Juliet Marillier - Daughter of the Forest

His words were strange; his tone chilled me. I knew he spoke the truth.

‘I will hear no more of this!’ thundered Father, rising to his feet. ‘You speak like a fool, of matters you cannot comprehend. I shudder to think a son of mine could be so ill-informed, and so presumptuous. Liam!’

‘Yes, Father?’

‘I want this brother of yours equipped to ride with us when next we travel north. See to it. He expresses a wish to understand the enemy. Perhaps he will do so when he witnesses the shedding of blood at first hand.’

‘Yes, Father.’ Liam’s expression and tone were well-schooled to neutrality. His glance at Finbar, though, was sympathetic. He simply made sure Father wasn’t looking.

‘And now, where is my daughter?’

Stepping forward reluctantly, I passed Finbar and brushed his hand with mine. His eyes were fierce in a face bleached of colour. I stood before Father, torn with feelings I hardly understood. Wasn’t a father meant to love his children? Didn’t he know how much courage it had taken, for Finbar to speak out this way? Finbar saw things in a way the rest of us never could. Father should have known that, for people said our mother had possessed the same gift. If he’d bothered to take the time, he would have known. Finbar could see ahead, and offer warnings that were ignored at your own peril. It was a rare skill, dangerous and burdensome. Some called it the Sight.

‘Come forward, Sorcha.’

I was angry with Father. And yet, I wanted him to recognise me. I wanted his praise. Despite everything, I could not shut off the wish deep inside me. My brothers loved me. Why couldn’t Father? That was what I was thinking as I looked up at him. From his viewpoint I must have been a pathetic little figure, skinny and untidy, my curls falling over my eyes in disarray.

‘Where are your shoes, child?’ asked Father wearily. He was getting restless.

‘I need no shoes, Father,’ I said, hardly thinking. ‘My feet are tough, look,’ and I raised one narrow, grubby foot to show him. ‘No need for some creature to die so I can be shod.’ This argument had been used on my brothers till they tired of it and let me run barefoot if it suited me.

‘Which servant has charge of this child?’ snapped Father testily. ‘She is no longer of an age to be let loose like some – some tinker’s urchin. How old are you, Sorcha – nine, ten?’

How could he not know? Didn’t my birth coincide with his loss of all he held most dear in the world? For my mother had died on midwinter day, when I was not yet a day old, and folk said it was lucky for me Fat Janis, our kitchen woman, had a babe at the breast and milk enough for two, or I’d likely have died as well. It was a measure of Father’s success in closing off that former life, perhaps, that he no longer counted every lonely night, every empty day, since she died.

‘I’ll be thirteen on midwinter eve, Father,’ I said, standing up as tall as I could. Perhaps if he thought me grown-up enough, he would start to talk to me properly, the way he did to Liam and Diarmid. Or to look at me with that hint of a smile he sometimes turned on Padriac, who was closest to me in age. For an instant, his dark, deepset eyes met mine, and I stared back with a wide green gaze that, had I but known it, was the image of my mother’s.

‘Enough,’ he said abruptly, and his tone was dismissive. ‘Get these children out of here, there’s work to be done.’

Turning his back on us, he was quickly engrossed in some great map they were rolling out on the oak table. Only Liam and Diarmid could expect to stay; they were men now, and privy to my father’s strategies. For the rest of us, it was over. I stepped back out of the light.

Why do I remember this so well? Perhaps his displeasure with what we were becoming made Father take the choice he did, and so bring about a series of events more terrible than any of us could have imagined. Certainly, he used our wellbeing as one of his excuses for bringing her to Sevenwaters. That there was no logic in this was beside the point – he must have known in his heart that Finbar and I were made of strong stuff, already shaped in mind and spirit, if not quite grown, and that expecting us to bend to another will was like trying to alter the course of the tide, or to stop the forest from growing. But he was influenced by forces he was unable to understand. My mother would have recognised them. I often wondered, later, how much she knew of our future. The Sight does not always show what a person wants to see, but I think she must have known, as she bade us farewell, what a strange and crooked path her children’s feet would follow.

As soon as Father dismissed us from the hall, Finbar was gone, a shadow disappearing up the stone steps to the tower. As I turned to follow, Liam winked at me. Fledgling warrior he might be, but he was my brother. And I got a grin from Diarmid, but he wiped his face clean of all expressions but respect as he turned back towards Father.

Padriac would be away off outdoors; he had an injured owl in the stables that he was nursing back to health. It was amazing, he said, how much this task had taught him about the principles of flight. Conor was working with my father’s scribe, helping with some calculations; we wouldn’t be seeing much of him for a while. Cormack would be off to practise with the sword or the staff. I was alone when I padded up the stone steps on my bare feet and into the tower room. From here you could climb up further, onto a stretch of slate roof with a low battlement around it, probably not sufficient to arrest a good fall, but that never stopped us from going up there. It was a place for stories, for secrets; for being alone together in silence.

He was, as I’d expected, sitting on the most precarious slope of the roof, knees drawn up, arms around them, his expression unreadable as he gazed out over the stone-walled pastures, the barns and byres and cottages, to the smoke grey and soft green and misty blue of the forest. Not so far away the waters of the lake glinted silver. The breeze was quite chill, catching at my skirts as I came up the slates and settled myself down next to him. Finbar was utterly still. I did not need to look at him to read his mood, for I was tuned to this brother’s mind like the bow to the string.

We were quiet for a long time, as the wind tangled our hair, and a flock of gulls passed overhead, calling amongst themselves. Voices drifted up from time to time, and metal clashed on metal: Father’s men at combat in the yard, and Cormack was amongst them. Father would be pleased with him.

Slowly Finbar came back from the far reaches of the mind. His long fingers moved to wind themselves around a strand of his hair.

‘What do you know of the lands beyond the water, Sorcha?’ he asked quite calmly.

‘Not much,’ I said, puzzled. ‘Liam says the maps don’t show everything; there are places even he knows little about. Father says the Britons are to be feared.’

‘He fears what he does not understand,’ said Finbar. ‘What about Father Brien and his kind? They came out of the east, by sea, and showed great courage in doing so. In time they were accepted here, and gave us much. Father does not seek to know his foes, or to make sense of what they want. He sees only the threat, the insult, and so he spends his whole life pursuing them, killing and maiming without question. And for what?’

I thought about this for a while.

‘But you don’t know them either,’ I ventured, logically enough. ‘And it’s not just Father that thinks they’re a danger. Liam said if the campaigns didn’t go right up to the north, and to the very shore of the eastern sea, we’d be overrun one day and lose everything we have. Maybe not just the Islands, but Sevenwaters as well. Then the old ways would be gone forever. That’s what he says.’