Chapter One

It was nearing sunset, and the quiet waters of the Vale of Avalon were overlaid with gold. Here and there tussocks of green and brown raised their heads above the quiet waters, blurred by the glimmering haze which at autumn's end veiled the marshes even when the sky was clear. At the center of the Vale one pointed tor rose above the others, crowned with standing stones.

Caillean gazed across the water, the blue cloak that marked her as a senior priestess hanging in motionless folds around her, and felt the stillness dissolving the fatigue of five days on the road. It seemed longer. Surely, the journey from the ashes of the pyre at Vernemeton to the heart of the Summer Country had taken a lifetime.

My lifetime…, thought Caillean. I shall not leave the House of the Priestesses again. Six months earlier she had brought her little band of women from the Forest House to found a community of priestesses on this isle. Six weeks ago she had gone back, alone, too late to save the Forest House from destruction. But at least she had saved the boy.

"Is that the Isle of Avalon?"

Gawen's voice brought her back to the present. He blinked, as if dazzled by the light, and she smiled.

"It is," she said, "and in another moment I will call the barge which will take us there."

"Not yet, please—" He turned to her.

The boy had been growing. He was tall for a lad of ten, but he still looked all haphazardly pieced together, as if the rest of his body had not yet caught up with his feet and hands. Sunlight backlit the summer-bleached strands of his brown hair.

"You promised me that before I got to the Tor some of my questions would be answered. What will I say when they ask what I am doing here? I am not even certain of my own name!"

At that moment, his great grey eyes looked so much like his mother's that Caillean's heart turned over. It was true, she thought. She had promised to talk to him, but on the journey she had hardly spoken to anyone, wearied as she was by exertion and sorrow.

"You are Gawen," she said gently. "It was by that name that your mother first knew your father, and so she gave it to you."

"But my father was a Roman!" His voice wavered, as if he did not know whether to be proud or ashamed.

"That is true, and since he had no other son, I suppose as the Romans count such things you would be called Gaius Macellius Severus, like him and his father before him. Among the Romans it is a respected name. Nor did I ever hear anything of your grandsire but that he was a good and honorable man. But your grandmother was a princess of the Silures, and Gawen the name she gave her son, so you need not be ashamed to own it!"

Gawen stared at her. "Very well. But it is not my father whose name they will whisper on this Druid isle. Is it true…" He swallowed and tried again. "Before I left the Forest House they were saying…It is true that she—the Lady of Vernemeton—was my mother?"

Caillean looked at him steadily, remembering with what pain Eilan had kept that secret. "It is true."

He nodded, and some of the tension went out of him on a long sigh. "I wondered. I used to daydream—all the children who were being fostered at Vernemeton would boast how their mothers were queens or their fathers were princes who would one day come to take them away. I told stories too, but the Lady was always kind to me, and when I dreamed at night, the mother who came for me was always she…."

"She loved you," said Caillean, more softly still.

"Then why did she never claim me? Why did my father not marry her if he was such a well-known and honorable man?"

Caillean sighed. "He was a Roman, and the priestesses of the Forest House were forbidden to marry or bear children even to men of the tribes. Perhaps we will be able to change that here, but in Vernemeton…it would have been death for her if your existence had been known."

"It was," he whispered, looking suddenly older than his years. "They found out and they killed her, didn't they? She died because of me!"

Copyright © Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1997.