Darragh stopped playing when he saw me. He’d found a sheltered spot amongst the stones, and sat with his legs outstretched and his back to the great dolmen we called the Guardian, not disrespectful exactly, just blending in as if he belonged there, the same as the rabbits. I stumbled forward, pushing my hair back from my eyes, and sat down beside him. I clutched my shawl closer around me. It was still barely dawn, and the air held the first touch of a distant winter.
It took me a while to catch my breath.
‘Well,’ said Darragh eventually, which wasn’t much help.
‘Well,’ I echoed.
‘You’re abroad early.’
‘I heard you playing.’
‘I’ve played up here often enough, this summer. Didn’t bring you out before. We’re leaving this morning. But I suppose you knew that.’
I nodded, sudden misery near overwhelming me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘I’ve been busy. Too busy to come out. I –’
‘Don’t apologise. Not if you don’t mean it,’ said Darragh lightly.
‘But I did want – I hadn’t any choice,’ I told him.
Darragh looked at me straight, his brown eyes very serious and a little frown on his face. ‘There’s always a choice, Fainne,’ he said soberly.
Then we sat in silence for a while, and at length he took up the pipes and began to play again, some tune I did not recognise that was sad enough to bring the tears to your eyes. Not that I’d have cried over so foolish a thing, even if I’d been capable of it.
‘There’s words to that tune,’ Darragh ventured. ‘I could teach you. It sounds bonny, with the pipes and the singing.’
‘Me, sing?’ I was jolted out of my misery. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Never tried, have you?’ said Darragh. ‘Odd, that. I’ve never yet met a soul without some music in them. I bet you could sing fit to call the seals up out of the ocean, if you gave it a try.’ His tone was coaxing.
‘Not me,’ I said flatly. ‘I’ve better things to do. More important things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Things. You know I can’t talk about it.’
‘Fainne.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t like to see you doing that – that – doing what you were doing yesterday. I don’t like it.’
‘Doing what?’ I lifted my brows as haughtily as I could manage, and stared straight at him. He looked steadily back.
‘Carrying on with the lads. Flirting. Behaving like some – some silly girl. It’s not right.’
‘I can’t imagine what you mean,’ I retorted scornfully, though I was struck to the heart by his criticism. ‘Anyway, you weren’t even looking at me.’
Darragh gave his crooked grin, but there was no mirth in it. ‘I was looking, all right. You made sure everyone would be looking.’
I was silent.
‘My father was right, you know,’ he said after a while. ‘You should get wed, have a brood of children, settle down. You need looking after.’
‘Nonsense,’ I scoffed. ‘I can look after myself.’
‘You need keeping an eye on,’ persisted Darragh. ‘Maybe you can’t see it, and maybe your father can’t see it, but you’re a danger to yourself.’
‘Rubbish,’ I said, bitterly offended that he should think me so inadequate. ‘Besides, who would I wed, here in the bay? A fisherman? A tinker’s lad? Hardly.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Darragh said after a moment. ‘Quite unsuitable, it’d be. I see that.’ Then he got to his feet, lifting the pipes neatly onto his shoulder. He had grown a lot, this last year, and had begun to show a dark shadow of beard around the chin. He had acquired a small gold ring in one ear, just like his father’s.
‘I’d best be off, then.’ He looked at me unsmiling. ‘Slip you in my pocket and take you with me, I would, if you were a bit smaller. Keep you out of harm’s way.’
‘I’d be too busy anyway,’ I said, as the desolation of parting swept over me once again. It never got any easier, year after year, and knowing I would myself be leaving next autumn made this time even worse. ‘I have work to do. Difficult work, Darragh.’
‘Mm.’ He didn’t really seem to be listening to me, just looking. Then he reached over to tweak my hair, not too hard, and he said what he always said. ‘Goodbye, Curly. I’ll see you next summer. Keep out of trouble, now, until I come back.’
I nodded, incapable of speech. Somehow, even though I had learned so much this season, even though I had come close to a mastery of my craft, it seemed all of a sudden that the summer had been utterly wasted, that I had squandered something precious and irreplaceable. I watched my friend as he made his way through the circle of stones, the wind tugging and tearing at his old clothes and whipping his dark hair out behind him, and then he went down the other side of the hill and was gone. And it was cold, so cold I felt it in the very marrow, a chill that no warm fire nor sheepskin coat could keep at bay. I went home, and still the sun was barely creeping up the eastern sky, dark red behind storm-tossed clouds. As I walked back to the Honeycomb, and lit a lantern to see me in through the shadowy passages, I made my breathing into a pattern. One breath in, long and deep from the belly. Out in steps, like the cascades of a great waterfall. Control, that was what it was all about. You had to keep control. Lose that, and the exercise of the craft was pointless. I was a sorcerer’s daughter. A sorcerer’s daughter did not have friends or feelings; she could not afford them. Look at my father. He had tried to live a different sort of life, and all it had brought him was heartache and bitterness. Far wiser to concentrate on the craft, and put the rest aside.
Back in my room I made myself picture the travelling folk loading their carts, harnessing their horses, setting off up the track northwards with their dogs running alongside and the lads bringing up the rear. I made myself think of Darragh on his white pony, and forced myself to hear his words again. I don’t like to see you doing that … you made sure everyone would be looking … you’re a danger to yourself … If that was how he saw me, it was surely far better that our paths were separating now. Year after year, season after season I had waited for him, pinning my hope and happiness on his return. It had seemed to me, sometimes, that I was not fully alive unless he was there. Now my grandmother was coming, and I was being sent away; everything was changing. Best if I put Darragh from my thoughts and just get on with things. Best if I learn to do without him. Besides, what could a travelling boy understand about sorcery, and shape-changing, and the arts of the mind? It was a different world; a world beyond his wildest imaginings. It was a world in which, finally, one must be strong enough to move forward quite alone.
That day I set all my things in order. I tidied my narrow bed and folded the blanket. I swept the stone floor of my bedchamber, which was one of many caves in the Honeycomb’s maze of chambers and passages. I put away my shawl and outdoor boots in the small wooden chest which housed my few possessions. Our life was very simple. Work, rest, eat when we must. We needed little. Deep in the chest, half-hidden under winter bedding, was Riona. She was the only possession I had that was not a strict essential of life. Riona was a doll. When folk spoke of my mother, they would say how beautiful she was, and how slender, like a young birch, and how much my father