By the light of the torches that flickered among the trees Eilan saw that Lhiannon was waiting, attended by Eilidh. Beside her stood Dieda, her eyes as huge and dazzled as Eilan knew her own must be, and her hair clinging to her brow in damp tendrils. What, Eilan wondered, happened to her? Their eyes met, and all the barriers that the past years had built between them vanished; they remembered only that they were sisters now.
I am glad that we will be making our vows together…she thought. The testing was always the same, but each priestess received the vision the gods willed. Dieda, she supposed, would have found music. She looked at the other girl, and it seemed to her that the Goddess smiled back at her from Dieda’s eyes.
Eilan looked around her and saw that they were all here—Miellyn and Eilidh and the others who had taught her for the past three years. But in each woman’s face she saw a reflection of the light of the Otherworld, and in some of them, something more, a hint of faces she had seen in her visions, constantly changing and yet always the same.
Why do men fear death when we will live again? Eilan wondered then. The Druids taught that the soul could take many forms through the circling years, and she had always thought she believed it, but now she knew that it was true.
At last she understood Caillean’s serenity, and the holiness that despite her fragility and fallibility, she sensed in Lhiannon. They too had been where she had gone, and no mortal accidents could change the truth of it.
She heard the words of the ceremony as if in a dream, and made her vows without hesitation, for the most important promise, the one that included and commanded all others, had already been made to the Goddess in the Otherworld. With the blood still singing in her veins, and the light of the Lady in her eyes, she scarcely felt the prick of the thorn as the blue crescent that proclaimed her priestess was drawn between her brows.
FOURTEEN
It was the tradition in the Forest House that after the priestesses took their vows they should undergo a period of seclusion. Eilan was grateful. During the days that followed her initiation she lay as exhausted as Lhiannon after giving an Oracle, and even when she recovered physically, she found her attention focused inward as she tried to understand what had occurred.
Sometimes the Druid’s words to her seemed impossible—a demented dream born of her frustrated love for Gaius. But when the priestesses gathered in the frosty darkness to salute the winter moon, Eilan would find her spirit lifted as the women’s voices soared. At such times, when the moonlight filled her like a silver flame, she knew that what she had experienced was no dream.
Sometimes she found Caillean watching her rather curiously, but not even when the older priestess taught them the secrets of the Wise Ones who had come over the sea—the lore that only the sworn priestesses were allowed to learn—did Eilan feel free to speak of the Merlin and the destiny she believed he had offered her. For gradually she had realized that whatever ecstasies the other priestesses experienced in their initiations, this mystery had been for her alone. And so the dark days of winter passed and lengthened into spring, and the mark of the Goddess healed upon Eilan’s brow.
Gaius lounged on the bench in his father’s office at Deva, breathing deeply of the breeze that came through the open window and wondering how soon he could get away. For a year he had been attached to his father’s staff, and he was tired of fortress walls. Spring was overwhelming the fields and woodlands. He could smell apple blossom on that breeze, and it made him think of Eilan.
"Most of the men will be taking leave for the Floralia, but I don’t want too many of my officers away at one time.” His father’s voice seemed to come from far away. "When you’re up for leave where will you go?”
"I hadn’t thought about it,” Gaius blurted out. Some of the officers used their free time to go hunting, but killing things for sport no longer particularly interested him. Really, there was nowhere he wanted to be.
"You might go and see the Procurator,” his father suggested. "You haven’t met his daughter yet.”