Daughter Of The Forest Read Online Free Page B

in was so full of magic that it was almost a part of everyday life—not to say you’d meet one of them every time you went out to pick berries, or draw water from your well, but everyone we knew had a friend of a friend who’d strayed too far into the forest, and disappeared; or ventured inside a ring of mushrooms, and gone away for a while, and come back subtly changed. Strange things could happen in those places. Gone for maybe fifty years you could be, and come back still a young girl; or away for no more than an instant by mortal reckoning, and return wrinkled and bent with age. These tales fascinated us, but failed to make us careful. If it was going to happen to you, it would happen, whether you liked it or not.
    The birch tree, though, was a different matter. It held her spirit, our mother’s, having been planted by the boys on the day of her death, at her own request. Once she had told them what to do, Liam and Diarmid took their spades down to the place she had described, dug out the soft turf, and planted the seed there on the flat grassy bank above the lake. With small, grubby hands the younger ones helped level the soil and carried water. Later, when they were allowed to take me out of the house, we all went there together. That was the first time for me; and after that, twice a year at midsummer and midwinter we’d gather there.
    Grazing animals might have taken this little tree, or the cold autumn winds snapped its slender stem, but it was charmed; and within a few years it began to shoot up, graceful both in its bare winter austerity and in its silvery, rustling summer beauty. I can see the place now, clear in my mind, and the seven of us seated cross-legged on the turf around the birch tree, not touching, but as surely linked as if our hands were tightly clasped. We were older then, but children still. I would have been five, perhaps, Finbar eight. Liam had waited until we were big enough to understand, before telling us this story.

    …now there was something frightening about the room. It smelled different, strange. Our new little sister had been taken away, and there was blood, and people with frightened faces running in and out. Mother’s face was so pale as she lay there with her dark hair spread around her. But she gave us the seed, and she said to us, to Diarmid and me, “I want you to take this, and plant it by the lake, and in the moment of my passing the seed will start to grow with new life. And then, my sons, I will always be there with you, and when you are in that place you will know that you are part of the one great magic that binds us all together. Our strength comes from that magic, from the earth and the sky, from the fire and the water. Fly high, swim deep, give back to the earth what she gives you…”
    She grew tired, she was losing her life blood, but she had a smile for the two of us and we tried to smile back through our tears, hardly understanding what she told us, but knowing it was important. “Diarmid,” she said, “look after your little brothers. Share your laughter with them.” Her voice grew fainter. “Liam, son. I fear it will be hard for you, for a while. You’ll be their leader, and their guide, and you are young to carry such a burden.”
    “I can do it,” I said, choking back my tears. People were moving about the room, a physician muttering to himself and shaking his head, women taking away the bloody cloths and bringing fresh ones, and now somebody tried to make us leave. But Mother said no, not yet, and she made them all go out, just for a little. Then she gathered us around her bed, to say good-bye. Father was outside. He kept his grief to himself, even then.
    So she spoke softly to each of us, her voice growing quieter all the while. The twins were on either side of her, leaning in, each the mirror image of the other, eyes gray as the winter sky, hair deep brown and glossy as a ripe chestnut.
    “Conor, dear heart,” she said. “Do you remember the