/ onl'v tried to help Guenlme. Why did you turn on met Even your own folk can make nothing of it. I never thought you this cruel.

Guenloie was-well, as innocent as a woman could be with that kind of beauty and so careless in covering it.

That was a fault and her only fault, innocent in all else.

Why did Dorelei act so irresponsibly? Was that her hea- then idea of leadership?

And what is yours of a priest? Wherein celibate when your soul and your eyes have yearned every day after her? Dreamed of 133.

her. imagined coupling with her? What part of the sin but the mere act have you omitted? Lord, was I wrong? Was my calling a vanity, a delusion? A moment's answer to loneliness?

It could be; he wasn't sure of anything anymore. His cosmos had turned on its head to show him facets and depths never guessed under Germanus or even Amathor.

The world, real and spirit, was larger than his idea of it, and he smaller, weaker, and more contemptible than Padrec ever imagined in his worst moments of self-flagellation.

And ignorant as Dorelei. How would he explain the mark on her arm, the inflamed, obscene outline of the knife against her smooth skin, as if the metal were red hot when it couldn't be?

How many times had he sheathed Dorelei in the bless- ing of God? And what good did it do her when she needed it? There was virulent sorcery in the iron: admit that and admit as well a whole dark, demon-driven cosmos beyond the edge of God's holding where His Grace did not apply, with only fools and failures like himself to make it work. He could preach of the loaves and fishes, Lazarus and the Resurrection, but he didn't know any magic, didn't even know human beings as Meganius did. Padrec was a stupid child trying to build a fire and burning nothing but his fingers.

Where will Megamus send me now? Not even Germanus will give me Ireland if I fail here. I only wanted to tell them of You, Lord. Was that vanity?

What else, liar? Did I not seek my own praise in that service?

"But look at Drust, Lord, how he already loves the Psalms. All of them love the miracles. I tell them in their own way, as stories of magic. Jesu did no less. Lord, 1 ^ learn slowly but I do learn. If I know not the vessel, i iknow the wine You would pour into it. To be consecrated Your priest is not enough. Make me one in truth, or put me aside for good and all, as You will divide goat and sheep. Do it now, I pray. Do not bow me down with Meganius' years before I have his wisdom. Let me know I men now. Not in safe Eburacum or Auxerre or Rome, my Lord, but here, now, in the forefront of the battle. The iron of me is white on Your anvil. Strike now, shape me now. Give me a sign."

134 Padrec gazed morosely about the shadowed circle and blew out his cheeks in exasperation. "Miracles . . ."

Miracles and magic: that was religion tu Faerie, that and the quaintly unstable marriage of sun and earth. Oi them all, Drust might in time go beyond that to true faith;

the rest understood nothing but the intercession of magic for good or ill. the folderol practiced with much display by Irish shamans. Tricks, but they believed.

"Tricks ..."

Failure was the lash he couldn't suffer again; yet to stay he must Find a powerful reason now. Hunched against a stone, muffled in the blanket, Padrec tried to order his mind to purpose, glaring up at the moon like a rival:

Dorelei's mother of magic.

"Don't look at me. You're the magician."

A piece of an idea snagged on the hem of his thoughts.

His frame of mind turned from despair; he began to think slowly, polishing each element before fitting it to the next, doing what would have been obvious at the start to one of the Irish shamans. He tried to think not about Dorelei but like her.

/// were Dorelei, what would I most need now? What would t want? If I were she . . .

To have one side of her at war with the other was new and painful to Dorelei. She knew her needs, but for the first time in her life she could not name her feelings. They were not as simple as before. She'd showed her anger like a child without knowing clearly what drove it, and vented it on Cru in loving that night, biting his neck. tearing his strong back with her nails. He wouldn't know that it was passion of a different color, that she battered herself against a force that threatened her.

"Thee has a hunger tonight," he whispered against her cheek.

"Do need you much." Dorelei writhed against him.

"Come to me."

"Again?"

Her arms went around him, tight.

Long after Cru breathed deep in slumber, Dorelei stared up into darkness, reliving the horrible day in the 135.

village, the miserable silence around the fire, the wound in her fhain as visible as that on her arm. Her thoughts sifted finer through the sleepless hours, showing her the problem but no way to the heart of it. He was the rock that broke her. Lugh had sent her no help at all. Padrec was a stone around her neck and one with a cutting edge. He defied her when she spoke as gern. He put his arm around sheep-witted Guenloie, who might have killed them all with her weak ways. In the village he thought first to shield Guenloie rather than herself from the hurled stones.

For all the magic of Lugh, Mother, and even Padrec's Father-God, all saw how Blackbar frightened her, saw what it did to her arm, and knew her magic was weak. She was shamed and beaten, and future life with Taixali would be all the harder for them.

The men must trade alone from now on, if they went at all. Three of them, all that were left. Padrec couldn't know how much more at stake there was than puling Guenloie, and yet he defied her-this man not sensible enough to reach for a woman. He incited Drust and Malgon to defy her. She'd shown enough of her humiliation this day, when she'd always shielded all but wise Cru from the hard truth of their weakness. They knew now. and when she looked at sullen Padrec across the firepit at supper, Dorelei realized she must rule fhain or he would.

She was glad he was going-

Not true; she ought to be glad. That hid itself in passion and made her love Cru until they were both ex- hausted. That robbed her sleep now, the feeling she strug- gled to catch and drag into the light. A gern must be able to read her own heart before she could read others. What was it that loosed the fury at Guenloie?

Not so much a finding but admitting. Whatever his mad notions of women, Padrec was a man for a woman to treasure and learn from. If her whole life proceeded from belief, so did his, and this made him strong in his peculiar way, strong and stubborn as herself. Aye, and what did he spend this strength on? Guentoie! Always the favored, spoiled child in Gawse's fhain. How her changeling mother cooed over Guenloie and made much of her. And oh, how Guenloie ciung to the petting and to her Padrec-protector,

136 wetting his shirt with her innocent tears, all atremble in

his arms. . ..

No more, woman. Is that the heart of it? Help me. Mother. I

must be wise when I'm a fool, strong -where all know me weak, a

gem where I am not fit to tend fhain flocks. Help me. Is it ail

because of him? That I amjealozis?

Send km away. And keep the Blackbar evil from us.

Dorelei burrowed closer to Cru's male warmth under

the covers. As she moved, her fingers brushed the swollen

evil on her arm, and she shivered with the oldest fear of

her life and her kind.

Padrec came home late to crannog, and Dorelei heard him rise early, while Neniane was kindling the morning Fire. She was not surprised he was gone and his horse with him. Whatever her feelings, that much was done and finished. If a gern could be wrong, she could right it, but she could not give up. Wisdom was never the worse for a sleep. Yesterday's troubles, sifted through a rested mind, were clearer now, the right and wrong of it. Dorelei took small sips from her cup of chamomile and prepared to break the smothered silence.

Guenloie and her husbands were glum and silent in their places around the firepit. They'd already begun to bundle their own things together. Dorelei set down her cup and assumed the format position on her stone.

"Guenloie?" Her cousin looked directly at her for the first time that morning. The bruises on her face were bluish-black now. The girl had suffered much. "Have spo- ken with Mother. A would nae have thee parted from fhain."

Guenloie bowed her head in acceptance. "Be inno- cent, Gern-y-fhain." Dorelei saw the gratitude in her eyes and the vindication in Drust's.

"Mother did say so. Be past and done, then. Fhain will be whole again.'

It was the right decision. Doretei felt the tension about the fire loosen and dissolve in tremulous laughter and snatches of idle talk. She caught Cru's tiny nod of ap- proval. He'd upheld her taw but approved the cooler common sense that shaded it to mercy.

"Do speak to all," Guenloie said into the ctay cup 137.