Shapeshifter

TWENTY-FIVE



Surely he would never get used to the strange ocean journey to and from Manannan’s secret stronghold, however many times he made it. This time the trip was much shorter, landing them on a strand that looked strangely familiar.

But it was not until hours later that Oisin was certain.

“That hill!” He turned on his horse to look backward at Derg, left arm still outthrust and pointing. “That is the Hill of Almhuin!” And they had traveled here from Baile’s Strand, but…the road was different. And why could he not see Finn’s dun topping the hill?

Derg smiled. “In Eire it is the Hill of Almhuin, home of the mighty Finn mac Cumhail. Here it is simply one of the two hills that keep company with our hill.” Derg pointed, in his turn, to the first of the approaching hills, and now Oisin noticed the cluster of buildings crowning its top. “Welcome to Sidhe Ochta Cleitigh.”

THEY AGREED THE first thing was for Oisin to see Sive for himself. Accordingly, Derg would fly out at first light to find her and then lead Oisin to the place where she was spotted. After that, Oisin would have to—his mind balked at the word, but what other was there?—hunt her.

He spent a good part of the evening wandering around Derg and Grian’s beautiful house and through the grounds of their sidhe. He had never imagined his mother as a young girl or thought of the kind of life she had had. To be accustomed to such luxury and then be cast unprotected into the wilds! How had she ever survived? he wondered.

On their journey he had asked Derg, “Why did you bring me and not my father? Will you not reunite them?”

Derg shook his head. “I do not think so. Not, at least, unless Sive comes back to us and, knowing all that it would entail, insists upon it.”

“What do you mean, all that it would entail?”

“Your father has remarried, Oisin. He has a young son, and another child on the way. His Fianna look to him to make them once again a mighty force. Would you have him abandon all these charges to come to Tir na nOg?”

Oisin did not answer. He wasn’t sure what his answer was. But Derg was not finished.

“There is another problem. Your father is old.”

Oisin’s protests were stilled by Derg’s raised hand.

“I know, lad. I know he is still strong. He is a great man. But he is more than twenty mortal years older than when Sive loved him, and it shows. What hope is there that she would know him, when she does not even recognize us, who are unchanged? We cannot undo what Time has already done. We cannot make him young again.”

And yet they think she will know me? Oisin shook his head and made to ride on, but Derg’s next words slowed his pace.

“It is not your appearance we expect her to know. You are the child of her heart, the one who gave her a reason to endure through all the years you were together. You were the source of her strength and her hope, and that hope was that you would survive to manhood.

“We want to show her that her hope came true. Perhaps you will fail, as we have failed. But we think that if anyone can awaken her heart, it is you.”

HE STALKED HER patiently, silently, careful of the betraying breeze that might put her to flight. The pain of it—that she would fear him so—caught him unawares.

That was the throbbing of a just-knit wound. When at last he watched her browsing in a glade, and, catching his scent, she raised her head to look at him—that was when the wound’s edges were torn apart. For he had thought she would know him. Not in his mind, he didn’t. His mind had truly reasoned that she would not. But his heart, he realized now, had believed that when she saw him, she would know him.

She didn’t. The startled brown eyes that gazed at him before she bolted away had none of the awareness and intelligence he remembered—oh, now he remembered!— from childhood. Those eyes had been his mother’s eyes, whatever form or color they took on.

Now they were a wild creature’s, nothing more.

THE WOODS WERE nearly dark, and Oisin was most of the way home when the white patches of a magpie’s wing flashed in the gloom. Soon Derg was pacing at his side.

“It’s slow going through unfamiliar forest in the dark. Thought you could use a guide.”

Oisin did not point out that in Eire, there were few places he knew better than the land surrounding Finn’s dun. He simply nodded his thanks. He was glad to see Derg. He had had time to think on the long trek back, and what he had concluded was this: so long as he tracked Sive like a hunter, she would respond as prey. He must find a way to gain her trust.

“I need a place that she frequents,” he said to Derg now. “Somewhere she goes to rest or drink. Can you follow her as a bird and find one?”

“I already have.” Derg’s smile was sad. “There is a pool she was fond of as a child. It is where she learned to become one with the wild creatures. Which is, as I gather, what you propose to do?”

“Something like that.” Oisin did not have his mother’s powers, but he had been a child of the woodland, and he knew how to be still and unnoticed.

“Does she go there often?” he asked.

Derg shook his head. “I can’t say. By day, she rarely comes that close to our settlement. The pool is not far into the forest. But I think perhaps it draws her, for I have seen her there several times at dawn. If you were there each daybreak…”

“I will be there each daybreak,” said Oisin. And whether she came or not, he would leave food—grains, apples, hazelnuts—for her to find when she did come.

IN THE GRAY HALF-LIGHT of early dawn, a dappled deer picked her way cautiously down the bank. Her dainty prints from several days ago still dented the mud by the pool’s edge.

She was almost at the water when she stopped, her wide nostrils flaring. The scent was delicious, fragrant with oats and the sweet heavy odor of fruit. A mound of food lay heaped on a fallen log just off the trail.

The doe stood motionless, torn. It was man-food on that log. She remembered the lean, hungry winters that had driven her, at times, to skirt along the edges of the hunters’ fields and orchards, scraping through snow to find fruit or grain heads that had been left behind. There was nothing better than that food, but always it was gained under threat of the spear and the dogs.

She lifted her head, scanning the underbrush around the pool and testing the faint dawn breeze. Yes, there was man-scent about, and—she stretched out her muzzle to an apple that had fallen off the pile and lay near her feet— definitely on the food.

The doe’s feet did a comical little dance as the war within—to flee or to eat—played itself out. Then she snatched at the apple, ready to leap away at the least noise or movement as she munched through its sweet flesh. The strange thing was, the man-scent on the food, which should have repelled her, made it all the more enticing.

Sive Remembers

The next morning, the food was there again, and the man-scent was stronger. And though my skin shuddered over my shoulders at the smell of it, I didn’t want to flee. I wanted to stay, not just for the grain, but to be near that smell.

When I saw him—a big man with pale hair, on the other side of the pool—his presence was so quiet and still that I didn’t bolt but simply retreated into the undergrowth and watched. The food still drew me, yes, but it was more than that. It was like a remembered dream, so many elements that I seemed to have seen before: a deer at the edge of a pool, a quiet person across the water. A big man with yellow hair—why did he feel safe, when other men made me run? And his scent—that tantalizing scent—drew me. Some mornings I had a crazy longing to run around the pool and bury my nose against him.

I never did that, of course. But I did grow accustomed to his presence. Soon I was coming every morning to the pool, and he was always there. He spoke to me sometimes in a quiet voice, a voice that recalled another quiet, gentle voice I had heard once, and trusted.

DAYS STRETCHED INTO weeks, and Oisin came to the reluctant conviction that he had failed to reach his mother. What he was about, in fact, was taming a deer. That alone was an improvement; if Sive could be tamed enough to stay in a stable with the horses, they could, at least, ensure that she was warm and fed. But she didn’t need feeding. She needed to wake up.

“I suppose Grian has tried singing to her?” he asked Derg. Derg looked at him in surprise.

“Grian?”

“She must have sung to Sive as a child.”

“Of course,” said Derg. “And then trained her in the gift. They spent many hours singing together.”

“So,” said Oisin. It seemed too obvious to have to explain. “Music was a big part of her life. I was thinking it might help her remember.”

Derg flashed Oisin a quick, sad smile. “I forget you haven’t known us long. Grian has a voice to make the heavens weep, true enough, but she has no woodlore whatever. We’ve never been able to get her close enough for even a glimpse of Sive.”

Derg’s eyes grew bright with excitement. His forefinger pressed into Oisin’s chest. “You must sing for her, lad.”





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