Eilonwy ate a sparse supper, served by a questionable-looking guard, in what had once been the Great Hall of Caer Colur. It was a grand space, its roof still partially intact, though charred wooden beams lay at haphazard angles, and chunks of masonry were missing from the tops of walls, particularly around the main entrance. What stonework remained within its arches and alcoves still flowed in graceful lines, incorporating sculpted trees and flowers and even human figures—mostly women, their carved garments draped and gathered in methods reminiscent of the gown Teleria had given her for the feast. Their heads were all turned to face the dais at one end of the room, their blank gazes fixed upon the place where thrones must have once stood. There were no furnishings, beyond a rough wooden table placed near the large hearth, and two stools that looked like things salvaged from a shipwreck.
Achren spoke little, and seemed rather brooding and preoccupied, but when Eilonwy had finished eating, the queen led her to an ancient chest standing in a shadowed alcove behind the dais. "Every Daughter of Llyr was initiated, at the age you are now, into the full use of her magic," she explained. "And several of their most potent implements respond to the light of the Golden Pelydryn –what you always called your bauble." The lock on the chest had been broken, and she opened it wide, displaying an array of items: a silver scrying bowl, bottles and jars containing materials long crumbled to dust, crystals in various shapes and sizes, mortar and pestle, fire tools, a small dagger with an ormer-inlaid handle, several seashells, brittle parchments, and other objects, strangely-shaped, whose purpose Eilonwy could not imagine.
She looked it all over, curious, but ambivalent. "My mother could have explained the use of all of these, I'm sure," she said. "What a pity I was stolen away from the one person who could have trained me properly."
There was a moment of chilly silence. "Your mother," Achren said, an iron edge in her voice, "would never have brought you here. She was very young, when I was summoned to aid her house-very young and impulsive, and so infatuated with your father that she made several foolish decisions. Some of them may have contributed to the disaster that occurred. And though her courage and sacrifice saved the people, the loss of her family and the destruction of the island broke her spirit. She went into hiding, and would have hidden you away as well, and never allowed you to become what you should be."
"And you knew better, what I should be?" Eilonwy retorted, incensed. "She was my mother, not you. It was her choice to make."
"It is your choice," Achren answered, fixing her with a hard stare. "Despise me all you please, but what I did was for your benefit. When I took you, I could have fought and slain your mother, if I had intended such ill. But I did not. I intended for her to follow you. Forced out of hiding, and made to see reason, she would have come to her senses, and agreed to the arrangement. You would have had the benefits of guidance from both of us, along with what protection I could grant you."
She shook her head, breaking eye contact, but not before Eilonwy saw the bitter lines that creased her mouth. "I had no design of trying to replace her. Had fate fashioned me for a mother, what chance I had was taken from me long before you were born. Angharad had the power and the wit to track us. What stopped her, I do not know. I told you your parents were dead because it was, and is still, the only reasonable explanation for her failure to find you."
"And my father? Did you have no room for him in this scheme?"
Achren dismissed her father with a single gesture. "He had no magic, only a handsome face and a knack for performing for an audience. How he bewitched your mother so completely only shows, again, how young she was, how driven by emotion and desire. He was not present the day I found you, and I had no reason to seek him out."
Boiling anger made Eilonwy turn away. Lashing out at Achren would be fruitless, as much as she desired to do it; instead, she stood before the hearth, finding solace in the heat of the flames, in the way her will reached out, entwined with them, pushed them higher. It had a different flavor, this fire, a hint of something wild she could not identify. It burned blue and green at the edges, and pulled at her spirit as though each flame was a grasping hand, drawing her to the incandescent core at its base.
She felt Achren's gaze upon her, watching her carefully, almost warily. "For you to truly access your full power," Achren murmured, "you need the Pelydryn. I shall send a search party after it in the morning. But it is only one of many tools. For now..." she had waved out toward the wall, where rain drifted in through an empty casement, and the growl of thunder occasionally rose above the sound of the sea. "Simply let yourself be immersed in this place. Listen to what it tells you. Do what you will. Your own insight will guide you."
How was she to accept such counsel? This woman, who had taught her nothing but fear and mistrust from her earliest memory, now spoke words of unimaginable freedom. They wove like harp notes into the song plucked in her mind by the ghostly fingers of Llyr's vanished bards. She had been prepared to reject, on principle, anything Achren told her, to fight tooth and nail for her autonomy, not to have it dangled before her, like...
Like a baited hook.
She shivered. No, she would be a fool to trust Achren, even in the smallest capacity; she must close her ears to these voices. It must all be lies, it had to be, no matter what grains of truth might be sprinkled within them. Dallben had told her once that there was no lie so powerful as a twisted truth.
Yet what was she to do, trapped here, with no recourse? Open defiance would only make Achren more dangerous. It was, perhaps, safest to feign compliance until she found a way of escape, or until her friends came to her aid. Surely they were already on her trail.
She said nothing, as Achren led her through a series of corridors and up a winding stair, into a tower room, furnished with a chamber pot and a narrow couch, its only bedding a thin and rather moth-eaten blanket folded at one end.
"It is no fitting chamber for a Princess, now," Achren said, sounding truly regretful. "Whatever comforts remained here after the cataclysm were taken by those who came to investigate, or looted by thieves. But this was your mother's apartment, if my memory is correct, and it can be made a luxury once again, if you only will it so. Such deprivation is temporary." She handed Eilonwy a rushlight, and shadows danced like living things upon the stone walls. "Sleep, now. This is your domain, and you need fear nothing."
Left alone, Eilonwy set the light upon the floor, and crossed to the far wall, where an alcove framed a stone bench before a window. She looked out and down; there was a courtyard below, but the tower was too high and sheer-sided to climb down without rope. A narrow doorway at one side of the chamber led only to a small antechamber; a place for a handmaid to sleep, no doubt. There was no other way out but how she'd come in, and the hallway that had led here was a maze she could not easily navigate in the dark. She was too exhausted to think her way out, anyhow.
Her garments were still damp and clammy; she shivered in the darkness, growing colder by the moment. Sleep would be impossible in such a state. The chamber had a hearth, and a decent amount of wood piled within; she kindled it with a word and huddled before it as golden tongues licked up the branches. The familiar music of crackling fire filled her ears with comfort. Again, the flames painted their own edges green and blue, and a strange, wild tang threaded itself within the scent of burning wood. She let her mind drift into the fire, curious and intuitive. What was it? It was new and yet not; it tasted and smelled like…like…salt.
It was salt. Seawater.
Her pulse quickened a little, suffused with a sudden thrill of understanding and recognition. This wasn't mere firewood; it was driftwood. These branches and twigs had floated upon the sea until their fiber had soaked in its essence, had drawn in its minerals as a sponge soaks up spilled milk, and now they burned with their own flavor, a melding of fire and sea that made her think of the sunrise that morning. And then, further back, a memory: a driftwood fire in a different hearth, a smaller one, and before it she sat in the warm circle of strong arms, and watched a young woman make the flames dance with graceful motions of her white hands.
"You see how it curls, love?" Her voice is sweet, and low, like a lullaby. "It means Rhiannon is pleased."
"She's happy for us?"
"Indeed, as she is happy anywhere there is life and love and family."
"Because she is the Mother." She stares at the flames, thoughtful. "What happens, if she isn't pleased?"
"Then the fire would sputter and smolder, and the wood would not burn up all the way."
"There was chunks left, this morning."
"That's only because Tad didn't bank the fire properly last night." The woman grins at something over her head, and a man's voice laughs, vibrating against her ear, warm and golden.
"Tad was distracted last night," it rumbles, "because his girls wanted so many stories. But that was ordinary wood, anyhow. We'll gather Mam more driftwood, all she wants, tomorrow, won't we, Lonnie?"
His chin nuzzles the top of her head. She giggles, and presses her cheek to the thud of her father's heartbeat. Her mother sings softly, a song about ships at rest in a harbor.
Eilonwy shook herself with a gasp, back to the darkness and solitude of the present. The fire danced before her eyes, curling and crackling. Its heat had become oppressive on her face; she turned away…and gasped again.
The chamber's plastered, whitewashed walls were covered in tapestries. Iron sconces bore flickering candles, casting winking light upon rich furniture: dark wooden chests, a cushion-strewn couch, a high, curtained bed. An ornately-patterned wool carpet softened the polished wooden floorboards. The firelight made colors undefinable, but everywhere she saw the glint of polished metal, the muted gleam of pearl and ivory. The fabrics bore the glimmering thread of brocade and the thick-edged shadows of velvet.
She stumbled to her feet, heart pounding, looking around in wonder and disbelief; she took a step onto the carpet, felt it soft and plush underfoot. A flash of movement caught her eye and she whipped her gaze to the window. Its panels, glittering with diamond-sharp panes of glass, stood open, and beyond them, framed by the arched opening, a nearby tower stood whole and proud, an azure pennant snapping at its highest point.
She took a step toward it. Suddenly the hearth-fire snapped loudly, showering sparks into the room. Eilonwy whirled with a cry, rushed to stamp them out before they could set the carpet ablaze.
Her foot fell upon bare wood, soft with age and exposure. She blinked, looking around in bewilderment at nothing but damp stone walls and the threadbare couch. The fire smoked sullenly, and she dropped to her knees before it, filled with an anxious urgency, and begged it, fervently as a prayer, to blaze again. The flames steadied, their weak flicker stabilizing. Slowly, with much mental coaxing, they blazed up with new strength, warming her suddenly cold hands and face.
She knelt before it until the last twig had burned to ash, motionless but for her lips, mouthing barely-recalled words whose meaning she did not even know. She did not look out at the chamber again, afraid of what she would see, afraid because she wanted to see it. When she rose, her clothes were dry. She lay upon the couch with the blanket crushed beneath her head, and stared at the living embers until she could no longer hold her eyes open.
Eilonwy awoke in the early dawn, to the low rumble of the surf.
It was a strange thing, how such a powerful sound could so quickly fade into the background of one's awareness, as unnoticed as breathing. If there were any other noises in this place during the night, she had not heard them over the smoothness of its white rhythm. She had dreamed nothing, unless that strange glamor of the previous night had, in fact, been a dream. It would be comforting to think so.
She lay with her eyes open, staring at the dark beams crossing the roof overhead, trying to make sense of all that had taken place since…was it just yesterday morning? She felt as though it were a year ago, when she'd stepped out of her chamber at Dinas Rhydnant. Further back, and the last few years seemed more dream than memory. Had she really lived for years within the calm safety of a cottage by the ...No, not by the sea. On a farm, of course.
But...she had lived in a cottage by the sea, too, sometime between the Rover camp and Achren. A gap had formed in that wall of rubble in her mind, and now images crowded through it, each clamoring to be first. A broad cove, sheltered by cliffs. A cluster of thatched huts. Nestled within one, a cozy interior, with hearth, a table and stools. Her mother tucking her into a trundle bed, then sitting near and stroking her hair, singing, until she slept. Awakening briefly to see her parents sitting together, curled up by the fire, talking in low voices. Rising in the early morning to the sound of gulls, dancing down to the water's edge to call out to her father, who stood in deep water, pulling in a net full of wriggling fish. He called her and she raced in, giggling as the sparkling foam rippled under her feet, as the wavelets parted to let her pass, then lifted her up when she ran past her depth, and carried her to the safety of his arms. On the shore, her mother laughed, her hair shining like fire in the sunlight.
She tasted salt. Her own tears, drifting down; she had not known that she was weeping. Eilonwy sat up stiffly and swung her bare feet to the floor.
She rose and crossed to the window. The sky was clear, pearly and pale, painted every color of the inside of a conch shell; the water reflected it like a mirror, fractured by waves. The storm of last night had played itself out, but the sea was still moody and full of thunder...a sound that called her, as compelling as all the forces of the previous night.
Do what you will, Achren had said; very well, she would take her at her word on this, at least. Eilonwy hurried through the chamber door and down the dark corridors, down the spiral stairs lit by periodic arrow slits, pulled along by the voices in her head, instinctively following their siren song. Outside, she scrambled over jumbled stone wreckage until she was beyond it. A series of rocky ledges sloped down toward the sea, not too steep for scrambling upon. Down and down, until she found a narrow strip of beach, worn smooth by the ebb and flow of water.
There she paused. Last time she had gone sea-bathing, there had been a scene. She vaguely recalled being scolded for her foolishness. But no one was here, now, to care. She stripped to her shift, leaving her gown spread upon a flat rock, and plunged into the water.
This was not the playful, calm sea she had entered, that evening on the way to Mona. This was an entity of power, shot through with danger; it writhed, every swell shining green with the churnings of algae dredged up by the storm; it drew back like an archer's bow and launched a wall of churning froth at her. It came roaring, charging; the crash of impact shoved her backward even as the undertow dragged at her legs, a force that sought to pull her further in. She braced herself against it in answering challenge, setting her feet and leaning into its angles with a thrill of rebellion as the sand shifted beneath her. The water ebbed and changed course; another breaker rolled toward her. She leapt to meet it and shouted as it struck, exultant with the breadth and depth and power it held.
Another lunge forward, deeper into the water, fighting the current as it sought to control her. She struggled past the point where its green swells curled in endless crescents, mirroring the emblem she wore. One towered over her; she realized too late that it would break before she could rise past its crest, and on impulse, dove beneath it, felt the sweep and spiral of movement as it passed over her and crumbled.
She surfaced again, laughing, meeting the next wave and the next, each one jostling her in a rough embrace before rushing past her to the shore. Once she mis-timed a swift series of crests and was knocked off her feet. The crush of water tumbled her, helpless as a rag doll, for a few seconds, until she struck the sand and came up gasping in the shallows. Her nose burned with salt, but the fleeting jolt of fright turned into a surge of elation. She ran back, whooping in defiance as she launched herself into the breakers once more.
It was long before she let the waves carry her back toward the beach, and she stayed sitting in the shallow water, sweeping its crystal surface with both hands, letting it slide between her fingers. The sensation pulled at the memories recently restored, and she brought them forward cautiously, letting her mind wrap around the corners of the things she used to know. She whispered; her hands moved. The water responded, rolling beneath her palms, reversing against the current, in a flow both sensuous and strong. She caught her breath in wonder; it was a new sensation, and yet not—a novelty like the first flower of spring, even more thrilling for being remembered, recognized, and anticipated.
She flexed her fingers, and felt the flow of power spread into the space around her, as though magic itself were a liquid, dispersed and dissolved into the sea, adding to its volume but becoming no less potent. It flashed and swirled in mesmerizing patterns in her mind. As before, on that night spent floating beneath the moon, she was filled with a sense of the enormous weight of water, so vast and wide and deep that it formed its own body, a breathing, moving darkness full of teeming life.
There was magic here, power beyond comprehension; even with her limitations, she could sense it, the way one may sense the power in a horse, dimly, by laying a hand on its flanks. But could it really be used to fight Arawn? She knew how to harness fire to annihilate an enemy, a fury that had terrified her with its ability to rage out of control. The destructive potential she sensed in these depths was no doubt just as potent, if not more so...and could just as easily escape her grasp, if she handled it carelessly and without knowledge.
And Achren. Eilonwy stared out at the water, nose wrinkling, perplexed. What could Achren have to do with any of it? Achren could do nothing with the magic of Llyr, but it was folly to think that she truly had nothing to gain by this scheme she proposed, no matter what she claimed. Revenge alone had never been enough for her. But suppose...suppose it were possible not only to resist her, but to defeat her at last? If she, Eilonwy of Llyr, were ever to throw off Achren's grip, could it not be with the aid of this magic that was her birthright? None could say she should avoid it, could hem and haw about powers mere mortals were not meant to wield. She had been born specifically to wield it.
The water slipped around her like an embrace. She rose, dripping, and sloshed all the way to the sand, staring thoughtfully at her own feet splitting the waves. At the rocks, she gathered up her gown and then paused, thinking distastefully of pulling it on over her wet underthings, of her streaming hair soaking it anew.
Another memory teased at her, whispering in her ear, a string of strange words her mother had often used, after swimming or bathing. She murmured them softly, and a tingling sensation prickled over her from scalp to toes. She patted herself, touched her hair: dry. Stiff with salt, but dry. Wonderment and elation made her laugh aloud. She pulled her gown over her head, blew a kiss at the roaring sea, and turned to scramble up the rocks again.
Cresting a ledge, she stood up to view the castle ruin from a new angle. Fragmented towers cut pieces out of the pale sky. The bodiless voices whispered suggestions, recalling the glamor thrown upon her mother's chamber in the night; before she could react, in an instant, the broken stone gave way to visions of walls rising whole before her, towers gleaming in the sun. The gates stood open to welcome a stream of visitors; people moved along the path, shouting greeting to one another. Music played on the air, mingling with the merry voices. The rocks at the castle foundations were pillowed in green, waving with wildflowers.
Gulls called overhead. Eilonwy turned to glance back at the sea and saw no sign of it. Instead, she stood upon a ledge overlooking a grove of willow trees, emerald grass spread like a dappled carpet beneath them. White-clad girls danced upon it, their heads wreathed in flowers, a song on their lips. A driftwood fire burned on a stone altar in their midst.
Eilonwy stood, trembling, dizzy with the sound of the song, the scent of the rising smoke. It wasn't real. It wasn't, couldn't be real; it was an illusion; who knew if it were even an accurate picture of the past? It might be a deception, as false as the faery gold the Fair Folk used to hoodwink greedy mortals. She should shut her eyes to it, should turn away, should not entertain even the desire to look upon what might have been, a temptation that could only make everything more complicated.
But her feet moved of themselves, from the rock ledge and into the grass, down, into the trees, under stone arches carved into impossibly delicate tracery. She wove among the girls, somehow avoiding disrupting them; not one of them glanced at her or lost her place in the woven ring of the dance. She walked through their midst like a ghost, and came near the altar fire, mesmerized by the dancing green and blue flames.
There was a lone figure on its other side: a tall figure, somewhere halfway between a fresh-faced girl and a young woman. Her long black hair was intricately braided with strings of pearls, her garments embroidered with jeweled thread. At her white throat dangled a crescent moon on a fine silver chain, an exact copy of the one Eilonwy had always worn. She stood with her eyes closed as if in deep concentration, and her hands moved in graceful gestures, movements that somehow mimicked the shapes of the fire, and traced symbols into the smoke curling up from bundles of grass placed upon the altar.
Eilonwy stood facing her, waiting for she knew not what. The song went on around her, taken up by those ghostly voices of Llyr; the movements in the corners of her vision may have been the girls dancing or it may not. She no longer watched anything but the entrancing flames and the face of the person they illuminated, lovely now with the loveliness of a woman in her prime, the lines of her face grown a little wider, the angles sculpted finer. Suddenly she opened her black-fringed eyes and stared straight at Eilonwy, meeting her gaze as directly as an arrow shot to its target.
Both of them were startled. The woman's eyes were green... green as the swollen waves after the storm, as sharp as a blade of the emerald grass, and wide with shock. "Angharad," she said, a gasp of disbelief and confusion. "How-?" Then, immediately, a swift expression of understanding, and the urgent stammer of one who knows that time is short. "No. No. You are... Give me your name."
It came without a moment's hesitation, without a single warning thought of faery trickery or entrapment; instantly she breathed out, "Eilonwy of Llyr."
For a moment the woman's face froze. The green gaze brightened with unshed tears, full of grief and joy mingled at a measure to break one's heart, bringing answering tears to Eilonwy's eyes, an ache of inexplicable empathy to her throat. "Tell me, quickly," the woman said. "Does your mother live?"
To utter a single word would shatter everything. She stared, stricken, at that pleading face, and did not, could not answer.
"Eilonwy of Llyr," the woman said again, desperately, "does Angharad still live?"
Eilonwy stumbled back with a sob, as the altar fire sparked and flared. It grew blindingly bright and then went dark as though snuffed out. The green grove was gone, the singing silenced by the roar of the sea at her feet. A woman stood before her still, ageless and beautiful, glacial-eyed and silver-haired and devastatingly familiar, a woman who demanded eagerly, "What did you see?"
With a wordless cry, Eilonwy whirled from her and scrambled up the rocks, hoisting herself to the highest point to look out upon the castle again. The ruin spread before her: the stark, bare bones of a thing long dead, and she cried out again, in shock, as though it had fallen while her back was turned. She fell to her knees, to the shallow depressions in the rock where enough bits of earth still clung to give the coarse seagrasses a foothold, and clawed into the dirt with both hands.
That wild current met her fingertips, the magic that flowed through the bedrock of the island. It was hers; it was hers, a thing more kin to her than anyone she had ever known, a mind that knew her down to her blood and bones and every secret space within. It rose in welcome and invitation. She opened herself to the flood of power, a maelstrom of mingled light and darkness, of saltwater and sun-fire, until she felt it pulse in every limb, tasted it on every breath. It bore her to her feet in a wave of euphoria, and she wondered that it did not lift her clear off the ground.
The voices soared in pleading desperation, a thousand voices begging her for succor.
Raise us up. Free us.
She could not bring her mother back. But perhaps...
I will, she swore silently, to the stones, to the waves, to every ancestor whose ashes lay within them. If I can, I will.
She was filled with raw, exultant strength, like and yet unlike the power she was accustomed to sensing within, the one that sometimes flared until she had to cast it at the nearest hearth to keep it from burning her alive. This was no fire; it was heavy and dark and deliberate, but it flooded her the same way, building until she could not contain it. She flung her arms out instinctively toward the sea, felt the shock of the water absorbing the overflow, the answering tremor in the swells as she pulled them in. The waves crashed past the line of surf and came thundering to her, slamming into the black rock on whose peak she stood, catapulting spray higher than remaining walls of Caer Colur, blasting her with the displaced air of its movement as she lifted her face to it in ecstasy.
Movement caught her eye and she whirled; Achren stood near, having followed her up the rocks. She looked, by day, somehow wan, the way a lit candle looks weak in bright sunlight. Yet she was beautiful still, her ivory face stained with an almost feverish flush, and the flash of her eyes was as dangerous as ever. She stood unflinching as the shattered water fell down upon them like hail.
Eilonwy faced her, breathing hard, every nerve tingling with the bracing spark of new-kindled magic. She had feared Achren and escaped, only to be taught to fear herself instead. It was Achren who had brought her here to be made whole again. Everyone else had held her back, while Achren had, for once, led her forward.
Dangerous? The warning that sounded in her mind merely served to breathe upon that fire. Yes, Achren is dangerous.
And so am I.
"Now," Achren said, with breathless triumph, "you will learn who you are."
"I already know."
Eilonwy turned back toward Caer Colur. Somehow, she saw both ruin and vision simultaneously, a dreamscape of past, present, and future. She touched the crescent at her throat. "I am Eilonwy, daughter of Angharad, daughter of Regat. I am an Enchantress of Llyr, and I am come home."
A/N: A practical disclaimer: It is, in fact, not advisable to burn driftwood, as the salt deposits create dioxins that are many times more toxic to breathe than ordinary woodsmoke (which is also not very good for you). Do not go off burning driftwood, my readers. I decree that the Daughters of Llyr are immune to its effects, but you, most likely, are not.
Speaking of the Daughters of Llyr, points to anyone who recognized the cameo here, as it means you've read Daughter of the Sea, which makes you one of my favorite people.