Free Warrior's Daughter by Holly Bennett

us.
    “It’s only the wind,” my mother assured me. Her voice was firm and confident, and I heard her grope her way carefully to the door and force it closed. “Go back to sleep, Luaine. It’s nothing, just the wind, and the light will come soon.”
    It was the first time I had known my mother’s words to be false. Not that she lied, not deliberately. But she was wrong. It wasn’tthe wind. Something had entered the Speckled House. It sat with us now in the dark.
    I cannot say now, looking back to the child I was, if it was awe or a reluctance to alarm my mother that stilled my tongue. But I said nothing and waited in silence, for I knew it was no gory head that had floated in on the wind. The presence in the room was foreign, but it was not evil.
    I did not know I could sense such things until that moment. And when Cathbad’s young man finally pushed open the door and the blaze of his torch thrust into the corners of the room, I knew—as did he with his druid’s eyes—that it was no human woman sitting there so quietly at my father’s other side. She was one of the Tuatha Da Danaan—a woman of the Sidhe. I stared in wonder, and she smiled at me, acknowledging my recognition. It was as the poets said: She had the appearance of an earthly woman. Yet there was no mistaking what she was.
    At least not for me. As the apprentice touched his forehead in respectful greeting, my mother spoke up sharply.
    “And who are you at all? Why do you come sneaking by night to my husband’s sickbed?”
    I wondered at her tone. She was badly frightened, covering it with bluster.
    The woman was Liban, and she brought the strangest message.
    “It is for my sister, Fand, I have come to this man. For Manannan, Son of the Sea, is no longer her husband, and her love has fallen on Cuchulainn. And the coming of Cuchulainn would bring great joy to her heart.”
    The anger in my mother was a bristling heat in the room. I thought she might attack the woman with her bare hands, until Liban’s next words caught her startled attention.
    “It is not long his sickness would be, if Cuchulainn would come to the Happy Plain. He will be healed, and what is lost of his strength will be given back to him again. It is Fand and myself will cure his sickness and wake him from his long sleep.”
    The silence stretched on, and still my mother did not speak. She didn’t seem to know where to look, or what to do with herself. I was too young to understand the turmoil of emotions warring within her, but I could see how she struggled to keep her composure.
    She turned to Cathbad’s apprentice and told him to take me to the Royal House.
    “You go to bed now, Luaine. I must speak with Liban.”
    It was a voice that brooked no argument. I pulled my cloak tight about my shoulders and followed the young man out the door.
    We left Emain Macha the next day, after another hurried preparation. I don’t suppose my mother was anxious to endure everyone’s curious eyes and prying questions. I can only imagine what it cost her to swallow her pride and jealousy and give my father to another woman, not knowing if he would ever return. She was distant that morning, her face set in a mask, her eyes hiding something close to grief.
    Doubtless there had been other women before Fand. If you believe the bards, Cuchulainn lay with half the women of Ireland. But if he did, it was far from home, and always he gave Emer pride of place. There had never been any question of losing him.
    So it was a bleak setting off we had, on a dark and drizzly day. Iremember wondering how Liban had transported my father back to her Otherworld home. Had she carried him in her arms? Turned him to vapor and vanished down one of the deep rock clefts that lead to the land of the Sidhe?
    The wind was cold, and I was glad when we entered the humpy wooded hills that fan west from the Cooley Mountains. The broad track from Emain Macha narrowed to thread its way through oak and hawthorn trees, and I