Day passes to night, and night becomes day again. Winter becomes spring, eventually, when the light-bringer comes. Time passes, sometimes steadily and slowly; other times it’s as fleeting and as magical as the glow of a firefly on a summer night. However it passes, you can’t hold onto it. Like everything that is good and precious, you have to let it go. Once I plucked a beautiful orange oak leaf from my tree and set it, like a boat, tripping down the chilly freshness of the river that runs next to the grove. I watched it float and spin, bumping into rocks and logs, until the river took it out to the sea and it disappeared forever.
Time whisks away every single thing we love until it is just a memory. We let precious things go so that the next can come to us. What reward can we possibly gain from holding on so tightly? I learned all of this through my life experiences, through my meditations at the stones, and now I looked down at the light-bringer I held in my arms and wondered if I would ever be able to apply the knowledge in this circumstance. How could I ever trust the world enough to let her go? For the first time, I feared my own death.
I thought of my own mother’s funeral pyre. A sight I wasn’t old enough to remember but an event I had imagined over and over again throughout my life, anytime I beheld another pyre or looked deep into the flames of the festival fires. I had let her go into the ether at the tender age of the babe I held in my very arms, and somehow I survived. I imagined my father’s funeral raft, fashioned in the way of his people, drifting off to sea, and the flint arrows of fire raining down on him until, whoosh, the whole raft was alight and his body disappeared into the smoke. I had not been brave enough to go down to the shores that day, but I had imagined it over and over. How had I gone on all these years after that? And yet I could and did find happiness in each passing day.
And finally, I thought of Ros. I thought of how he might look in the vast sea from the flight of an albatross or another great seabird, his bright red hair against the gray-green ocean as he expertly navigated and steered his little boat through the waves and tides of the northern islands. I didn’t fear for him because I knew he maneuvered that boat as if it were an extension of his own body. I knew the open sea was where he belonged, and that made the letting-go easier on my aching heart.
There she was in the sunlight, walking toward me. Hair on fire from the sun, an amber color I’d never seen before: red, gold, cinnamon. Aric still said it reminded him of his mother’s hair, and I realized how little he had spoken of her before Sorcha was born. She was an only child. But of course, so was I, and so was Aric. She danced in the woods on tiptoes, calling to the birds. She named the squirrels and rabbits, played with Grandmother’s goats more than the other children, and fell asleep by the hearth with puppies in her lap. Life was changing in the village with the development of the forge and the search for copper and tin minerals. We traded some out but kept most for ourselves, in the king’s cave, where they waited to be alchemized into a new life, like I had been in the days leading up to our visit from the stranger.
I was head Druid now, since Ray had vanished, and so much of my life was dedicated to others, to the fire festivals, to the village, and to building relationships with the forgers, tradesmen, and metalworkers new to the village. Ray had left me as a young Druid. “Come back to me, Ray. Come back to Aric. Come back to Sorcha,” I prayed at the stones every festival and every celestial event. Only Jord and Elijah had been at the stones with him the day he vanished. The great spiral stone had hummed, they said, and he was gone. Jord had moved in with grandmother to help take care of her, and we stayed up by the hearth many a night, telling stories about our best friends who had disappeared, hoping for their welfare, waiting for the day they would return with stories of their adventures. I smiled to think that maybe their paths would cross at the gathering at the large henge to the south or maybe where all the greatest boats and priests converged: Orkney.
We continued the work of pulling out the green veins from the standing stones, chipping away at the massive blocks without destroying them. So few places had both the green veins and the silver ones needed to create the perfect alloy. They didn’t naturally occur in the same type of stone. We had the silver veins, which occurred naturally on the glittering stones at the mouth of the cave, the stones that Aric had washed up on as a boy, the stones that had burned in the hot fires of Ros’s boat and melted in front of Aric’s eyes on the night Ros jumped into the sea. And because our ancestors had moved stones from another island to erect our stone circle, we also had the green veins. Elijah said it was unheard of to have both types of stone so close together, and this gave me the uncomfortable feeling that we would have many more visitors in our future.
And just as intuition had warned me, late in spring we had an unexpected visitor: a traveler who brought news from the northern isles in a ship with a crab claw sail. When he appeared on the coast, I had been at the stones, and I ran down in excitement that it might be someone else. But he was a northerner, much like my father: tall, with a leather bag and dark brown cloak lined with wolf’s fur; long, pointed features; and handsome dark eyes shining down on me.
He was trying to explain something when I summoned the Druid elders, Elijah, and my apprentice Griff, the youngest new Druid, down to the cave. “These stones are from my land,” he said in our language, handling the pieces of the standing stones that we had harvested for their blue-green veins. “Our villages used to be one, many years ago, after the ice receded, but the Druids left to inhabit this island and build a new stone circle, similar to the one we have.”
Jord came to look over my shoulder at the stones. “It’s just like Ray dreamed,” he whispered.
“We must start a fire now. I have bellows to harness the heat and melt the stones. I will show you.” The new man said.
I looked up at Jord and looked back at Elijah, his mouth agape.
“Uh, how have you come to this knowledge, friend?” Elijah asked him.
“And why have you come to share it with us?” I asked, pointedly.
He darted his eyes around, looking for an explanation. We all waited, staring, a united front with a peculiar feeling about this man. “This Ray you speak of,” he began, and Jord’s eyes opened wide, filling with tears, as Griff’s small hands squeezed my arm tightly, “he has spoken to us as well. He brought this boat to me, together with a ginger man, and bade me come share the news with you.” The man clearly hoped this information would gain our trust. “He wants you to know that he lives still.” The man extended a palm full of the spiraled shells that Ray collected in his meditations on the beach.
Jord gasped, his long, bony fingers covering his mouth. Elijah let out a short cry of utter shock and happiness. The northern man smiled when his news brought joy to us and reached with a long metal poker into the fire to retrieve the rocks.
Griff hugged Jord in glee. “They’re both alive!” he exclaimed in a voice cracked with emotion and adolescence, looking over at me.
Yet I was still unsure. “What else did they say?” I asked. “You’re holding something back.” I needed the full truth in order to trust this new man, whether Ray did or not.
The man was focused on his craft, though. He poured the melted rock into a four-sided container he had pulled from his bag, and we all watched, holding our collective breath. Elijah rejoiced when he saw the copper fall like warm honey into the pointed mold. After a moment of intrigue, questioning, and chatter, the liquid cooled, and the man looked up into my eyes, opening the mold to reveal to us our first shining spearhead.
“I don’t want it.” I said reflexively, staring at the weapon that reflected my muddled likeness.
“It’s not for you.” the man answered quietly. And now seven pairs of eyes stared at him across the growing fire as our shadows danced on the cave’s wall, foretelling what would come.
“Ray also said that he and Ros will be back to help fight the war that is coming when you are gone, Ailsa, and Sorcha has become head Druid and alchemist.”