Free Magdalen Rising by Elizabeth Cunningham Page A

escaped? When?
    â€œWe need a whole shipload of heroes. We’ll ask the Cailleach. Surely she’s had at least a premonition concerning the next shipment. It’s long overdue.”
    â€œAnd when the heroes come, Maeve could have a baby.”
    A baby! I was aghast. I was the child around here.
    â€œThen she’d be content, and life would go on. Our lineage would continue.”
    Then I remembered: the blood, my new name. I was a child no longer. Was that what it meant to cease to be a child? You simply replace yourself? Was that what my womb mother had done? But no, it hadn’t been like that. My mother was the beloved of a god. It was special. I was special. Not just generic hero spawn.
    â€œBut is she meant to stay?” someone sighed heavily. “We have to face the possibility that she isn’t. We’ve raised her to be a hero-woman herself. We’ve taught her everything we know.”
    â€œJust so she can teach it in her turn.”
    â€œYes, in her turn. We never meant her to go. She’s ours.”

    â€œListen, sisters, she’s no more ours than the wild horses or the lost heroes or the waves of the sea. We have more control over the weather than we have over her destiny.”
    A tremor of fear and excitement shook me. I might chafe at my mothers’ control, but it had not occurred to me that I might already be beyond it.
    â€œDo you think the Cailleach knows what is to come?”
    â€œIt’s almost Samhain. A good time for seeing.”
    It was also the time I was to go to her. I could tell by the weight of the silence that they were all thinking the same thought.
    â€œThere’s so little time left,” a voice quavered.
    â€œWe’ve done our best.”
    â€œBut is it good enough? We’ve taught her how to handle a weapon, but not how to handle herself. Out there. With them. ”
    Them! They must mean the appended ones. My ears strained for more. But for the moment, my mothers seemed to have worn out their words and their worry. The next sounds I heard were a mixture of sighs, snores, and settlings as they curled into each other and the comfort of sleep.
    I receded into myself, calling up the image of the dark eyes I had seen in the pool the day the fire came into my head. On the whole, it pleased me that my mothers did not know what was to become of me. My destiny must be so strange and wonderful it was beyond their collective powers of imagination. My thoughts slowly turned to dreams. In them, someone I’d never seen narrated the wonder tale of Maeve of Tir na mBan. The words, instead of hanging invisible in air, took strange forms becoming not illustrations of the story but rising flames, diving birds, leaping salmon, falling stars.

    After that night my mothers were not so single-minded about my military training. It’s hard to say if they slackened the pace because they’d lost their certainty of my vocation or because it was harvest time. Even warrior witches have to eat, and unlike warriors elsewhere, my mothers had no peasant class to labor for them. What I liked best at this time of year was to gather berries and nuts—a traditional child’s occupation involving a race against time. After Samhain all the unplucked fruits of the earth belonged by rights to the Fomorii, a fierce misshapen tribe of beings, only partially subdued, who dwelt under the wave. Since I
supposed my father had them in hand, tales of the ferocious Fomorii merely lent a pleasurable frisson to the season.
    When all the grain was harvested, Fand enjoyed a free hand with fogs and mists. My memory of that time is full of beaded spider webs and bramble thorns. Now and then, Grainne slipped in a few days of perfect calm, warm at the center and crisp at the edges, like something good to eat. Then I’d see snakes on the move to holes leading deep underground; or sometimes a snake would just sun on a rock, storing the warmth in its body as if it