Page 21 of The Winter Goddess

The Sixth Life

“She had carved ‘sacrifice’ on her own chest,” Fionn said after a long, long time. “But this time…”

“This time, Danu did not come.” I wiped a tear from Fionn’s cheek with my own shaking hand. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “Perhaps if I had not sent that winter…perhaps there never would have been such hunger, even generations later. Perhaps Fia would not have been so endlessly hungry. Perhaps all of this could have been prevented.”

Fionn wrapped his arms around me, hushing me. “I know what it is, Cailleach, to do something you regret. To move through the world even as endless, crushing guilt piles on you like stones.”

We were quiet for a long moment. Then I asked him, “Are you not frightened of Danu? Do you not worry that she will grow angry at the lie of Fia’s godhood?”

Fionn shrugged. “I do not fear death. What more could Danu do to me? Besides, all storytellers lie. We weave together pieces of stories we hear on the road, and we add to them: the laugh of a red-haired woman, an old man’s croaking voice, the way the lad on the road sang softly to his cow. All stories are lies, and all stories are truth. And Fia…this is all I can give her. It is not godhood. But it is a kind of immortality.”

Fionn left later that day. He kissed me, promising to return the next winter, and I watched as his form grew smaller and smaller until he disappeared on the horizon. I scoured a pot, filled a dish with honey and water to give to my bees, swept the floor, and kneaded the dough I’d set up earlier, all without a thought for the work. I was thinking instead of Fionn and Fia. Had she kept traveling the roads and found nothing, then returned to Síd in Broga? Or had Fionn’s rejection sent her fleeing immediately back to the place she felt most connected to the gods? Had she thought, even at the very end, that Danu would still come?

I lay on my pallet that night but could not sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see her as clearly as I had during Fionn’s story. I could see her huge, desperate eyes. Hungry eyes …But how could I know what she looked like? I had never seen her. Never met her before. I had not been near Síd in Broga since…since…

Since my fifth life…

My eyes flew open, and I got up, feeling that I was finally tugging on the right thread in a tapestry, the thread that would finally unravel the whole thing. I paced the house endlessly before going outside. I was in my thin shift and shivering, but I didn’t care, because as I looked out over the hills stretching eastward, I began to remember…

I had walked the roads, half-mad, calling my daughter’s name. I had been desperate to find her, to find my Mór, and when I did not find her in Daingean Uí Chúis I had finally taken the road out of town. I had walked only where my feet took me, until finally, they brought me east, toward my sacred grove—the place that mortals now called Síd in Broga. I do not know why my thoughts had turned toward it, perhaps in my madness I believed that returning to the place I had once loved above all else would bring her to me. It hadn’t, of course, had been nothing more than the burial mound I’d once found there, and I had left it, cursing the ground, until I finally stumbled into a tavern in a nearby town to drink myself into oblivion.

A tavern, where I had met Fia.

Now I was sure.

But what had I said to her? I could not remember.

Over the next days, as winter drew closer, I could think of nothing else. A tightness wound around my chest. What if I was the villain in Fionn’s story? What if the girl had told me her tale, and in my madness, I had hurt her for trying to claim what Mór had not received? What if I had taken a knife in my hand and brought it down against the girl’s chest? What if all those times he had held me close, he had been holding his sister’s murderer?

The not-knowing was unbearable. So one day, after the cold had drawn in, after I had gathered my honey and made my candles, I pulled my cloak around myself and set off on the road east, toward Síd in Broga and the answers I sought.

The road was long and cold, but I was able to make my way there well enough by following the stars. After all, Síd in Broga was close to Tara, and I knew the stars above its sky as well as I knew Danu’s own face.

I couldn’t see Tara, of course, not anymore—that was reserved for the gods—but I could feel when I drew close to it as any mortal would because of how wary my body grew, how tightly coiled. Hair rose on the back of my neck and my heart raced like that of a rabbit that knows it is about to be spotted by a hawk. I was surprised by my body’s reaction, had supposed that when I came close to Tara I would feel excitement, perhaps even joy, at the thought of being near the place I had once called home. But even though I remembered how lovely Tara was, how it looked when the walls shone with the sunset, the ease of feasts that appeared with a wave of the hand, and beds piled high with fat, soft cushions, I could not bring myself to think of it with anything but fear. There sat Danu, with her power to shape the word; Morrígan, with her sharp weapons and sharper smile; Manannán, with their power to bring up storms from the depths and swallow mortals whole. They—Danu, Dagda, Morrígan, Manannán, Lug—were the gods, the Tuatha Dé Danann. I was only a woman and had been one so long that my own immortal days felt nearly lost to memory. I could have stood there and tried to fight the teeth-rattling terror that gripped me, but instead I turned resolutely away. What did it matter if I feared the gods now, or if they saw I did? I was not here for them; I was here for Fionn and Fia.

I walked even as night fell and the stars rose. While the ground around Tara might have frightened me, the woods I roamed were so familiar and comforting that I closed my eyes, letting my mind fill with the sounds and scents I had loved for so long. I could smell pine and fir and a cold wind that betokened snow, and I could hear squirrels running and mice scampering, even a wolf howling, long and high.

Then snow began to fall and the wood grew quiet, until all I could hear were my own crackling steps. Though I was cold and growing colder, I kept going, stalwart, until I saw Síd in Broga rise ahead of me, covered in a blanket of white.

I climbed the slope slowly until I stood atop it, looking out at the cleared land. It had been an eternity since I’d stood here, and still it seemed as though it had been no more than a heartbeat. Somewhere deep inside me was that endless grief, but it was different now, mixed up with other aches: the loss of Failinis, áine’s betrayal, and my Mór. Mór and Fia and Enya, bright, brave girls who were all dead now.

Like them, I would be brave.

I bowed my head and closed my eyes and pictured Fia’s face. I knelt where she must have, pressed my hands against the ground gone cold, and pictured her wide hungry eyes. I braced myself to remember—and then, with a reeling gasp, I did.

The night came back in flashes.

I was sitting in the tavern, mad and grieving. I had not found Mór at Síd in Broga and I’d known then that it was pointless to look for her. She was dead and buried and her children were dead and buried and I would never see her sweet face again, and I was desolate, inconsolable, furious—and I wanted to scream at Danu, but she no longer listened to me. And so, when the bard in the tavern that night told a story about Danu, extolling her virtues, her kindness, and love for mortals, I snarled, “You want to know the truth of the gods?”

No one listened to me, of course. They could tell I was mad.

And then, dark and hungry eyes.

Fia, who had come in the door in search of food for her long journey ahead.

She heard me, and she said, “Yes. I want to know. I’m Fia. Tell me.”

I remember trying to study her, being unable to focus on her face, just those eyes and that ring of golden hair. I remember demanding more ale. I remember saying, “You’ve heard the stories all mortals have. About Danu. The great mother goddess.” My voice was cold and biting. “From her tears, the seas were filled, and from her blood, the land was given crops and flowers and all manner of trees. She shaped the hills and valleys after her perfect breasts, after her rounded hips. But still she was lonely. Still she searched for more like her. Other gods. But she could not find them. She was alone. So she created a family. Other gods, created from mortals she brought forth: Dagda and Morrígan, Manannán, Lug.”

“Cailleach.” Fia leaned toward me, and I gave a hard, angry laugh.

“No,” I said. “No, she did not create Cailleach. She gave birth to her. Cailleach was the only god who had never experienced mortality. The only god who did not understand death, pain.” My teeth were gritted. “Perhaps if she had created me as she did the others all that happened would not—”

“You?”

I took a long drink from my glass, beer spilling down my neck as I nodded. “I was Danu’s child. Her own daughter. And then one day I had a daughter, and when I asked her, begged her, to give her own grandchild godhood, Danu said no. She was angry that I’d asked for such a thing. Angry. And I do not understand why she would be angry that I asked for immortality for my own child.” I was shaking my head vigorously. “She said no, and I do not understand , I do not understand!” I slammed my hands on the table and my drink spilled, but I paid it no mind. “You know what I think?” I seethed. “I think she can’t . I think she’s a liar. I think she’s not as powerful as she claims, and she is terrified of what would happen if mortals found out, if the other gods found out. Because why should they worship her, then?”

I was raving. I was desperate, and I blamed Danu. I did not truly think what I said was true. But the girl believed me. I had seen it in the way her eyes widened, in the paleness of her skin and her trembling hands as she turned and fled.

And now, though I had not seen it myself, I could picture what had happened to Fia next.

She must have gone back to Síd in Broga, where it had all started. She must have knelt and traced the floor where she had once spilled her own blood, and then she carved the marks in her chest while she called Danu’s name.

The goddess had appeared before her, voice ringing with anger. “I told you not to call on me again.”