Morrigan didn’t need to flip the page to remember the rest of the long-ago entry.
She could recall all too well the little girl she used to be. The girl who’d loved, more than anything, the trees and the earth and the beautiful dappled gray mare she did get for her ninth birthday. The girl who didn’t constantly look into shadows for bad things, but believed that all the voices in her imagination were good, her special friends, and that she wasn’t a total and complete freak for being able to sense spirits in the land.
Not today. She wouldn’t think about that today. She shook her head. Today she had enough to deal with as she packed to leave her home and then went on one last road trip with her friends before they scattered to different colleges. The battle between good and evil would have to wait till after she was settled in the dorm. She wasn’t Buffy. Morrigan snorted. She wasn’t even Eowyn, although she’d give just about anything to be a Shieldmaid of Rohan.
Was there really a battle between good and evil? Could it just be something her aging, eccentric grandparents had made up?
“No,” she said firmly, shoving aside the fact that she didn’t know if those last thoughts had been her own, or had been whispered to her on the wind. To distract herself she flipped the journal ahead to the April 30 listing, and let herself smile and relax as she read her childish excitement.
Dear Journal Dear Journal Dear Journal!
THEY DID GET ME A HORSE! I knew it! She’s the most beautiful, amazing, incredible thing in the world! She’s only a two-year-old. G-pa says that’ll give us time to grow up together. (G-pa is so funny.) She’s an awesome dappled gray that’s so light she’s almost silver. I think I’m going to call her Dove because she’s so pretty and sweet. AND SHE’S MINE!
G-pa and G-ma are the best! It doesn’t even matter that they’re old.
Tonight while I was brushing Dove G-pa told me all about a horse goddess named Epona. She’s also goddess of the earth and trees and rocks and everything. He said if I’m really happy about my new horse then maybe I should thank Epona, because she probably pays attention when someone gets her first horse of her very own. I thought that sounded like a cool idea, so after dark I snuck out to the big tree in the front yard (the one right outside my bedroom window) and I said THANK YOU to Epona. Because that’s a really big tree and I figured if she’s goddess of trees she probably liked that one a lot. Then I pulled one of the lawn chairs over and stood on my tip-toes on it so that I could reach to put my favorite shiny rock (the one I found when I was weeding the garden last summer) as far up as I could. I told Epona the rock was for her.
And do you know what? I swear I heard someone laughing up in the branches of the tree! A girl someone!
“And the next day the shiny rock was gone,” Morrigan whispered. And that’s when her relationship with Epona had started. The older she got, the more often her grandparents mentioned the Goddess. And the more often Morrigan thought about her.
Morrigan didn’t remember exactly when the woman’s voice in the wind had become that of the Goddess to her, she just knew that soon after the rock disappeared she’d started thinking of the voice in her mind, the one that sounded like music, as the whisper of a goddess.
Until the day she had finally admitted to G-pa that the wind spoke to her. She’d never forget the look on his face. He’d gone from laughing with her about something Dove had done, to being pale and serious within the space of just a few seconds. Then he’d sat her down and given her The Talk.
Had The Talk been a big, embarrassing lecture about sex and periods and that kind of stuff? Unfortunately, no. It’d been a talk about good and evil, and how both might touch her life.
Morrigan put away the journal she’d been reading, and sifted through the others until she found the one she wanted. She didn’t have to thumb through many pages to find the entry she’d made after The Talk.
September 13
Dear Journal,
I guess the whole thing about the 13th being unlucky is true. I told G-pa about the voices in the wind today and he really freaked. And the stuff he said kinda scared the s**t outta me.
Morrigan closed her eyes. She didn’t have to read the childish version of the conversation. She remembered it all too well—and without the cushion of childhood’s innocence to soften the impact of his words. The three of them had sat at the kitchen table.
“Morrigan, I want you to listen carefully to me,” G-pa had said. She’d known he was dead serious because he’d called her by her full name instead of Morgie or Morgie old girl. She remembered that the tone of his voice had made her stomach hurt.
“You think I’m crazy because I hear the wind,” she’d blurted.
“No, hon!” G-ma had patted her hand. “Grandpa, tell her we believe her and don’t think she’s crazy.”
“Nope, nope,” he’d grumbled. “You’re not crazy. We believe you can hear voices in the wind.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “It’s like how you used to draw pictures of rocks and trees with hearts in them when you were a little girl. Remember what you told us about that?”
Of course she’d remembered. “I told you that I drew hearts in them because I knew they were all alive.”
“Right,” Grandpa had said. “The wind talking to you is like you knowing the trees and rocks have spirits.”
“The wind is just another spirit in the world?” Morrigan had brightened, thinking that if the voice was like the trees and rocks then it should be okay. Maybe one of the voices, that really pretty girl voice, was Epona!
“It’s not that simple, hon,” G-ma had said.
“The rocks and trees are good. But the voice you hear—”
“Voices,” she’d interrupted. “It’s not always the same voice, but I always think of it as wind.”
G-pa gave G-ma a long look before he continued. “You know that there’s good and evil in the world, right?”
“Yeah, we’re studying WWII in history. Hitler was evil.”
“That’s right.”
“And lots of kids believe in Satan. He’s evil.”
“Yes. But sometimes evil isn’t as easy to identify as Hitler or Satan, just like not all that’s good seems good at first.”
Morrigan had scrunched up her nose and said, “Like brussels sprouts tasting nasty but being good for me?”
That had made him chuckle. “Just like brussels sprouts.”
Morrigan remembered that she’d suddenly realized what he was trying to tell her. “You mean that the voices in the wind might be bad?”
“Not all of them, hon,” G-ma had said.
G-pa had taken a deep breath, and she remembered thinking that he looked really tired. Then he’d said, “Your mom heard voices. Whispered voices. Some of them were good. She could even hear the sound of Epona’s voice.”
She’d sat there, awestruck that her mom had actually listened to a goddess. And if her mom had heard Epona, then maybe she could hear her, too! Then the rest of what G-pa was saying was like he’d thrown ice water on her.
“But she could also hear a voice that was evil. She listened to it, too, until after a while it changed her, and it wasn’t until you were born that she realized she had made a mistake and let evil get a hold of her.”
“But you said my mom was a good person.” Morrigan had felt like crying.
“She was. There was a lot of good in her. For a while it just got smothered out by the