"What did you do?” Eilan’s voice came from a great way off, like a distant star.
"What could I do?” Caillean said harshly, clinging to that little light. "I—I ran away, crying—crying till I thought I would melt, and filled with such horror and disgust—I can’t speak of that. It seemed there was no one I could tell, no one who would have cared.” She was silent for a long time. "To this day I remember the smell in his hut—filth, bracken, seaweed, and being pushed down on it while I whimpered—I was too young to imagine what he wanted. The smell of the sea and of bracken still makes me ill,” she added.
"Didn’t anyone ever know? Didn’t they do anything?” asked Eilan. "I think my father would kill anyone who had touched me so.”
Caillean had said it at last, and breathing was a little easier now. She let out some of the pain in a long, shuddering, sigh. "Wild as our tribe was, women could not be molested, nor a child so young. Had I accused my attacker, he would have come to the wicker cage and roasted in a slow fire. He knew it, when he threatened me. But I did not know it then.” She spoke with a strange detachment now, as if it had all happened to someone else.
"It was about a year afterward that Lhiannon came. She would never have suspected that a girl so young could already be impure—and by the time I came to trust her and believe in her goodness, it was too late; I feared I should be sent away. So, after all, that divinity you thought you saw in me is all a lie,” she said harshly. "If Lhiannon had known, I should never have been made priestess—but I made sure she never knew.” She turned her face away. For a moment that seemed far too long, there was silence.
"Look at me—”
Caillean found her gaze drawn back to the child and saw Eilan’s face, one side Goddess-bright and the other in shadow.
"I believe in you,” said the girl gravely.
Caillean drew a shaken breath and Eilan’s image was blurred by her tears.
"I live only because I believe that the Goddess forgives me as well,” the priestess said. "I had already received my first initiation before I understood the enormity of my deception. But there were no evil omens. When they made me priestess I waited for a thunderbolt, but none came. I wondered then if perhaps there are no gods, or if there are, they care nothing for the doings of humankind.”
"Or perhaps they are more merciful than men,” said Eilan, then blinked as if amazed at her own temerity. It had never occurred to her to question the wisdom of men like her father and grandfather before. "Why did you leave your tower by the sea?” Eilan prompted after a time.
Caillean, lost in memory, started and said, "Because of the destruction of the shrine on Mona—you know that story?”
"My grandfather—he is a bard—has sung it. But surely that was before you were born—”
"Not quite,” Caillean laughed. "But I was still a child. If Lhiannon had not been in Eriu, which you call Hibernia, at the time, she too would have died. For some years after that disaster the remaining Druids of Britain were too busy licking their wounds to take much thought for their priestesses. Then the Arch-Druid made some kind of treaty with the Romans that ensured sanctuary for the surviving sacred women within Roman lands.”
"With the Romans!” Eilan exclaimed. "But it was the Romans who killed the others!”
"No, they only despoiled them,” said Caillean bitterly. "The priestesses of Mona lived long enough to bear the bastards the Romans had begotten on them, then killed themselves. The children were fostered out to loyal families like your own.”
"Cynric!” exclaimed Eilan with a look of sudden comprehension. "That is why he is so bitter about the Romans, and always wants to hear the story of Mona, though it happened so long ago. They always hushed me when I asked about it before!”