Daughter of Lir Read Online Free

know how it worked.” Again she had
spoken without thinking. “There was a wide field—very wide. It was full of
these things, rolling like a storm over the plain. The horses were galloping.
Men were shouting. They had spears and axes. They were laughing. Some were
singing. The wheels made a terrible noise.”
    He sank down while she spoke, first to his knees, then to
sit on his heels. His face had gone perfectly white. “Did you see—were there
people on foot?”
    Rhian had been trying not to remember that. “The wheels . . .
made a terrible noise.”
    “Yes.” His eyes were wide, blind, seeing nothing in that
plain and pleasant place. Where he was, there was blood and screaming, and
wheels crushing bone into earth.
    She could go there, if she would let herself. She refused.
She turned her back on it. She said to him, “If I make it small enough, maybe
no war will come.”
    “The world is going to end,” he said. He said it perfectly
calmly. “My mother is dying, and she has no heir. The Goddess has turned away
from us.”
    “She has not.” Rhian spoke with certainty so deep she could
not find the source of it. It simply was.
    He was a priestess’ son. He must have drunk such surety with
his mother’s milk. He did not scoff as a man from Long Ford might. He sighed
heavily, shook his head, but held his peace.
    o0o
    The day had begun in odd and unsettling fashion. It went
on like a song sung out of tune. Bran was unwontedly surly when he woke—unwontedly
late—and shambled to his work. The prince by then had gone. Rhian had wrapped
the thing that she had made, that had so disturbed him, and laid it deep in the
box of scraps and half-finished workings. There was nothing for Bran to see,
except Rhian stirring a pot over the cooking fire.
    Bran would not eat. She had no appetite. She left him to his
smelting and went where she should have gone hours since. She had promised to
help her aunt with the kiln that morning. She had pursued the shape of her
dream instead, and appalled a prince.
    Dura was at the kiln, hair drawn back and wrapped in a bit
of scarf, broad face red and streaming with the heat. A glance was all the
rebuke she offered. Rhian bit her lip and lent a hand with the fire.
    o0o
    The priestess and her acolytes were shut away in the
headwoman’s house. The guards kept to their own camp in the field by the river,
except two who stood at the headwoman’s door. Neither of those was the prince
Emry.
    As the sun rose toward noon, the cry of a ram’s horn sounded
through the village, calling them all to the gathering place.
    Rhian had been waiting for it. She was washed clean of soot,
her damp hair plaited tight. She had on her best gown, that had been her
mother’s, with flowers embroidered on the hem; she was wearing her necklace of
shells, her armlets of amber and carved bone, and the earrings of bronze that
Bran had made for her. They were bells, and they rang softly as she walked.
    She was as beautiful as she could be, and that, she knew,
was very beautiful indeed. People stared as she passed through the village.
None of them spoke to her. They all knew. They were drawing away already.
    That hurt, but she put the pain aside. If she would be a
priestess in Lir, she must rise above everything that she had been. Even her
name; even that would fall away.
    The gathering-field was full already. Everyone had come, men
and women, old and young, toothless elder and babe at the breast. The sun was
direct overhead, the sky a cloudless vault. The heat was breathless, the wind
utterly still.
    Rhian slipped through the crowded bodies. The priestess was
standing on the gathering-stone, her acolytes in a circle about her. They were
all clad as priestesses in a sacred rite: bare but for a kilt of woven cords
dyed the color of blood. Their free hair curled exuberantly down their backs.
Sweat sheened their bodies, plump or slender, richly female or angular as a
boy’s.
    They had no faces. Each wore a mask, blank,