PART I
SIVE
ONE
She woke in the early dawn, the light still only a promise in the dissolving darkness. The woods called to her.
Sive had never been an early riser. In the otherworld land of Tir na nOg, there is no need to cut short the sweet ease of sleep. But this summer, the hush before sunrise filled her with expectancy. She loved to watch the world wake up, to see the leaves glow golden in the sun’s first rays. She left her warm bed, slipped out of the sleeping house and took the path to the forest.
By the time the sun spilled its bright warmth over the world, she was sitting in her favorite spot, a fallen log coated with moss as soft and deep as her mother’s silk cushions. It rested at the edge of a dark spring-fed pool. Soon, when the sun was higher and the breeze came up, the pool’s surface would dance with ripples and light. Now it lay still and smooth as polished copper. Many animals and birds came to drink at the pool, but Sive was no longer elated when they appeared, or disappointed when they did not. She was content just to sit and watch the water and breathe the fragrant air.
SHE HAD ROAMED THESE woods for years, ever since she had first told her father about the longing in her heart. To take on the form of a creature wholly different, to be utterly changed and yet yourself—this, she thought, was a true marvel.
“How is it done?” she had asked, and then added in an eager rush, “And don’t be saying I’m too young to understand. I’ve lost my first two milk teeth, and that means I’m no longer a baby.” Triumphantly, she pulled down her bottom lip as proof.
Derg peered at the pink, gummy gap and nodded solemnly. “So you have, indeed. Then I will tell you the truth: you won’t find your shape until you grow up, Sive. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do the work that comes before.”
“What work is that?”
“You must spend time in the fields and the forests, with the creatures there. Watch them, listen to them. Learn to understand them.”
As he talked, Derg pulled his young daughter onto his knee and played with the copper-gold waves that already reached halfway down her back.
“To become an animal, you must have a sense of kinship with the wild creatures,” he explained. “Shapeshifting begins with the ability to place your heart and mind within an animal’s skin. Only then will the skin itself take shape.”
Sive pondered this and then squirmed around to face her father. Her lovely face was intent.
“How do you choose which animal to become?”
Her father laughed.
“You don’t, daughter. Most of us have but one animal form; we become the animal most like our inner spirit. It’s true that the greatest shapeshifters can take on the form of several beasts, but always there is something about each animal that speaks to the essence of the person. We cannot become what is foreign to our nature.”
“What is your animal, then?”
Derg hesitated. Derg Dianscothach—Derg of the Quick Speech—was not a man of great power or ancestry, but his keen eye, quick understanding and artful tongue had earned him a place as the king’s counselor, messenger and, sometimes, spy. It would not do for his animal form to become common knowledge.
“It is secret,” he said finally. “Can I rely on you to keep it safe?” And with Sive’s solemn nod, he bent and whispered into her ear.
AT FIRST HER FATHER went with her to the woods. He taught her how to mark her path to keep from losing her way and which boggy, dangerous places to avoid. When he was convinced Sive could wander safely, he gave her leave to go alone—despite her mother’s objections. But it did not take her long to notice the magpie that flitted from tree to tree, seemingly paying no mind but never far from sight. She complained about the way Derg watched over her, but she felt safer for it too.
She was so tense and eager on those first excursions that her very presence frightened the beasts away. She would strain her eyes and ears and nearly tremble with alertness and rarely saw more than a tomtit. Any unsuspecting deer or otter that did come into view would bolt the second it noticed her presence. “Be easy, Sive,” her father would advise. “Be one of them. You would not get all excited if your sister walked into the room.”
Perhaps not, she thought. But I would not be easy either.
Sive’s half-sister Daireann was not the pleasant companion Derg saw. He thought it was kindness that prompted the young woman, on her rare visits from her father’s home, to take the time to play and talk with a little girl. But Daireann was a subtle tormentor, one with a need to feel grand by making others—even children—feel small. Sive had learned to be on her guard, to wait for her sister’s honeyed sting.
There was a game they played. “If I were an animal, what would I be?” Daireann would ask, and Sive would try to think of something clever and beautiful for her sister: a fox, a champion’s horse, a falcon. But although her sister preened at the flattery, it did not soften her tongue.
“Daireann says I will be a rabbit,” Sive told her father now. “Or a mouse.”
“Does she indeed?” Derg considered this apparent insult.
“Perhaps she says this because you are quiet and small.” He smiled at his daughter and shook his head. “But I believe she is wrong. You do have a gentle nature, something timid, perhaps, at times. But you are also strong and beautiful. Courageous too, at need.”
Sive glowed at his words. She had known better than to argue with Daireann, but she knew her father was right. She knew, too, what animal called to her above all others.
If it were given to her to change shape, she would become a deer.
ON THAT STILL MORNING, Sive was alone. Her father had not flown with her since the winter, for Sive’s mooncycles had begun and Derg knew her first change would not be far behind. That was a thing requiring solitude and not for another’s eyes to witness.
She was not even thinking of shapeshifting. She simply rested in the peaceful stillness that many hours in the woods had taught her. It was this peace, she had learned, that allowed the creatures about her to relax in her presence and go about their business right under her nose. She let the swell of early birdsong fill her, let her eyes be lulled by the gentle motion of the leaves floating on the pool.
The underbrush trembled, and a red doe stepped into the clearing. She froze, lifting her black nose to check Sive’s scent. Sive remained still, feeling the doe’s caution and her curiosity, feeling her thirst. After a long moment, the deer picked her way down the muddy slope to the pool. And then—Sive could not keep her heart from tripping faster in a rush of delight—a young fawn, dappled with its white baby spots, came after its mam. All spindly legs and wide brown eyes, he braced himself on the bank beside his mother and lowered his muzzle to the water, whiffling uncertainly at its cold touch.
It was a moment of pure magic, watching that fawn learn to drink. Sive was filled with joy, as though it were her own baby’s clever trick, as he stopped trying to suckle at the pool and instead lapped slowly with his tongue.
The fawn looked up from his drink, water streaming from his muzzle, and noticed Sive for the first time. It was comical how he started and stared. His mam startled, too, at his movement, and Sive thought they would both fly off, but after a quick check of the wind, the doe went back to her drink. Reassured, the fawn gazed at the girl and then with a friendly little tail flick began to skirt the pond toward her. He was unafraid, as though ambling over to meet one of his mam’s herd mates. Sive was enchanted and then suddenly alarmed.
If a fawn so young became familiar with her shape and scent, he might lose the fear of men that was his only defense against the hunters and their dogs. She saw him, confused and frightened, surrounded by the snarling hounds, and her heart twisted. It was her baby, her own, crying out as the sharp teeth sank into his neck.
Before she could jump to her feet and scare him off, before her intention to do so had fully formed, the change took her. The world rippled and blurred in her vision. Her body was lost to her in such an utterly strange gust of streaming sensation, blood and bone and flesh all swept into hurtling flux, that she could not think of it as her own. She was formless, and then she was sucked into the alien shape like molten metal flowing into a mould.
The fawn hesitated, one tiny hoof raised, as the stranger seemed to waver and grow dim. Then the figure came clear, and he could both smell and see her properly: a nearly grown fawn, a doe. He bucked a bit, playfully, and frisked over to her side.
Sive Remembers
I didn’t dare move, my four legs as uncertain and untried as a newborn’s. I thought my eyes had been injured in the change, for I had never dreamed the world could look so different. The lush, deep greens were gone, replaced by a yellow-brown wash that tinted everything—grass, leaves, tree trunks, even the other deer—shades of the same dun hue. Only later did I notice how brilliantly blue the sky blazed overhead and how clearly I could see into the shadowed places even in the dimmest twilight.
The triumph of what I had done thrilled through my blood, and the terror of it too. It had happened without my effort or will. What if I could not change back? Panic rose up in my breast, and I might have tried to claw my way out of my new skin if not for the fawn. He nuzzled beside me, nosing my flank as though checking for milk and then backing up awkwardly to find and lick my muzzle. The wonder of it pushed away the fear, and once I stopped being afraid, I understood that returning to my own form would be as simple as willing it.
I looked again through my new eyes, recognizing anew each familiar feature of the clearing. I stayed there all morning—so much to learn, there was. The air a complex stew of smells I didn’t understand, far-off sounds so sharp and clear it seemed every moving thing in the forest was right beside me. The strangeness of losing my upright view, of a body stretched out parallel to the earth. So many legs! I thought they would tangle and trip me, but once I dared take a step with one hoof, the rest followed and I could soon walk easily around the pool.
When the sun was straight overhead—a time when all real deer rest hidden in their secret beds—I ventured away from the pool to explore the forest. I leapt over logs, I drifted silently through dark spruce groves, and when at last I came to a long bare slope, I ran. The swiftness, the power—it does not seem such a marvel to me now. But on that first day, flying could not have been more thrilling. It is a memory I cherish still, despite all that followed.