"Speak to her of her harp,” Miellyn added then.
"I thought you said it was not a harp—”
"Indeed, Caillean went to considerable trouble to explain the difference—” Miellyn grinned. "The strings go into a box at the base instead of the side, but the sound is much the same. She knows many songs of Eriu. They are very strange indeed; somehow they all sound like the sea. She knows all of the old songs too, though because of our training we all remember more than most people. If they had been willing to train women as bards before so many of the priests had been killed, perhaps she would have been one.” Irresistibly, Miellyn began to giggle. "Or she might have been the High Druid—if it is not blasphemy to say so—after your father.”
"Ardanos is my mother’s father, not mine. Dieda is his daughter,” Eilan told her, gathering up the last of the thyme.
"And your foster brother is one of the Sacred Band?” Miellyn asked. "Truly you come from a priestly family. They will probably try to make you a priestess of the Oracle one day.”
"No one has said anything about it to me,” Eilan answered her.
"Would you dislike it?” Miellyn laughed at her. "The rest of us have our duties, and I, for one, am happy with my herbs. But the seeresses are the ones the people worship. Would you not like to be the voice of the Goddess?”
"She has not said anything to me,” the girl answered, a little sharply.
It was no business of Miellyn’s what Eilan might secretly long for, or the feelings that had stirred in her when she saw Lhiannon lift her arms in invocation to the moon. The longer she stayed here, the more vividly she remembered her childhood dreams, and every time she carried offerings to the shrine at the spring she stared into the water, hoping to see the Lady once more.
"I will be whatever my elders say. They know more about what the gods want than I.”
Miellyn laughed. "Oh, perhaps some of them may; but I am not sure,” she said. "Caillean would not say so. She told me once that the knowledge of the Druids is that which was given to all people, both men and women alike in the old days.”
"And yet even the High Druid defers to Lhiannon,” Eilan said, as she bent to cut a few leaves from a bunch of stitchwort she had found growing on the sunny side of a great rock.
"Or seems to,” Miellyn said. "But Lhiannon is different, and of course we all adore her—”
Eilan frowned. "I have heard some of the women say that even my grandfather would not dare to cross her.”
"Sometimes I wonder,” Miellyn said as she sorted through the leaves Eilan had cut. "Cut them closer to the branch; we cannot use the stems. Do you know, I have heard that in the old days the laws required that any man who cut a tree must plant another in its place, so the woods would never be less. That has not been done since the Romans came here; they cut trees and plant nothing, so one day there will be no trees in all Britain—”
"There seem to be as many as ever,” said Eilan.
"Some seed and grow of themselves.” Miellyn turned and gathered up the plants they had cut.
"What about the herbs?” asked Eilan.
"We have not cut enough to make any difference; enough shoots will grow up in a day or two to replace what we have taken. That is enough. I think it may rain; we should hurry back. The priestess who taught me herb lore used to say that the wilderness is the garden of the Goddess, and men cannot gather from it without replacing what they use!”
"I had not heard before, stated in just that way, but, but I think it is beautiful,” Eilan said. "I suppose, if you think in centuries, that to cut down a tree is as foolish as slaughtering a breeding doe—”
"And yet some men believe—or seem to believe—that they have the right to do what they will to anything weaker than they are,” Miellyn said. "I do not understand how the Romans can do what they do.”