Sistersong

1

KEYNE

Imbolc—a festival celebrating the end of winter

I will tell you a story.

Seven years ago, when I was a child of ten, I became lost in the woods. My sisters and I had been travelling the road that skims the coast like a stone from Dintagel. I loved our summer home—a spume-silvered rock of houses and workshops, its docks piled high with amphorae. But there is a place, many leagues to the east, where the road slows, turning inland. It loses itself amongst the trees, straying into giant country. Branches interlace here; it is easy to slip away into the green space between a giant’s fingers. Easy for a careless child to disappear.

Looking back, I wonder whether it truly was carelessness. Perhaps it was her doing. Given everything which came after, that would make sense.

Between one scout’s holler and the next, I am lost, a prisoner of the wood. I feel no fear, more an irritation that I’ve let the trees trick me. I can hear my father, the king, calling me and the irreverent footfalls of men rending foliage.

I wander so long, it feels as though I’ve crossed some hidden boundary. I’ve left our world for theirs—the nameless land where goddesses sing to the stars, where lost spirits linger in the twilight. Dark quills scratch me; I am surrounded by yews, the terrible grave-trees which grow from death. I shiver, as irritation turns to fear. Deep voices seem to call my name, anthems to lost children. And now I am lost, hopelessly so.

The sky darkens and with the light goes hope. Hunger claws at my stomach; I am old enough to know I cannot survive long without food and water. Tears well. What if I die here and the yew grows stronger, roots curling through my bones?

Despair is a sharp scent and I suppose she smells it upon the air, for suddenly a woman stands before me. She is old, but not so old as Locinna, our nurse. Eyes peer beneath a heavy brow, blue, and piercing as a gull’s. She wears rags, tattered and rent, but after a blink, these become a cloak of moths, their wings a-flit in the evening. Another blink and it’s just an ordinary cloak, albeit a strange one made of patches and ribbons fluttering free.

She extends a hand and I realize I’ve collapsed to the leaf mulch, the seat of my skirt now damp through. My legs wobble as I stand. Her fingers are rough, calloused like a smith’s. I wonder what strange trade might have marked them.

“Are you a witch?” The dangerous question is out in the open before I can stop it.

She smiles. “Perhaps.” Looks me up and down. “Would you like me to be?”

“No.”

“And why not?”

“Because witches are to be feared.”

She pauses. “A good answer, if not entirely true.”

“I want to go home.”

The witch tilts her head, her gull’s eyes narrowing on my face as if it were a fine fat fish. “I wonder if you do.”

“Of course I do.” But I glimpse her meaning. I have never felt at ease in my home.

“You are wet through. Come and get warm.”

They are such inviting words. And I’m freezing, it’s true. But she’s a witch. “My father must be worried.”

She steps back and something jingles—her stick-wrists gleam with silver bracelets. My eyes widen; only Mother has silver like this. Where hers is solid and silent, however, the witch’s bracelets sing. I feel a desperate urge to touch them, to capture those chimes between my palms, as if I could draw the melody inside me.

She notices my gaze, smiles again. “Would you like one?”

Throat dry with want, I shake my head.

“Here.” She slides off a single band, passing it over gnarled brown knuckles. Before I know it, my fingers have closed about its shining curve.

“I can’t…”

“But you already have.”

My cheeks flush. Shaped like a horseshoe, the band is too big, hanging on my wrist like the crescent moon above us. But it shrinks to a perfect size even as I watch, and I catch my breath at the tingle of magic. When I look up, she’s half turned her back. “Wear it when you are ready to find me again.” And she is gone, returned to the forest that birthed her.

The forest I am no longer within, for I now stand upon a wide road, and voices—human voices—are shouting my name. One laughing, one crying, my sisters rush towards me.

I remember burying that silver bracelet, sweating and fearful. I hadn’t planned to hide it, but inside Dunbriga, our capital, I began to question my gift. It felt nothing like the spells spoken over hearth and home. Not even akin to Father’s ability to spark a flame or ask the skies for rain. It was otherworldly. It had come from the dangerous heart of the forest, warmed by a witch’s skin.

And yet for all that, the bracelet was mine now. My parents would surely take it away if they found it. So in the shadows cast by Dunbriga’s oldest yew, I gouged a hole in the raw earth and dropped the silver in, weeping to see my shining crescent amidst the dirt.

I’ve ventured into the forest many times since then and have never once glimpsed the witch. As the years pass and the magic fades, she seems more and more a figment of a fevered mind. “Just a fancy,” I tell the wheat doll taking shape between my hands. She is nearly finished—a shoulder shy of complete.

“Keyne!”

I twitch. I should have seen Mother coming, sitting as I am at our hill fort’s highest point. A waft of rosewater precedes her and then she’s towering over me—her shadow blotting out what little sun struggles through the clouds. “What are you doing?” she demands.

My blasphemous fingers are busy weaving a brideog. We make the goddess’s dolls every year for the festival of Imbolc. Gildas, the Christian priest, doesn’t like it, but I find the work soothing; it takes my mind off other things. And from my perch on the steps of the great hall, I can watch the hold tumbling out below me down the hill. Cattle on the lowest level are tiny as a child’s toys.

“I told you to put this practice aside,” Mother says sternly, and I hear the priest in her words. Beneath the queen’s skin runs the blood of old Rome, the jewel of the empire that abandoned us to our fate. Father took her for her blood; he thought it might give him strong sons to guard his lands and legacy. Instead he has two daughters… and me. Rome’s last laugh, I suppose, before the legions left our shores for good.

“We are not prepared for Candlemas on the morrow,” she adds, and the word forces my head up. Bright fox fur frames my mother’s shoulders, her curls tamed into an elegant braid. Her skin is a shade browner than my own, though we share the same dark hair. “And do try to sit graciously. This”—she waves a hand at my trouser-clad legs—“open sprawling is improper.”

My hands clench around the wheat woman. “We’ve always made brideogs, Mother. I don’t see the harm in it.”

“Brigid is no longer our concern. We need candles for the ceremony, enough for every woman who—”

“Why is it only the women who must be ‘purified’ at Candlemas?” I snap, imagining what my sisters might say. Wild Sinne would scoff at the thought, eyes sparkling with some planned mischief. Riva would probably grit her teeth and bear it while murmuring prayers to the old gods under her breath. I almost smile, but it dies when I think about Rome’s god and the way his priests seem to delight in punishing women. Gildas believes all Britons sinners, despite being a Briton himself. He condemns our festivals, our traditions, even our little wheat dolls. But every tale he spins, of revelation and ruin, pushes his Christ further away from me. Gildas’s Saviour is a stranger who died long ago in a hot land I have never seen.

Mother’s gaze briefly strays from my own: part of her agrees with me. But when she says, “Make candles, Keyne,” it is Queen Enica who speaks.

“Let Riva do the candles. You know she cannot weave the—”

“Riva is making them already. And when I find Sinne, she will join you.”

She won’t find Sinne. My younger sister has a talent for making herself scarce whenever there is work to be done. And to Sinne, everything looks like work.

Our home, Dunbriga, is a smudge of smoke on the edge of the world. I know it’s not really—Armorica is just across the water, and ships come from further still, bringing us oil and olives, the taste of sun-drenched lands to the south. I like to imagine cargoes of silks and spices cocooned in ships’ holds, waiting to be abused by our rough hands and palates. But when storms keep the ships away, the walls of Dunbriga close in and the fort seems to shrink. We need travellers to remind us that there’s a world beyond our borders.

I make my way to the workshop, feeling the holdsfolk’s customary stares as I pass. The brideog is coming apart in my hands. I don’t know why I care, except that she’s an antidote to Christ and his earnest suffering. I am tired of being called sinful. Half my father’s hold already thinks me so. I need no help from Gildas and his followers.

At the creak of the door, Riva looks up, her good hand coated in tallow. She’s wearing a bandage around the other, hiding the scarred flesh she cried over every night for years after the fire. No one knows how it started, except Riva herself perhaps, and she claims she doesn’t remember.

“So,” Riva says, as I take the stool beside her in the dim room. “Mother found you.” She’s as tidy as Sinne is tangled, her chestnut hair braided neatly, sober dress crease-free. Riva has a stillness in her that soothes me. She listens where my younger sister would speak.

I nod. “Now she’s after Sinne.”

“She won’t catch her.” We share a fond smile before my sister’s eyes stray to the tattered figure in my arms. “… Brigid.”

I let her fall. “Mother forbade me. I’m to help you with the candles instead.”

Riva scoops the brideog from the rush-strewn floor. The doll is a sorry sight, broken wheat sticking out of her like pins. “Finish her, Keyne,” my sister says. “It’s important the goddess feels welcome here. I’ll see to the candles.”

I force myself to protest. “There are dozens. And you don’t like fire.”

“I am coping.” A tremor in her face. “You can help when you’re done.”

“Thank you.” The words hiss from my lips and I sound ungrateful. I can’t seem to sound any other way these days. Riva, however, just nods and returns to her shaping and dipping.

I know she’s watching as my fingers flash in and out of the brideog, perhaps mocking the dexterity she no longer has. But I don’t move, because it’s warm beside the stinking tallow and the fire that keeps it soft. And that stillness I love in my older sister is here in the room between us. I can feel my earlier anger slowly seeping away.

An hour passes in companionable silence. I stare at Brigid’s blank face. She could be anyone. She doesn’t even resemble a woman, just a figure with arms and legs, trunk and head: human. That’s something we all share. That’s what really matters.

Isn’t it?

Raised voices pull me from my thoughts. Riva and I exchange a glance before we creep to the workshop door. We don’t want to be seen. People clam up around us, the king’s children, as if we’re his spies. I grimace to myself. It might look that way, but Father doesn’t listen to us as he used to do. These days only Mother, his lords—and Gildas—are welcome to speak.

“Hush, Siaun. If someone hears and tells the priest—”

“Then we’ll know who’s a traitor.”

I put my eye to a crack. Three men lurk outside, one checking the yard is empty. I guess they’d never dream of finding the royal children with their hands in a tallow vat.

“Do you want to be caught? The king will lock you up… or worse.”

Siaun snorts. He’s a slight but rangy man in a farmer’s overall and his cheeks are lean with hunger. Last summer’s harvest was the poorest in years and the winter has been hard. “Lock me up for speaking truth?” he demands.

The other man shakes his head. “For speaking against the priest.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“It’s not about sides, Siaun,” the third man hisses from where he’s keeping watch. “Plenty of folk are beginning to listen to the priest. The king listens, so they do too.”

“The king is wrong,” Siaun says, and I hear Riva draw a startled breath beside me. Her eyes are wide in the dim space.

Siaun’s friend clamps a hand over his mouth. “Holy Brigid, Siaun. Say that any louder and you’d be lucky to escape with a whipping.”

I swallow tightly. Siaun’s expression doesn’t change, but his fists are clenched and trembling.

“Will you die for this, Siaun?”

The farmer turns so I can’t see his face. “Our women don’t need purifying for the festival of Imbolc, so why is this Candlemas different? Would you let the priest shame them?”

“Of course not, but what can we do when ’tis the queen’s will for us to follow new ways? Besides, Gildas is not all bad. I hear he’s building proper houses for Brys and his family. Times have hit them hard. And not just them.”

Riva mutters something under her breath and I think, Candlemas is only the beginning.

Once Siaun’s friends have bundled him away, I meet my sister’s eyes. “Is it true what they said? That there are already people who follow the priest?”

Bandaged hand held close to her chest, Riva says, “Gildas doesn’t care a wit for them, so why build them houses? It must be part of his plan to convert us all.” Her face firms. “We should talk to Father. Not to tell tales,” she adds hastily when I open my mouth to protest. “About Gildas. Father allows Mother to honour the priest’s festivals, but perhaps he doesn’t know how far it’s gone. That people are prepared to give up the old ways altogether, that Gildas is essentially bribing them to do so…”

“What if Father does know?” The stink of candles clogs my nose. And what if he doesn’t care?