CHAPTER 18

The gods’ island of Mona lay low in the ocean. Pale waves creamed its flanks and the sea ran thick as liquid iron in the straits that separated it from the mainland.

Dawn had not yet come. Graine lay on her belly in the un-light amidst colourless sea pinks and harsh, rimed grasses looking out to the place where water met land. The tide was on the ebb. Waves riffled up the shingle, a little further away each time. Periodically, she measured the distance from the frothing wavelets to the high-tide mark a hand’s span in front of her face where the storm of the last three days had rammed a broken crescent of bladderwrack and sea-aged oak and clear jellyfish with pale purple stars at their centres far above the rest of the shore’s detritus.

Time was measured by waves. In between was timeless and held its own peace. The pungent scent of sea and rotting weed seeped into her skin and hair; it lay ripe on her tongue and swelled the space of her lungs, drawing out forgotten memories of the time before, when she had lived on Mona, when she had been whole and the world had seemed safe, when her mother had been the beloved of Briga, a warrior without match and invincible, when Rome had been a distant, faceless enemy to be defeated by the greater power of the Boudica and the gods, when the Boudica’s daughter had been the promised of Nemain, and had not ached in every part of her body from the assaults of uncounted men.

The pain was less than it had been; the sea’s healing had worked on the journey over, and that—the freedom and exhilaration of the ocean—had been the first surprise. Until she had boarded the ship sent by Luain mac Calma to fetch her, Graine had not known how much happier she was riding the prow of a bucking vessel than she had ever been, or was ever likely to be, riding the calmest horse. The journey from the far southwest toe of Britannia to the southwesterly tip of Mona had taken three days, the last two sailing hard into the teeth of a storm. Every slamming wave had been a challenge as great and as miraculous as the spear-trials of her brother and sister; they had made as nothing the bruises and tears of her body, showing how small were the assaults she had suffered when the vast, crushing power of the god was so great. At first, simply to face that force without terror, to stay still and accept what was thrown at her, had been challenge enough. Later, numbed and cold and exhilarated, she had learned to fight back, shouting and screaming into the power of the sea.

Caught in the need of it, she had spent each moment of daylight, and a good half of the torch-lit nights, on the foredeck of the Cormorant, clinging to the prow rails, howling into the maw of the gale that Manannan had roused to protect the gods’ island from Rome, with the sea lashing her face and hands until the skin grew red and peeled from her flesh and her ox-blood hair lost its shine and became brittle and greyed with salt.

Hawk and Dubornos had wanted to bring her below deck to safety, but Segoventos, the elderly Gaul who had put his ship to sea on her account at least half a month earlier than anyone else would have dared to, had promised to care for her life with his own. Then Gunovar had made a harness that tied to the prow rail so that even if she lost her grip she would not be swept overboard and the two men had given up their persuadings, and only brought her meals and asked her to come below to sleep when the night was darkest. On the last night, seeing the storm about to blow itself out, they had not done even that.

The wind had been dying as they had put down the small-boat and rowed for Mona’s shore, so that the white manes cresting the waves had shrunk and shrunk again until they became just more green water slopping lazily up to kiss the rocks of the headland.

The disappointment of that was a blessing of sorts; if Graine had come straight from that wild joy to the desolation of the abandoned great-house and the hollow emptiness of the evacuated steading, the loss of all that was Mona would have been much harder to bear.

As it was, the five hundred warriors who had been chosen to remain had made an honour guard for her, and it had been necessary to greet them and to learn their names and to hear their stories and see the place set apart from the rest where their dream marks had been carved on the roof beams of the great-house, so that it was almost dusk before she had time alone to look for Bellos of the corn-gold hair and the godlike eyes whose dream had called her back home. Unlike the others, he had neither remarked on her bruising, nor pretended not to see it; he had met her in the dream and knew what she was. The relief of his easy presence had held her with him through the remainder of the evening.

She had been sitting by the fire with him, sharing malted barley and ewe’s milk cream from the first lambings before she had found that he was blind. She had been lying in the dark, halfway to sleep, before she realized that Valerius must have known of the blindness, and had not thought to tell her, but had left her to find out on her own.

She had fallen asleep thinking of that, and wondering why, and had dreamed of something, but had lost the shape of the dream on waking. The frustration of the loss, and the aching emptiness of the once-vibrant steading, had been enough to rouse her from her bed and send her down the path to the jetty to find a place where she could lie unseen and find out for herself if everything she had been told about the coming invasion was true.

It was not yet light enough to see anything. Alone in a kind of peace, she lay on her belly in the coarse grass, listening to the soft out-breath of the waves and breathing in the ocean’s leavings while the dawn leached colour back to the world.

Shapes grew from the greys. Presently, she was able to see the barnacled wood of the island’s jetty, a spear’s throw to her right. For a little longer, there was only mist and the iron sea beyond it and she could hold on to the memory of Mona as it had been through all of her childhood; not at peace, because the warriors who made it home had conducted a war against Rome without cease and she had never known true peace, but the island had always been a place of sanctuary, secure against any threat.

It was secure no longer.

The sea became an ocean of muted mirrors, catching the early light and spinning it high, again and again, to the sky. A pair of oystercatchers sliced across the wavetops towards her and then turned at an angle and fled north to open water, piping alarm. Beyond the line of their flight, it became possible to see that the jetty’s opposite partner, which should have reached back to offer a landing place on the mainland, had gone. Where it had been, the rock was scorched black and fragments of charred wood still dabbled in the waves.

There was tranquillity of a kind in the burned remains, couched in mist and rock, but straight lines were already taking shape amongst the curving stones. Right angles grew at their ends and, too fast, the burgeoning light showed the outlines of gunwales and prows of boats and soon she could see what Bellos had described: that dozens of flat-bottomed barges were strung end to end, bobbing in the quiet water like beads on a string hung for a child to play with, and beyond those, spread thickly along the shore and back into the purpled heather and bracken of the lower slopes, were the tents and pavilions and mules and horses and latrine ditches and quartermaster’s piles, set about with chained hounds to keep off rats, of two legions of the Roman army and their four wings of attendant cavalry. Closer than those, two smaller clusters of tents sat about the burned heel of the mainland jetty, with horses in two separate corrals and two different cavalry banners cracking in the breeze above them.

Graine had no need to count them; she had grown in a world where she knew the standards and banners of Rome, and the numbers of men they commanded, as well as she knew the dream marks of her own kin. Taken all together, there gathered on the mainland twelve thousand men trained for war. A stretch of water was all that kept them from Mona and it was not enough.

“They have their boats ready. Why did they not attack yesterday, when the storm first died?”

Graine asked it aloud, into the silent morning. After a moment, Bellos God-eyes, whom everyone else knew as Bellos the Blind, said, “Did I make a noise, that you knew I was here?” He sounded amused and exasperated and had not answered her question.

“No. The oystercatchers took fright at you and turned away. You might have been Hawk; he can walk as quietly, but your tunic smells of applewood smoke and his still smells of the sea.” Graine rolled on her side to look back at him over her shoulder. “Does anyone know why the governor hasn’t attacked yet?”

“We were lucky; or perhaps we could say that Manannan extended his grace one more day. The west side of the island, where you landed yesterday, was clear, but here, on this side, a sea mist held both sides of the straits all through the day, so that it was impossible to see your hand in front of your face. That might not be a handicap to me, or perhaps to you, but it was enough to halt the legions, for which we may be grateful.”

Bellos had not mentioned his blindness before. Graine searched for bitterness in his face and found none, but only a closing of something that had not been truly open, as if he felt her scrutiny and was not yet ready to bare himself to it.

She said, “Would that not have been a good time for them to attack, while the mist hid their true numbers from us? They did not need to see much, only enough to know that they were not killing each other.”

“The officers might think so, I suspect the governor will have done, but the men are too afraid of the nightmare beasts and the walking dead that stalk Mona’s shores. They won’t attack in anything except perfect daylight.”

She was learning to read him; to hear the faint lilt in his voice that was satisfaction, and the barest shavings of pride, even while he kept them from his face. Guessing, she asked, “Are the nightmares of your making?”

“No, but I made them greater than they might have been.” He did smile at that, cheerfully, and came to sit beside her, stretching his bare feet down the stones until his heels met the gelatinous weed. He was slim, almost bony, and more of a youth than he had seemed in the dream, or even at the night fires; perhaps three or four years older than Hawk but no more. His hair was fine as combed wool and a lighter, more brilliant shade of gold than Cunomar’s, or Cygfa’s. His eyes were a startling, noon-sky blue and they stared out over the water at nothing. Even so, he had walked alone from the great-house to find her and made his way down the beach without any hesitation.

She said, “How well do you know the island?”

“Well enough to know my way around.”

“Is that why you haven’t left? Because Hibernia would be a new place and it would be hard to come to know it as well as you know here?” It was not a delicate question, but then it was not intended to be; on the day she had discovered how frustrating it was to have others step around her own wounding, Graine had stopped doing so for anyone else. Still, she held her breath, waiting to see if she had overstepped a mark that neither of them could see.

Bellos smiled, peacefully. Everything about him was peaceful. Reflectively, he said, “I lived on Hibernia for two years with Valerius after he freed me from slavery in Gaul so it wouldn’t be entirely new, but yes, there’s a bit of that. Then again, every sighted warrior would have stayed behind to see to the defence of Mona if they had been allowed to. In the event, only five hundred were given leave; the rest are better used elsewhere. Luain mac Calma is Elder; he decides who comes and who leaves and if he is in conference with Nemain and others of the gods as to his decisions, we are not privy to that. He has asked me to stay. If he had asked me to be in Hibernia, I would have taken ship with the others a long time ago, however unwillingly.”

“Did he ask you to call us to Mona?”

“You. I only called you. The rest are here of their own accord, and may be sent away for their own safety. Don’t tut at me like that; I’m going to answer your question. No, mac Calma didn’t ask me to call you, but when it had happened he did not ask me to stop it either. He has no dreaming of you.”

He has no dreaming…Once, Airmid had dreamed of Graine’s birth, and Luain mac Calma had dreamed a place for her amongst the elders. As close as last night, even in the quiet grief and release of the morning, there had still been hope that Mona might have reawakened the promise of that.

The oystercatchers piped a long way off. A seventh wave hushed closer to the tide-wrack than the rest. In the cavalry camp on the opposite shore, a lean, bare-chested man with black hair growing thin on his head and thick on his pectorals stooped out of his tent and, yawning, stretched both arms up to greet the grey morning.

It was no easier to look at him than at Bellos. Dropping her gaze to the shingle, Graine said, “Perhaps that’s because there is nothing any longer to dream?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s because even the gods don’t yet know what will become of you, what you may be or may not be. We have it in mind that you are the wild piece on the board of Warrior’s Dance, the one that can move from one end to the other unhindered and unseen and so win the game. If we are right, then between us we may save Mona.”

The dawn wind was too cold, suddenly, and the sea spray on her face too painful. Graine sat up, hugging her knees. She felt sick. “And if you are wrong?”

Bellos was still peaceful, still smiling, still staring out across water he could not see towards the growing activity in the Roman camp on the far side of the straits. He pursed his lips, considering. “Then we have two thousand dreamers who can help to cloud their dreaming. If they, too, fail, then of course we’ll have to fight them. Which is what the five hundred warriors are here for.”

“Against twelve thousand legionaries and enough barges to circle the whole of Mona? That’s madness.”

“Perhaps, but I prefer to think it’s practical. We know the island and are not afraid of nightmares. Twelve thousand frightened men could become lost here very easily, and even before that, boats have to find a place to land and be filled with men prepared to step off them.” He answered absently. He was no longer thinking of her. “I suspect we shall find out soon, and if I am wrong you may have time to tell me so. Would you say they are getting ready to march to the barges?”

He was still staring blindly out across the water, only that the tilt of his head was different. Graine looked along the line of his no-sight, and found that the random movements of morning were becoming more ordered and linear in the legionary camp at the foot of the mountains. Even as she opened her mouth to speak, a trumpet brayed the call to muster. The sound drifted patchily across the straits.

Bellos pursed his lips and blew a small huff through his teeth. “Mac Calma was right, then; it will be today.” He got to his feet and held out both hands towards her. His blue eyes smiled to somewhere just above her head. “If I offer to help you stand up, will you offer to lead me back to the great-house? I could find my way alone, but it’s far faster with help and today, I think, we don’t have the luxury of time to spend feeling the lie of the birch bark and lichen on stones to find a sense of direction.”

As at the Roman camp, the five hundred warriors and as many dreamers who had slept in and around the great-house of Mona were rousing to a slow, grey dawn that might be their last. New fires scattered at intervals across the clearing flickered pale flame and blue smoke against the backdrop of new-leaved oaks. Half-dressed men and women were washing or using the middens or standing quiet-eyed, speaking to the gods of their dreams. At the fringes, ewes were being milked and hens tracked down to their night roosts to find the eggs and corn was being ground and baked into bannocks for the morning meal.

Near the stream, a mare newly in season was being held to be served by Hawk’s horse, a flashy blue roan with a white forehead, which had been the gift of a cavalry commander.

The horse was Thessalian and bred for chariot racing until it fought too much in the stables and was sent off to be trained for war. At loading time on Segoventos’ ship, they had thought it was too hot-blooded to stand a voyage without destroying itself, the ship and everyone on board and would have to be left behind. In the event, it had taken to the sea crossing without demur and it had been Gunovar’s solid black wagon horse that had panicked on the gangway so that a man had to be with it for most of the voyage to keep it from kicking the ship apart.

Gunovar was there now, making sure the mare did not damage the horse while he served her, or the other way round. Graine sat a little away, leaning against the stone hut that had been Airmid’s before she followed Breaca east and was now, apparently, Bellos’. Gunovar had spent the night inside; the flavours of her wound’s-ease and fescue and meadow garlic still hung around, as they did any place where the scarred Dumnonii dreamer had woken and made herself the infusions that helped her to manage the morning.

The horse served the mare boldly as horses were meant to do. It augured well for a strong, fast, sharp-minded foal and Hawk, it could be seen, put a great deal of effort into not looking too pleased so that nobody might think he saw his horse as himself and the mare as his lover. Graine made herself watch and let the nausea rise and was not sick, which was an achievement in its own right, the more so because no-one was watching and she did it for herself alone. She fixed her gaze on a certain branch in the woods beyond and breathed in deeply and did not move when a shadow slid over her, blocking out the faint warmth of the sun.

“Did you go down to the jetty at dawn?” Gunovar stepped back three more paces and sat down at her side.

Graine said, “How did you know? Did you dream it?”

“No. I saw Bellos go out and asked him where he was going. He hadn’t dreamed you either, he just has better hearing than anyone else. Losing one sense brings up the others. It’s why they used to blind the best dreamers in the old days.”

Gunovar grinned, lopsidedly, as she always did. Because the morning was what it was, Graine took note of the scarring in the other woman’s face and on her hands, of the rolling, uncomfortable way she walked, and realized how long it had been since she had last noticed any of these. Gunovar was not beautiful, and had not been before the Roman inquisitors had broken her—she was too big-boned and thick-set for beauty—but she carried herself with a dignity and self-possession and humour that stepped over such things, so that it was not only possible to see beyond the damage, but essential.

Graine said, “The mist is clearing and the legions are getting ready to launch their boats. The cavalry are there. Before I left, Valerius said that if he were in command, he’d make the cavalry swim across first to take and hold a beachhead so the barges could land safely, but that the governor doesn’t know how to order his cavalry and would probably set them to swim alongside the barges. Did you bring any skald-root with you from the east?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I have an idea. Sulla the ferry woman used to say that the currents of the straits were her friends and she could swim across from one side to the other and back without dying. We’d have to work quickly, before the mist is fully gone, or Sulla will be seen, but if we can do that, there is a thing that can be done that might help us.”

It was a morning to savour the small pleasures: the surprise on Gunovar’s face, and the flash of uninhibited joy that lit her eyes as she understood what was proposed, so that it was possible to see she had been handsome once, and then the swiftness with which she moved and brought her herb sack from the hut and set about doing what was needed while Graine went to find Sulla and see if it was still possible for a ferry woman to swim the straits.

It was indeed possible, and Sulla took the idea and made it better and Dubornos set himself to help her into the straits and out again, which made him less likely to fret over Graine, and so, for a moment, on the brink of war, the island was at peace.

There was long enough, just, to savour it, before a bull’s horn sounded a long, low, looping note that rattled the ribs and shook the air from the chests of all within its reach, signalling the Elder’s call to meeting.

Across the clearing, the dreamers left their morning’s preparations and began to file in pairs and silent handfuls into the great-house where Luain mac Calma waited to discuss with them the dreaming of the night and all previous nights and how they might make use of whatever they learned in defence of their island, and everything it stood for.

By the river, where the skald-root had been boiled, Gunovar stopped scouring out her cooking pot and straightened, frowning. “Do you want to come? Whatever else has happened, you’re still a dreamer by birth and right. You’d be made more than welcome.”

Graine was calf-deep in the stream, washing herself clean of the things she had made. Brown water coursed in furrows around her, turbid with peat. Vaguely, she could see pebbles and sand and the pale shapes of her feet. The right one was still purple-black from arch to ankle where she had tried to kick a man and he had grabbed her foot and crushed it in his hand, forcing it outwards.

She looked at the bruising and made herself speak and not feel. “I haven’t dreamed of anything since we came here. This morning, perhaps, but I don’t remember it.”

She did not say, Bellos and Luain mac Calma think I am the wild piece on the gaming board, and that’s more frightening than having lost the dreaming, because I have no idea what to do or when or even if I can do it if all the rest becomes clear.

Gunover laid her pot upside down on the damp grass. Straightening with some effort, she said, baldly, “Bellos may be wrong. And mac Calma. It is not unknown.” Her face was quite neutral, offering neither challenge nor support.

Graine stood very still in the water. Her legs were cold. She noticed that as if they were part of something else that should be cared for if she could muster the interest.

For most of her young life, she had been part of the world where a thought might be lifted from the air if it were strong enough; she had never understood why everyone could not do it and some were afraid when it happened. Now she understood both of these, and that this, too, was lost to her.

Something hard lodged in her throat and would not be swallowed away. She said, “Do you dream me as the wild piece on the board?”

The old woman’s face was soft with care. “No. I dream you as a child who is wounded and may yet be healed. Mona has great healing, more than you have yet met. The heart of that is the great-house and if we fail in our defences, the great-house may not be standing after today. Will you not come with me and be present in the company of dreamers one last time?”

She went, because she could think of no reason not to. The cauldron lay upturned on the river bank with the remains of the skald-root beside it, and the cooling embers of a wormwood fire.

“What do you see?”

Bellos God-eyes asked it, who was blind and so, perhaps, had good reason. He set his question quietly, not to interrupt the Elder, Luain mac Calma, who was speaking.

Graine answered the same. “I see a fire badly built of hawthorn and pine, with damp wood and too much smoke so that it has almost no heart.”

The fire trench took half the width of the great-house. They were at the northern end of it, near the folded black mare’s skin where sat Luain mac Calma. The Elder had nodded to her as she came in but there was no greater acknowledgement; Mona’s end was too near to speak to children, however wild their dreaming might be.

“But there is some light?” Bellos asked. “I can feel the heat.”

“A little. It’s red at the heart, yellow almost to white at the place where flames grow out of the wood.”

“People? What do you see of the people?”

“As much as the dark will let me. I see faces that I half remember. I could name some of them perhaps, if it mattered to you.”

He was leading her somewhere and Graine resented it. Gunovar was gone, called early into the press of the dreamers by one of the half-remembered names. Bellos rested his elbow on his knee and tilted his face towards her. The striking blue eyes were almost white in the poor firelight, like ice lit from behind by the sun. They carved their own path into her, which had nothing to do with ordinary seeing. He said, “Sit with the flames then, and make them what you want. There will be time enough for that before the talking is done.”

He was treating her like a child, which was unfair, and it was impossible to make what she wanted: a place full of mystery and dreaming and the answer to the end of Rome. Instead, it was full only of weary, frightened dreamers, sweating in the dank dark, with the fire built badly and smoking and the horsehides on which she sat stiff with age and brine.

More than that, she wanted power and ideas from mac Calma, strategies that would defeat the twelve thousand sent against them. Instead, for the first time in his life, she sat in the treacherous dark and heard him name exactly the disaster that faced them, and name after it his lack of any answers. He invited the dreamers to share whatever the gods had given overnight and they did so, wordily, lacking the precision and drive of other mornings and other sharings so that time passed and nothing of value was happening except that Sulla had swum to the mainland and back and Dubornos, who had gone to help her, slipped into the great-house and nodded to Graine to signal some measure of success.

Six dreamers had spoken by then; men and women made hoarse and uncertain by the proximity of danger. Their voices had been dull and lifeless, so that simply to stay awake while they spoke was a challenge. Six more spoke after them, as dully and to no more benefit, and others, and others.

Frustrated beyond all telling, Graine stared into the fire and wished she had stayed outside with Hawk, who had ideas that made sense and were not based on the shadow of a buzzard seen on water in a dream, or the flight of a spear that took three days to land and killed the Roman governor each day, resurrecting him overnight the better to kill him again on the morrow.

It was not for Bellos but for herself that she built the shapes in the fire. Hawk was first and easiest; it wasn’t hard to take the flames and weave them into his form. She carved out the sharpness of his eyes and the way he rode and laughed, or was serious, according to her mood. She had not noticed, until then, how closely he mirrored her, giving whatever she needed. She sent his image out to do battle against the legions on the foreshore, and he went willingly, leaping over rocks like a deer with his black hair flying behind him and the lizard marks of his clan alive on his arms.

Hawk alone was not enough. Graine wished Valerius were there; however ambivalent she felt about him personally, there was no denying his strengths in fighting Rome; he would never have allowed the Elder’s prevarication. Her mother, too, would have insisted on action rather than words. With flames encompassing all of her vision, Graine thought of black hair and copper, of black eyes and green, of the flash of a dry, ironic smile which could have come equally from one or the other, of the easiness with weapons and horses that should have been her birthright and so clearly was not.

She envied that; in the fire she could admit it and become what she sought. The fire showed her patterns of the warrior she could be, fighting as Cunomar did, or, better, Cygfa, because, even now, Cunomar was still too taken with proving himself and Cygfa was long past that, if she had ever known it.

In her mind and so in the flames, Cygfa came back to Mona, and waited on the foreshore while the Roman cavalry swam their horses across the straits. She sat tall on the white-legged colt who had the mettle of his grandsire; Valerius joined her on the Crow-horse itself and then Breaca, mounted on the bay that had been Cygfa’s gift.

The enemy mounts neared the land. Their manes were white as the crests of Manannan’s horses, which were built of water and waves. They were heading towards the place where Graine had watched the dawn rise. She had been there for a reason, and had not known it then. In the fire-fancy, it made sense; she had made her peace with the god in three days of a storm and again in the quiet of a turning tide. The vast bulk of the water knew her as well as she knew it.

Taking a quiet breath, she sent herself into it, spreading out and out until she had no margins, until all of her was all of the ocean. She felt the lap and rise of the waves and the far slower rhythm of the tide. Within it, she felt the enemy horses like hornets attacking her skin. She could feel a panic in them that was her doing, and was sorry, except that it meant they were more likely to flounder in the sea, which was good.

She did not feel sorry for the men at all; they were jagged iron, with souls that harboured desecration of all that she cherished. It did not feel good to have them there. They were scratching at the place where the tide turned, where the great mass of water that was her soul came to rest and then, answering Nemain’s call, turned about and began to move the other way. There was a fold in it that she knew, that she had known for all eternity, a way of creasing the waves one on the other at the turning of the tide that would do for the men on horseback what they wanted to do for her. Smiling now, Graine turned herself over in the ocean and felt the fold of the sea crease over and saw the horses flounder and pull away and saw men in armour, unable to keep afloat without the support of their mounts, tumble and sink and spin and become still on the sand that was her resting place and theirs.

They were not all dead. Perhaps a hundred still lived, of the thousand who had set out to swim the straits; such things can happen in a child’s imaginings. These few surged out of the water onto the foreshore near where Graine lay. She pulled her soul from the sea and fitted back in her body like an arm in a sleeve. She lay flat in the shingle and used the blade of her skinning knife to catch the sun and make flash-signals as Ardacos had taught her. Spears of light went out to dazzle the men, so that, fresh from near-death in the sea, they came to a land of fire and smoke.

The fog-smoke wreathing about them was hers. At some other time, she had placed pots of fire and plants around the headland, full of ash and wood and the poor, damp fire of the great-house and other things she knew of: the smoke of plants that Airmid had taught her about, and Theophilus, the Greek physician who had spent a winter in her company. The story of the skald-root was his, and of the other plants which, when burned, would confuse men and horses. All these, Graine had carried in pots from the great-house, because in the dream she was a warrior, the same as her mother or Valerius, but different.

The smoke they made was thick and vaporous and stole the minds of those who did not know how to protect against it. Even Graine, who had made it, felt that the roof of her mouth was rising to break through the top of her skull. It loosened her mind, making it easier to push the path of her thoughts out from her body into the land and the sea and the smoke.

She remembered Valerius’ stories of what it took out of the men to swim in full armour, and how hard it was for them to fight on the other side. Into the smoke she wove the certainty that the swim had been the ultimate exertion and the men who reached land were too cold and tired to fight. They came out of the water slowly, dazzled and befuddled. Led by Valerius, the five hundred warriors of Mona met them and slew them where they stood, except for Corvus, who was a friend to them all and did not need to die. Graine asked the gods for his life but did not know if they heard her.

There was respite then, for a while, before more of the living came. In time, they paddled in a wide wave across the water. Hundreds of barges packed with men, each one tight with fear and resolution, not fully understanding what had happened on the island.

Graine whistled. Her mother was no longer there, but Valerius and Cygfa rode like the gods’ hunt to the water’s edge. Their horses were vast, with tags of lightning at their polls and crests and thunder rolling from their feet. They were three, against three hundred vessels and twelve thousand men, but the fire was on their side, and the smoke, and the three thousand dreamers within it, who were well versed in the dream-fears of the men that Bellos had fostered. They wove a web between them of smoke and sea fog and fear and cast it like a net into the water, ensnaring the legionaries before ever they left their barges. The five hundred warriors were ready to step into the spaces between and kill men as they stumbled ashore but they were barely needed. The dream-web confused the landing men and set them one against the other so that whole cohorts turned face on and set about each other with the ferocity of fear and fury.

Behind them, the five hundred warriors of Mona waited, to take on those left alive. Graine, only true blood-daughter to the Boudica, raised a hand and brought it down again, as she had seen her mother do, setting it all into action.

Somewhere in the background, a low, monotonous voice was still speaking. The contrast with the brilliant colour and action of the fire-dream was laughable.

Graine? Graine? “Graine?…”

Her name came to her from a long way distant, from outside the great-house, perhaps, or even beyond the island. Cool fingers touched her wrist. Blue eyes the colour of the noon sky came into the line of her sight and Bellos’ hair, framing them, was the dazzle of sheet lightning.

“Graine? It is enough for now. You can stop. Stop. It is enough.”

Her throat hurt. She was croaking like a gannet. Mid-word, she stopped, and there was silence.

They were silent, all the talking, droning dreamers, watching her and listening as they had been, it seemed, for a long time.

Luain mac Calma was at her side, white with a strain she did not fully understand, as if he had been holding the entire net of the fire-story and all the three thousand dreamers within it and the effort had cost him dearly.

He said, “I’m sorry. We had no way to ask it of you, only to hope it might happen. Bellos is right, it is enough and more than enough. All we need now is to put what you have shown us into action as best we can. What was not clear is what plants you would use in the smoke to befuddle the horses and the riders, and how to know Corvus, that we may do what we can to spare him. If you can tell us those things, you can sleep, or you can go back to Hawk, who is angry with us for using you, and may have good reason.”

Graine stared at him, unable to speak. She felt hungry—ravenously, achingly hungry—and tired, and under those, as the meaning of what he said became apparent, she felt a blind, screaming panic that cut holes in her heart and threatened to choke her.

Someone passed her a waterskin and she drank, dribbling gouts of it down the front of her tunic. Still croaking, she said, “It wasn’t a dreaming. I have had those, and this was not that, only an imagining that anyone could have done.”

“Anyone who is the daughter of the Boudica, whose uncle is Valerius, who shares blood with Cygfa Romehater, who can build her fancies in a fire made of yarrow and oak when the rest of us are choking so we can barely speak and the tears are streaming from our eyes. We have few enough of those on Mona.” Luain mac Calma was smiling sadly. “I’m sorry. We should not have used you like that, but so much has already been sacrificed for this, and now is not a time to set care of a child above the welfare of Mona. You’re right, it wasn’t a dream. This is not your healing, nor even the beginning of it, but you have given us what we need. Can we be grateful for that now and do with it what we may? If you are angry, which you have every right to be, you can tell me of it later and I will make what amends I can. For now, we have an island in peril and must do what we can to protect it.”