CHAPTER 23
THE WHITE BLOSSOM

I had but one visit from Geanann that first year, for he would be eligible for the feathered robe in just over a year’s time, and his two masters were pushing him hard.

“Fingin is determined I shall have the skill of the god of healing himself before he is done with me, while my father will allow no scrap of knowledge from the other branches of learning to be overlooked,” he told me ruefully. “It is all I can do to survive their zeal.”

“You are at Emain, then,” I said, my voice flat. Fingin was Conchobor’s personal healer. It sickened me to think of Geanann there, right under the king’s nose. Foolish, I know. There was no healer more renowned than Fingin. Who else would Geanann study under?

But I was surprised to see him shaking his head. “I will not stay there,” he said, his eyes dark and hard. “I am with my mother’s people, not far west of Emain. There is travel back and forth, of course, but I prefer that. My father knows the reason. Fingin does not, but he accepts it.” Then he flashed me a quick smile. “Actually, Fingin probably does know something of the reason. There is little that escapes him. But he has a physician’s discretion.”

We talked of lighter things, then, and the hours flew by until the time came for his leaving. And then he laid his hand on my shoulder and returned to the subject of the king.

“I began my apprenticeship when I was only twelve years old,” he said to me. I did the figuring in my head—he was twenty-five, then. Ten years older than me. “It is half my life I have been on this path, and now my goal is within my sight. I cannot change masters now, not so close to my testing.”

I would not ask or expect it, I began to say, but I remembered how my heart had gone cold at the thought of him there, and realized I had indeed, in some secret place, hoped for it. So I did not say a half-truth, but only nodded my understanding.

“But it is this I wish for you to know, Luaine. I am not bound to Conchobor, nor will I be. When I win my robe, I will be gone from that place, and Conchobor no more aware of my absence than he is of my presence now. To him, I am just one of Cathbad’s many apprentices.”

I was not sure he was right about that. Conchobor did not get where he was by being oblivious to his surroundings, and I didn’t imagine the identity of Cathbad’s son escaped him. But I was glad Geanann would not stay with Conchobor. It was selfish of me, perhaps, to put my own grudge before Geanann’s prospects, for there is no doubt he could become the king’s physician after Fingin. But I was glad all the same.

I had messages from Roisin that year too, so I knew that King Lugaid had indeed remembered Berach and welcomed him into his service. But it was not until the following Samhain that I was able to see her.

Late in the summer, Tlachta called me to the small cluttered room where she had first interviewed me and made her proposal.

“I do not usually invite the less experienced apprentices to assist me at Samhain,” she said. I had taken my vows the week before and was now a “true” apprentice. “However, you have proved to me the seriousness of your calling, and I believe you may take a special interest in observing the judgments in the days that follow. Also,”—and here her lips twitched into a rare smile—”I am aware that you have dear friends in the area. I’m sure we could manage to free you for a visit.”

I needed no persuading. But Tlachta had not finished with me. This journey, she explained, brought to urgency a problem she had been mulling over for some time.

“You do not strike me as a person who will wish to spend her life hidden away on the Isle of Women,” she said to me. “Yet if you leave these shores, how long will it be until word reaches Conchobor of a young woman of the same name and age as his wife, her face blemished as though by a poet’s curse? And given such news, how long will he believe in your death, which was never proved?”

“I have worried about this also,” I confessed. “I suppose I thought that I would be here for some years, and that...well, that the king was not likely to live a great deal longer.”

Tlachta had none of my squeamishness in anticipating another’s death.

“You could wait for him to die,” she agreed frankly. “But Conchobor has been a strong man all his life. Despite his age, he may have a good many years left to him.”

I was trapped, then. Except...I glanced up quickly. Tlachta’s hazel eyes, tinged gold in their intensity, were trained on me like a hawk’s.

“You have a plan,” I said. “You would not have invited me to the Hill of Tlachta if you did not. What am I to do?”

She leaned forward, her eyes never leaving my own.

“You must leave Luaine behind and become another,” she said. “You must dream for a name.”

I had wondered how I would ever manage to sleep. To seek a true dream, I was to sleep on the wattles of knowledge. And while the very name filled me with awe, the reality—a lumpy rack of woven rowan whips erected under the great yew tree—looked very uncomfortable indeed.

But the dream draught is powerful, and so is the body’s demand for rest after the long vigil that precedes a dreaming. Indeed, as I lowered myself gingerly onto the wattle bed, I realized it did not matter if I even closed my eyes. I had been two nights without sleep, and fatigue had made my waking into a series of fragmented, brightly colored episodes as strange as dreaming. If there was a vision meant for me, it would find me.

The stars wheeled overhead like an endless tapestry recounting the deeds of a strange world, framed at one corner of my vision by a black fringe of yew branches. The bright patterns coalesced and scattered before me, so that at one moment my eyes beheld a familiar constellation, or a fanciful picture of my own invention—a warrior’s steed, a handled mirror—and the next nothing but a random infinity of light. And then it was as if a heavy black cloak was drawn over the sky, and the stars became darkness, and I slept.

The lawn is studded with stars. No...I see now, not stars at all, but the tiny white flowers that used to nestle in the grass around our house in the spring. There is no sign of a house, though, nor any familiar landmark to say where I might be.

Movement catches my eye—it is a seedling, pushing out of the grass and into the sky. Another grows beside it, and both of them stretching up and unfolding leaves so fast that in the space of several breaths they have become young saplings: a sturdy straight oak tree and a graceful white-skinned birch. They reach to the sky, and as they swell in girth the two trunks first touch and then grow together so that they form one inseparable column and their branches intertwine and mingle in the sky. And neither beauty nor strength are lost, for the oak grows straight and true, and the birch branches dance lightly in the wind, and each is a perfect specimen of its kind. Together they are a marvel.

Then the skies darken. Heavy clouds cloak the sun, rain beats down on the oak leaves and wind lashes the delicate birch branches. But the two trees stand proud and strong and pay as little mind to the weather’s violence as they do to a passing breeze. The winds cannot touch them.

But they are not unassailable. Even as a sudden foreboding grips me, there is a rumbling in the sky. The white fire forks out of the clouds. My head swims with the crack of it, and for a heartbeat, two, my eyes see only darkness punctuated with jagged phantom flares of light. The strange burnt smell hurts my nostrils.

I know what I will see when my vision clears. The two trees are cloven to the roots, felled to the ground with a single stroke. Smoking, writhing, they darken to black and crumble away.

Such desolation. I want to turn away, but I can’t. I am compelled to watch until the last blackened twig collapses into ash and earth. And it is because I cannot turn away that I see the tiny green shoot that trembles into life. Slow and fragile at first, it sprouts from the very place where the two great trunks were sundered. The sun kisses it, and now it brightens to a dark and glossy green, leaves unfurling proudly, leaping up to the light. Strong, shapely, it is a plant I have never seen. Its upward rush slows, stops, and from the topmost branch the hard bump of a bud appears. Swelling and lengthening, the bud bursts into glorious bloom. White, luminously white, its beauty shines in that dark place and banishes despair.

I awoke at the first thin light of dawn, shivering in the chill dampness, dew heavy on my hair and blanket and the imprint of the woven rowan branches engraved painfully into my skin. The dream’s grip was still upon me, so that I felt I was only half in this world. It was an exhilaration in my blood, for I knew it was a dream of power. I had not been given a name, but I had been given something. I rushed to the little boat pulled up on the shore and started across the water. I must speak to Tlachta before the dream faded.

“But it is your name, plainly.”

I shook my head. “Mistress, there were no words at all in my dream. I heard no name.”

Tlachta looked at me sharply. “You have a bright mind, Luaine, and are keen in understanding. Do not tell me you have not seen in the oak and birch trees your own peerless parents, their rise and fall?”

“I did think of it,” I admitted.

“Well, then.”

She was not making this easy for me.

“Well, I suppose then that the plant that rose from their ashes could be me.” Or the legend that lives on after a great life, or Ulster itself, which my father gave his life for, or King Lugaid whom he trained, I thought. It seemed presumptuous to push myself into that place.

“Of course it is you. Are you not their offspring, and did you not come close to your own death at that time and rise back up into life?”

She rose then, and bade me kneel before her. Macha and Rathnait rose and stood on either side of Tlachta as she laid both hands on my head. They gave a long prayer of greeting, inviting all beings—those of our world and those of the worlds beyond—to bear witness to their words. And then Tlachta said in a loud voice, “I name you Finscoth. Let you be known by this name henceforth, and may you live true to the course this name sets for you.”

White Blossom. I knelt and kept silent, struggling within myself to accept Tlachta’s words. I understood the charge she put on me: to cultivate that flower in my heart, to strive for a soul as luminous and pure as my dream. Yet my cheeks burned when I pictured the years to come. No one who met me would be thinking of the flower of my soul. They would be thinking, with amusement or pity or scorn, of the inescapable contrast between my name and my face. It was a name for a great beauty. I did not think I would ever feel it my own.

“It is your true name,” Tlachta told me, when the ceremony was over and we were alone. “You have only to believe it to make it so.”

I tried to believe, as I made my way to breakfast. It was my first proper meal in two days, and I had been ravenous when I awoke. But the thought of announcing my new name to all those women made my stomach buzz and jump. I would have a hard time eating.