Shapeshifter (20 page)

And yet they think she will know me?
Oisin shook his head and made to ride on, but Derg’s next words slowed his pace.

“It is not your appearance we expect her to know. You are the child of her heart, the one who gave her a reason to endure through all the years you were together. You were the source of her strength and her hope, and that hope was that you would survive to manhood.

“We want to show her that her hope came true. Perhaps you will fail, as we have failed. But we think that if anyone can awaken her heart, it is you.”

HE STALKED HER patiently, silently, careful of the betraying breeze that might put her to flight. The pain of it—that she would fear him so—caught him unawares.

That was the throbbing of a just-knit wound. When at last he watched her browsing in a glade, and, catching his scent, she raised her head to look at him—that was when the wound’s edges were torn apart. For he had thought she would know him. Not in his mind, he didn’t. His mind had truly reasoned that she would not. But his heart, he realized now, had believed that when she saw him, she would know him.

She didn’t. The startled brown eyes that gazed at him before she bolted away had none of the awareness and intelligence he remembered—oh,
now
he remembered!— from childhood. Those eyes had been his mother’s eyes, whatever form or color they took on.

Now they were a wild creature’s, nothing more.

THE WOODS WERE nearly dark, and Oisin was most of the way home when the white patches of a magpie’s wing flashed in the gloom. Soon Derg was pacing at his side.

“It’s slow going through unfamiliar forest in the dark. Thought you could use a guide.”

Oisin did not point out that in Eire, there were few places he knew better than the land surrounding Finn’s dun. He simply nodded his thanks. He was glad to see Derg. He had had time to think on the long trek back, and what he had concluded was this: so long as he tracked Sive like a hunter, she would respond as prey. He must find a way to gain her trust.

“I need a place that she frequents,” he said to Derg now. “Somewhere she goes to rest or drink. Can you follow her as a bird and find one?”

“I already have.” Derg’s smile was sad. “There is a pool she was fond of as a child. It is where she learned to become one with the wild creatures. Which is, as I gather, what you propose to do?”

“Something like that.” Oisin did not have his mother’s powers, but he had been a child of the woodland, and he knew how to be still and unnoticed.

“Does she go there often?” he asked.

Derg shook his head. “I can’t say. By day, she rarely comes that close to our settlement. The pool is not far into the forest. But I think perhaps it draws her, for I have seen her there several times at dawn. If you were there each daybreak…”

“I will be there each daybreak,” said Oisin. And whether she came or not, he would leave food—grains, apples, hazelnuts—for her to find when she did come.

IN THE GRAY HALF-LIGHT of early dawn, a dappled deer picked her way cautiously down the bank. Her dainty prints from several days ago still dented the mud by the pool’s edge.

She was almost at the water when she stopped, her wide nostrils flaring. The scent was delicious, fragrant with oats and the sweet heavy odor of fruit. A mound of food lay heaped on a fallen log just off the trail.

The doe stood motionless, torn. It was man-food on that log. She remembered the lean, hungry winters that had driven her, at times, to skirt along the edges of the hunters’ fields and orchards, scraping through snow to find fruit or grain heads that had been left behind. There was nothing better than that food, but always it was gained under threat of the spear and the dogs.

She lifted her head, scanning the underbrush around the pool and testing the faint dawn breeze. Yes, there was man-scent about, and—she stretched out her muzzle to an apple that had fallen off the pile and lay near her feet— definitely on the food.

The doe’s feet did a comical little dance as the war within—to flee or to eat—played itself out. Then she snatched at the apple, ready to leap away at the least noise or movement as she munched through its sweet flesh. The strange thing was, the man-scent on the food, which should have repelled her, made it all the more enticing.

Sive Remembers

The next morning, the food was there again, and the man-scent was stronger. And though my skin shuddered over my shoulders at the smell of it, I didn’t want to flee. I wanted to stay, not just for the grain, but to be near that smell.

When I saw him—a big man with pale hair, on the other side of the pool—his presence was so quiet and still that I didn’t bolt but simply retreated into the undergrowth and watched. The food still drew me, yes, but it was more than that. It was like a remembered dream, so many elements that I seemed to have seen before: a deer at the edge of a pool, a quiet person across the water. A big man with yellow hair—why did he feel safe, when other men made me run? And his scent—that tantalizing scent—drew me. Some mornings I had a crazy longing to run around the pool and bury my nose against him.

I never did that, of course. But I did grow accustomed to his presence. Soon I was coming every morning to the pool, and he was always there. He spoke to me sometimes in a quiet voice, a voice that recalled another quiet, gentle voice I had heard once, and trusted.

DAYS STRETCHED INTO weeks, and Oisin came to the reluctant conviction that he had failed to reach his mother. What he was about, in fact, was taming a deer. That alone was an improvement; if Sive could be tamed enough to stay in a stable with the horses, they could, at least, ensure that she was warm and fed. But she didn’t need feeding. She needed to wake up.

“I suppose Grian has tried singing to her?” he asked Derg. Derg looked at him in surprise.

“Grian?”

“She must have sung to Sive as a child.”

“Of course,” said Derg. “And then trained her in the gift. They spent many hours singing together.”

“So,” said Oisin. It seemed too obvious to have to explain. “Music was a big part of her life. I was thinking it might help her remember.”

Derg flashed Oisin a quick, sad smile. “I forget you haven’t known us long. Grian has a voice to make the heavens weep, true enough, but she has no woodlore whatever. We’ve never been able to get her close enough for even a glimpse of Sive.”

Derg’s eyes grew bright with excitement. His forefinger pressed into Oisin’s chest. “
You
must sing for her, lad.”

TWENTY-SIX

“S
he won’t know my voice.” Oisin lay in his deep bed staring up at the dark ceiling. He should sleep— he would be rising well before daybreak, to be at the pool before Sive—but he was too jangly with hopes and worries. Derg had found a small harp for him, and soon he would be playing it, and singing, to a half-tamed deer. He told himself that if it didn’t work, there was no harm done, that it might take many days, that there were other things to try; but that was not how it felt. It felt like the sudden-death move in a
fidchell
game—everything won or lost in a single play. And what stood to be lost was his mother’s life.

“Then she must know the song,” Niamh’s quiet voice countered. She was curled into him, her breath a gentle rhythm on his chest. Their marriage right now was a far cry from the first ten days, Oisin thought, with him gone every morning, long before Niamh awoke, and buried in the woods half the day. When he had tried to apologize, though, she had given him a round-eyed look of comic confusion.

“And how would I be complaining of that, Oisin mac Finn, when it was I myself searched you out to beg you to do this very thing?” Then she grew serious. “There will be many days for us to spend our time as we please. Now your quest is with Sive, and I am well able to get by in my sister’s house without you.”

Oisin thought about Niamh’s advice. His mother must know many songs from both worlds, but what he needed was a song that would allow her to know
him
. And he knew which song he wanted, only…

“Niamh, do you know any cradle songs?”

“Certain I do. But I haven’t the gift, if it’s singing to sleep you’re wanting.”

Oisin shook his head in the dark. “There’s a song my mother used to sing to me. I only remember a little bit of it.”

Haltingly, he hummed a little phrase of music. “Something about sleep and the moon?” he ventured.

Niamh’s laughter tinkled beside him. “Is there a cradle song ever created that doesn’t have sleep and the moon in it? But I think I know that tune. Does it go like this?” And she sang him to sleep after all, with a song that had come back to him entire as soon as she began it.

HE FOUND HIS WAY to the pool in the dark and played the harp softly as the night softened into shadowy dawn. He wanted Sive to become accustomed to the sound as she approached, rather than be startled as he began. The tiny instrument had the sweetest, truest voice of any harp he had ever played, and as his fingers grew used to the tight intervals he found first the melody, then the accompaniment to his song.

THE LITTLE DOE STEPPED slowly into the clearing. She paid no attention at all to the food Oisin had left, but kept her attention wholly on him. Her ears swiveled toward the harp, quivering and flicking almost in time with the notes. Was he imagining it, or was she watching him—really looking at him—in a way she hadn’t before?

He knew not to stare back, however strong the temptation. He tried to think only about the strings, about the clear notes cascading into melody. He played the harp until the set of her head and haunches told him she was no longer on the verge of flight. It was as relaxed as she was going to be. Oisin drew in a long, slow breath, and he began to sing.

Sive Remembers

From the time he first came to the pool, strange sensations and feelings had been coming to me. I know now they were memories, or fragments of memory, but as a deer all I knew is that many things that should have been strange and alarming seemed instead familiar and safe.

The sound that came from the clearing that morning—it drew me, just the way mortals say the music of my people draws them. I knew that sound. I knew it! Yet I had no understanding of what it was.

And then Oisin began to sing, and all the faint, weak voices that had been whispering to me joined with his voice, and it was like a clear bell sounding in my head, calling me home. And I remembered.

AND THAT QUICKLY, before he was twice through the verses, it happened. She stood before him, trembling and wide-eyed, looking like she might still vanish into the forest if he so much as spoke to her, but without doubt a woman. And he hardly dared look at her, she seemed so frightened, but fought to calm the emotion that shook his own voice. He kept singing. And it came to him, as he sang, how it had once been with them, him just a small boy lying in her lap, Sive stroking back his hair as she sang, and his eyelids growing so heavy he kept forgetting to keep them open.

He kept singing as she stared at her own hands, front and back. Slowly she raised one and felt her head, her face, her lips. She bent forward to look at her feet, and the tears spilled over then and dripped onto her bare toes. At last, hesitantly, she made her way around the pool to where Oisin sat.

It was as if a bird had perched beside him on the log, so light she seemed and so likely to fly. She was weeping almost silently, and Oisin wanted nothing more than to throw the harp aside and sweep her into his arms, but he could tell she was not ready. She had been away so long; he must not rush her returning.

Sive Remembers

The winter I was at Finn’s dun, a young boy came in on a bitter afternoon with the tips of his ears and fingers white. His mam scolded him for staying out too long, but he was saucy, saying they didn’t hurt, so no harm done.

But once he got inside and sat by the fire awhile, his frozen parts began to thaw. His fingers turned fiery red and the edges of his ears swelled and he cried at the throbbing pain.

That’s what it was like for me, as if my heart and mind had been frozen deep in the ice and were now pulled out into the sun and thawing. But the pain of it—all those lost memories and sorrows rushing back—if Oisin hadn’t kept singing that little cradle song, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to endure it. I held on to that unfurling song and let it pull me in, like a man fallen into the sea hangs on to the rope his comrades throw to him.

The urge to sing was strong in me before I dared try. I could feel the words in my throat, trying to get out.

Moonsilver bless you,

Starshine caress you,

Sleep in the peace of a night free of fear.

Dreams will delight you,

Sunrise will light you,

Slumber till morn, for your mama is near.

But what would come out? I feared I would not know how to form the sounds in my mouth, or that my voice would be a goat bleat or donkey’s bray. And—does this sound strange?— I also feared it would be unchanged, for the Dark Man had made me think of it as an evil thing.

But Oisin’s song—a baby song, so innocent and uncomplicated— reminded me that before the Dark Man, my song had been my own. I could almost feel my son’s little head under my fingers, the curls sweaty from hard play, his forehead and cheeks so smooth and soft.

I began to hum, so softly I could hardly hear myself, but it was there. My voice was true. And then I was singing, singing with my own grown son who I had never thought to lay eyes on again. And the song was like Miach’s healing spell. The song was making me whole again.

FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE, Oisin had heard that voice only in his dreams. Now it rose beside him, real as his own, and it was as hard a trial as he had ever faced to keep from faltering.

He kept his voice steady as her own grew in strength beside him, doubling the melody he had learned from her own lips. He hung on when her voice rose into a harmony line that brought a new, unguessed-at beauty to the simple song. But then he let down his guard and started really
listening
to Sive’s voice, and that’s when his own failed him. There was too much contained in that lovely, liquid sound— too much sorrow and fear, too much joy and love, too many memories. He fell silent and then, to his chagrin, was overcome with weeping.