TWENTY-SEVEN

Despite a generous bribe from Oisin, the serving girl who helped Sive with her bath and dinner did not keep quiet—at least not to the other servants—and so Oran knew of Sive’s return before her parents did.

He stayed in the background, though, and not only because it was for Derg and Grian to welcome her first. He was still not quite used to the way people saw him now, after all those years of invisibility. It made him uncomfortable to push himself forward, the more so that he was a servant and Sive a lady of the house.

It was Derg who thought to bring them together privately the next morning, the way she would not bump into him in the hallway or serving at table.

Her mouth had gone slack with surprise at the sight of him, and then, laughing and crying, she had rushed across the room and more or less thrown herself into his arms. Oran, beet red and not knowing what to do with his hands, looked at Derg helplessly. Sive’s father was smiling broadly.

“She’s a wee bit over-emotional right now, lad. Best just to let her be.”

“Oran, you’re so big!” Sive was feeling his arms and shoulders, completely unembarrassed. Oran blushed an even deeper red.

“You should have seen him eat when he got here,” said Derg. “At least, once I persuaded him he was allowed to.”

“I was so afraid he had killed you,” Sive confessed and burst once more into tears. “I couldn’t bring myself to ask, didn’t think I could bear to know.”

Oran again shot a pleading look to Derg, who made a patting motion with his hand and nodded encouragingly. Gingerly, Oran patted Sive’s shoulder.

“Aye, well, he made a good try at it,” growled Derg. Manannan’s healers had, indeed, brought Oran back from the very brink of death. They hadn’t been able to do much about the mangled leg though. That was an older injury, badly healed, that left him with a twisted ankle and a pronounced limp.

“Yet you have him working!” Sive rounded on her father. “After all he did for me, you make him a servant!”

“Sive.” Finally finding his voice, Oran interrupted. “I asked him to give me a position. He asked me how he could repay me, and this is what I wanted.”

Sive stared at him. “But why? Surely there’s no need…”

“There is for me.” Oran searched for the words that would help her, a highborn lady, understand. “I wouldn’t know how to live like you do. And I don’t want to be a burden on Derg, who had no need to take me in at all.” He held up a hand, most un-servantlike, to forestall her protests.

“Sive, imagine my life up to now. I have never had a choice. Never earned a wage of my own. Never had companions to work with or friends to pass my leisure with.” He gave a short, breathy laugh. “Never had any leisure to pass, for that matter.” He spread his hands wide. “This is so much better than anything I’ve ever known. Perhaps some day I’ll want more. But right now, this is what I need.

”

“You need to learn to be in the world again,” Sive said softly. “Just as I do. I should have realized.”

Oran nodded. He had had his own exile to endure, even longer than Sive’s. He couldn’t remember his home before the Dark Man took him.

But he had a home now. He and Sive, they had both been marked by the Dark Man. Yet among his victims, they were the lucky ones. They had come home.

Sive Remembers

I went back to the pool a few days after Oisin brought me home.

I needed to look with my true eyes on the place where my life as a deer had begun, and ended. Oisin was a bit alarmed when I told him what I meant to do; I could tell he half-feared I would change again and run off. But I assured him I just needed a little time alone, and he seemed to understand.

The water was dark and still, the woods hushed, and it was easy to imagine it as it had been that first morning, the light just breaking and I a young girl on the verge of her first change. It had been a different doe then, and a tiny fawn, and myself. And who could have foreseen how this one event would color my life?

Shapeshifting had been a gift and a curse to me, as my voice had been both gift and curse. Yet it had protected me from the Dark Man’s evil, if not from his wrath. A gift then, but one that came at a high price.

A blackbird’s cheery burble broke the silence. I took a final, lingering look around the pool. To see green again! Even in the shadows, the world was rich with color. Never again, I thought, would I trade the colors and faces of my world for the brown and yellow vision of a deer.

Or perhaps, after all, I would. Perhaps a far-off day would come when the memory of my years in exile would be as weightless and untroubling as a wisp of cloud in a blue summer sky, and I could once again play at being a deer. It was possible. After all, in the Land of the Ever-Young, never is a very long time.