The forest path looks so different at night.
Even in full daylight this forest guards its secrets jealously but by night, with only the dim silvering of moonlight tracing the path, it is a forbidding place indeed. Anything at all might be lurking in the impenetrable shadows just beyond the path's edge: An evil spirit, a brigand, a bear... a wolf.
You would think that a woman alone, unarmed, would be frightened to find herself standing on the forest path in the middle of a sweltering summer's night.
But I'm not afraid. The spirits of the forest have always looked on me with favor and neither brigand nor bear has ever been seen lurking here. As for wolves, well, there is only one roaming this forest. And it is because of him that I am standing here on the forest path at midnight, waiting. But perhaps I should start at the beginning.
***
"Ruadh" is what everyone calls me, although it is not my name. Red: for the hair that led to my disownment even more than the woolen cloak that has become my mark. Red: the color of blood, and anger, and passion. I embraced the name at a young age, preferring it to the one my father had given me in bitterness and scorn; by the time I became a woman few remembered that I'd ever been called differently. Only my father still uses my given name on those rare occasions when he must address me at all, but it has long ceased to have any power to wound me. I give him the courtesy and respect that is his due as the lord of the tuath but beyond that, I feel nothing for him. He has not been my father even though he is unquestionably my sire.
The story of my birth is well known. I was to have been the seventh son of a seventh son, a magical, mystical being. The wise women had all been certain of it, tasting my mother's blood and urine as her pregnancy advanced to divine my sex, reading omens in the entrails of sheep and goats. Six sons my dam had borne before me, each as dark as a moonless night, the very image of their sire. My father had been justifiably proud of his virility and I was to have been his crowning achievement. Seven gotten from seven: blessed of the gods, favored by the denizens of the Unseen World, bearer of good fortune.
The whole village had watched anxiously as my dam's time grew nearer. As summer waned and Samhain approached, the Druids had gathered at the keep, the High Priest of the Horned God himself coming all the way from the Holy Isle to attend the birth. They were welcomed; my lord father secretly keeps to the old ways despite his outward conversion to the White Christ of our Briton and Norman overlords.
But even those with the Sight cannot know everything. As it turned out no ceremonies celebrated my arrival and by the time the fires of Samhain were lit I was already both disgraced and disowned.
The forest that curls along the edge of my lord father's lands is ancient, nameless, and secretive. The people of the village may be grateful of its protection, for no invader has ever emerged from its dense tangles to attack us, but they do not love or trust it. They call it cursed, or haunted, and stay in its outer fringes where the sun still glimmers reassuringly, taking of its bounty of herb and mushroom and root only what is within easy reach. Even the hunters avoid it despite the abundance of stag and hind, taking their game instead from the smaller wood to the south.
On the warm autumn day of my birth, my lady mother had gone down to the edge of the forest to gather the oak nuts falling like rain from the huge old trees. She had with her some few of her ladies and several serving women to carry the large baskets. It had still been some weeks before the expected birth and the duties of the mistress of so great a keep as my father's did not permit much leisure for even a heavily pregnant woman.
But as the day wore on her labor pangs came upon her suddenly and fiercely, and for all that I was early I was impatient and would not wait for the shelter of the keep. Thus, I was born not as planned, in the luxury of a fine bed with hangings of silk, and midwives and Druids to ease the birth and drive off evil spirits. No, I arrived amid the leaves and moss at the verge of the cursed forest as the sun slipped behind the hills and the shadows blurred the sight of those who bore witness.
My mother's ladies were experienced in such things and delivered her of me without incident. One of them wrapped me in a soft woolen scarf she'd been wearing. It was a rich crimson - the first of many red wrappings to cover me.
Perhaps it was some dangling piece of the mother-cord and the gathering gloom that deceived their vision; perhaps it was the stress and anxiety of the unexpected delivery; perhaps it was simply a case of seeing what is expected. To this day, I do not know why, but when at last a litter had been brought and my mother and I borne back to the great keep, my mother's attendants announced she had been delivered of the seventh son. So, when my father took me from my swaddling to inspect me and found not another dark haired son but a red headed daughter, they tell me his shout shook the very stones of the keep.
The High Priest sent his underlings to fetch the afterbirth that he might read what it could tell as my father interrogated the women. With sword points at their throats, they all swore oaths to the gods old and new that they'd seen a son, even after my father slew one of them while the others watched. Old Siona the washwoman, who witnessed it all, told me once that the mutterings began right then.
When the Druids returned hours later, they reported the afterbirth was gone. The High Druid then declared I must be a changeling, that the spirits of the forest had stolen the magical seventh son for their own and left me in his place. No one ever thought to wonder how this could have been managed when I had been in plain sight of a half dozen women from the moment of my birth. No one ever thought that perhaps the beasts of the forest had devoured the afterbirth or that the Druids, being unfamiliar with the country, had simply looked in the wrong place. No, the High Druid had spoken: I was a changeling.
Siona says that my lady mother alone refused to believe the High Druid's word and perhaps if she had lived all would have been different. But she sickened of the womb-fever and died three days later, before she could even give me a name. Any lingering doubts about my status were then removed and my lord father, seemingly twice bereaved in a matter of days, took swift action.
It is considered ill fortune to slay a changeling outright, so the common practice is to leave such children on the forest path for the sidhe to reclaim. If the child dies, well, it is the fault of the faery folk and not the mortals. They carried me to a spot not far from where I'd been born, wrapped once more in the now fouled and ragged red scarf and prepared to leave me to my fate.
But before my father and his henchmen could ride away an old priestess appeared as if from thin air and halted them. She demanded to know what they were doing, leaving a newborn child alone in the forest. One of the men told her I was the changeling babe from the keep and they were simply returning it to its own.
The priestess picked me up and unwrapped me. She then asked my father why I was not wrapped in his colors, azure and silver, as was my right. "And why, lord," she asked, "Do you leave your own flesh to be devoured by wolves? This is ill done."
But my father denied me as his get and cursed me, saying the belly of a wolf was a more fitting place than the cradle I'd stolen from his seventh son and that his colors would never be profaned by the likes of me. Better, he said, that I should wear the color of blood since I'd already shed so much of it.
The priestess rebuked him and called him a fool blinded by his own pride. The words she uttered next have been called a curse and repeated a thousand times since:
"Give me the little ruadh then Lord, if you will not claim her. For it may indeed be her fate to be devoured by a wolf but not on this night. Go back to your six sons and your fine keep; the forest path is no place for such as you. And know, Lord that no matter how much seed you scatter a seventh son will never be yours. The gods do not smile on kin slayers even when they are prevented from doing the deed."
My father, it is reported, whitened with anger but for a wonder held himself back. To strike a priestess is to spit in the face of the gods and even he is not that great a fool, despite his justly deserved reputation for temper. It was then that I at last received a name.
"Call the whelp Deirdre," my father is supposed to have said. "For she is the child of Sorrow, begotten by Woe, and she is none of mine."
From then on, I was raised by the priestess Brighid in her little grove at the edge of the forest. Brighid is a small, neat woman who radiates stillness. I have never been able to determine with any success how old she might be, but I do know it is far older than she seems. In all the now twenty summers of my life, I have not seen her change at all. Her hair is the exact same mix of sable and silver as when I was a child, the lines around her eyes and mouth have not deepened or changed. When I ask her about it, she simply smiles and asks if I am ready to be initiated as a priestess. So I suppose it is some mystery of the Goddess, that her priestesses are not touched by the years in the same way as other women. Oddly, the priests of the White Christ claim our Goddess is false and yet their Christ seems to have no such power to prevent his servants from becoming dotards. Doubtless, they have some clever answer for that.
It was Brighid who gave me that first hooded cloak, sewn by her own hands of fine wool dyed a deep, rich crimson. She would wrap me in it whenever we would go into the village as a reminder to my father of his sin. The original scarf had long since fallen to pieces, but he did not miss the meaning of that cloak.
As I would outgrow one red cloak Brighid would fashion another, larger one until I was old enough to sew my own garments. I knew my own story well enough by then to keep up Brighid's torment of my father of my own accord. I became a familiar sight in the village and at the keep, always cloaked in red no matter the season or the weather, a basket on my arm, trading the bounty of the forest for things that Brighid and I could not produce on our own. I went out of my way to be sure my father saw me; it was like waving a bright cloth at a bull and I'm not ashamed to say I enjoyed it immensely. I was young, after all, and had all the hurt of a child scorned by her sire.
By the time I had matured enough to weary of the game, my cloak had become a fixture, a sort of personal sigil. And so I've kept to it, although I almost never wear it with the hood drawn up anymore unless it is raining and I sometimes trade it for a plain, serviceable gray one if I go up to the keep. I no longer have the desire to taunt my lord father and besides, the gods have repaid him handsomely. Of his six sons, five were carried off by the bloody flux that swept through the tuath four summers ago. The last, his heir, is little more than an idiot after his head was cracked open in a fall from a horse.
True to Brighid's words, he has never begotten another son but the keep overflows with daughters. As of last spring, I have nine half sisters. I have never spoken to a one of them, but I've seen them often enough. All of them have locks the color of the sunset, and I could use the eldest as a mirror. The gods have a dreadful sense of humor.
I am accepted readily in the village for all my rather unusual origins but I am not very comfortable there. I am only at home in the quiet of Brighid's glade or in the solitude of the forest where I forage for rare plants and gather berries. Brighid has shared with me all a priestess's knowledge of the earth that shelters us, of the plants and creatures with whom we share it, and I've made quite a comfortable living for us searching out those herbs, roots, and flowers that grow deeper in the forest than most dare to go. But I do dare for I know the forest intimately, or perhaps it is fairer to say the forest knows me. It was the place of my birth, after all. If Brighid has been my mother, the forest has been my father, shaping me to its rhythms and cadences, molding me into one of its creatures. I am at peace there as nowhere else, although Brighid fears it and often begs me not to go so far into the interior.
"Ruadh," she will say now and again, "the wolf waits for you there. I have seen it, when you were just a babe. The wolf will consume you and you will be lost to me. Stay away from the forest path, my child, for your doom lies that way."
I have always laughed off her words and gone back, drawn to the dappled twilight of the deepest glens by some longing I have never been able to wholly describe. And in all the years I've played, wandered, worked, and explored there I had never once seen so much as a wolf track, let alone a wolf.
Until recently, that is.
I'm not exactly sure when I first became aware of him. I think it was high spring, after the rains let up. I went deep into the heart of the forest to harvest the tender young fiddleheads of ferns that grew there. My basket was soon overflowing and I was glad for they fetch a handsome price. Only the lord can afford such a delicacy for his table; I wonder if he knows his spurned daughter provides so many of the delicacies his table is known for. Probably not, for such details are beneath his notice.
In any case, it was about that time that I first caught a glimpse of the wolf. I'm not even sure I really saw him, truly. It was more as though I heard someone call my name but when I looked up, no one was there. There was just the vague impression of something moving off through the underbrush. And yet I knew it was a wolf, on some level beyond the physical senses.
Since that first "sighting," his presence has become an almost constant companion as I roam the forest, ghosting along just outside my view, silently padding along behind me as I forage. I have seen him clearly only once: A chance meeting that seemed to startle him as much as it did me. I was picking berries in a tangled thicket near the heart of the forest and as I pushed through an especially dense patch of briars, there he was. We both froze. His golden eyes locked with mine, and the shock of that contact struck me like a blow to the stomach. My breath caught in my lungs, my heart pounded. A tremor shook me, but it was not fear that raced along my nerves and turned the blood in my veins to fire. It was something even wilder, more elemental than fear, but why a beast of the forest should provoke such a reaction baffled and disturbed me. We stood there motionless for what seemed an eternity; then the wolf licked his chops and quite deliberately turned and walked away. I swear there was recognition in his eyes - recognition and ... hunger.
About the same time that I first saw the wolf, the man called Lú Garrú came to our lands. He rode in with my father's warband one day, and he had the well-worn arms and hard-edged look of a mercenary. I wondered at his presence for my lord father has never been one to use sellswords, preferring henchmen of his own clan whose blood loyalty could never be questioned.
But there he was, riding at my father's side in the place of honor. I found out later that he'd saved my father's life when Vikings ambushed the warband. The story was that Lú Garrú had been hunting in the forest nearby, heard the sounds of battle, and came to their aid. He deprived a Viking of his head just before the man's spear could spit my father like a suckling pig, earning that coveted place at my father's side.
From the moment I laid eyes on him, something about Lú Garrú has disquieted me. At first I thought him merely a liar. Take that tale of hunting in the forest, for instance. No one goes into the forest except me and comes out again. But then he began coming back from his solitary forays with huge stags that could have been taken nowhere else. He slips away in the gray shadows before dawn, afoot, and returns before evening with fresh game, neatly dressed. I have never once seen him in the forest, nor have I seen the prints of his boots on the forest path, but I have seen the gut piles from his kills. So, he is not a liar, whatever else he is.
Then there is his name, Lú Garrú. It is seemingly in our tongue although I have never heard a name anything like it before. And by his looks, I'd call him a Norman or a Briton, not a Gael. No Gael has hair the color of sun-ripened wheat; we are either as dark as my sire, or ruadhs like me. There has been from the first something maddeningly familiar about his name, but every time I would try to put my finger on it, the memory would slip away like morning mist. A song, I thought, or perhaps a tale, but whatever it was it continued to elude and frustrate me.
Not long after Lú Garrú's arrival, I had my one and only encounter with him. I had torn myself away from prowling the forest long enough to bring a large basket of morels in for trade and was taking them up to the keep to see what the head cook would offer for them. I went in through the postern gate as usual and walked straight into him. The basket went flying, morels scattered everywhere, and I quite suddenly found myself sitting squarely on my rump looking up into the bluest eyes I have ever seen. The impact of that gaze pulled me up as much as the strong hand he offered, and I was trembling by the time I regained my feet.
"I seem to have scattered your dainties, little Ruadh" he said, amused. At my start, he laughed softly. "Oh, yes, I know who you are. The story of the woman in the red hood is a popular one with the villagers, and who can blame them? A beautiful woman running wild in the forest who is either the unacknowledged eldest daughter of the local lord or a sidhe changeling: Why, it is a tale to make any bard envious."
He looked at me in frank appraisal and I felt my cheeks flush under that penetrating stare. Flustered, I bent to pick up the nearest morel, but he took it from my hand and picked up the basket himself. "Here, allow me." He gathered up the morels with a graceful efficiency and presented the basket with a bow. "With my apologies, my lady." He glanced at the morels, then back at me with that same appraising look. "There are many delicious things to be found in the forest, it seems."
I am unaccustomed to the casual flirtations the noble folk engage in, or even the cruder sort of the village folk, but there was no mistaking the doubled meaning of his words. Blushing and feeling out of my depth, I pretended I thought he was referring to the mushrooms even though I knew better. Looking at the basket, I shrugged. "Yes there are, but only if one knows where to look. Luckily for Cook, I do."
His smile said he saw straight through my ploy. "I think I can find what I want in your forest, Ruadh." He bowed once more. "It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, my lady. Until we meet again."
He kissed my hand then and as he straightened, our eyes met again. Through some trick of the sunlight, those bottomless pools of azure suddenly seemed to shimmer into amber, and my breath caught in my throat. He smiled enigmatically as he dropped my hand, then strode through the gate and disappeared into the village streets leaving me to stand there speechless.
That made it twice that I had been badly shaken by a chance encounter, although at least this time the object of the inexplicable yearnings coursing through me was the right species.
Those two encounters changed me in a way I cannot explain. It is as if some other person sleeping within me has been awakened at last. Brighid complains I am distracted, inattentive, and I suppose I am. I find more and more excuses to spend entire days in the forest, hoping to steal a glance at my wolf. That is how I have begun to think of him: My wolf, although if Brighid's soothsay is accurate I am more likely his than the other way around. But for all the time I spend in the forest, I come home too often with an empty basket. Instead of gathering and harvesting, I spend my time simply listening to the rhythms of the forest, wandering through it half in trance, and becoming one with it. When I do tear myself away from the forest and go into the village, it is more to try to catch the glance of a certain mercenary than to sell what meager produce I have gathered. But I seem to have even worse luck with him than I do with the wolf. For while I can sometimes catch a fleeting glimpse of gray fur as I roam the forest, I have seen Lú Garrú not at all, not since that one chance meeting.
I spoke to Brighid about what I have been feeling only once, right after that encounter with Lú Garrú. She was silent for a very long time, her eyes boring into mine as if trying to read my very soul. Then she shook her head, and said something vague about how these urges were to be expected in a maid of my age, especially in spring.
But I knew what I felt was more than the usual stirring of the blood in response to the powers of creation and fertility that are strongest around Beltane. I had felt that stirring in seasons past, from the time of my first bleeding, and this was different. It was stronger, more primal, harder to ignore. It was not a vague, unfocused longing as in previous springs but rather a very specific hunger centering on two very different beings. And Brighid knew this was different, I could tell, but her only advice was once more to stay away from the forest. She pressed me to go more often to the village, to seek out the company of men and not beasts. But men hold no interest for me, with that one notable exception, and I told Brighid as much.
Curiously, she then warned me away from Lú Garrú as well. She suggested I find some village lad who appealed to me and let nature take its course, then proceeded to give me some very explicit recommendations on how to best go about relieving my urges. The priestesses of the old gods tend to be frank about these things.
Spring passed into summer but my yearnings did not subside, despite the best efforts of the blacksmith's son. Oh, yes, I took Brighid's advice, and tried out all of her suggestions - many times. The blacksmith's son got quite the education, and no doubt, his future bride will be grateful. But while I found our trysts to be quite pleasant, they did nothing to slake that basic hunger those two encounters had awakened in me. If anything, they only served to worsen the matter as my dreams took on the detail of knowledge.
After a few weeks, I broke it off. My former lover was none too happy about it, but we'd learned all we could from one another and there was nothing else to bind us together. He was the son of a prosperous tradesman while I was merely a nameless orphan girl, no matter that all knew my blood to be noble. A match between us would never be permitted even had I desired it. Besides, his father had already accepted a dowry offer from the miller. Of course, the miller's daughter has hips as wide as an oxcart and the face of a draft mare but she comes well dowered and is a kind, gentle soul. He could do worse, and with those hips, she will like to bear him many fine sons.
So, while he sulked and grumbled about the village, I went back to haunting the forest. And there I have spent the remainder of my summer seeking but never finding. It is little wonder I have been irritable and moody. Lately I have avoided the village entirely, not really wanting to cross paths with my former lover and be forced to endure his whining and pleading. There has been enough loose talk already and he is too much the fool to see the damage it might do. Best to simply stay away until he is safely wed. Besides, all that I truly need is in the forest. I know they are both out here somewhere but the only place I see either one is in dreams, and then only the wolf.
It is the dreams that drive me back here to the forest each day, the dreams of the wolf. He owns my nights, prowling at will through my mind, teasing and taunting me with his presence, arousing in me needs that are never fulfilled. In them, I can see those topaz eyes staring at me, into me; can feel his hot breath against my throat, smell the musky scent of his fur. His howls send shivers of uncontrollable desire racing through me, and I yearn to rub my face in his coat, to feel the rasp of his tongue, to drown myself in the golden depths of his eyes. It is only here in the forest, under the full light of day, that I can sleep at all peacefully. I come here both to recover from the previous night's restlessness and to maybe see him again in more than just glimpses.
For I have conceived the notion that should he and I meet once more all my questions will be answered and I will be myself again. I know it sounds a folly, but I believe it with all my heart.
What little time I spend with Brighid is uncomfortable for us both. She worries about me, I know, and has begun slipping mistletoe into my food when she thinks I will not notice. I cannot fault her for thinking I am going mad; I have thought it more than once myself. And yet there is something she is keeping from me, something she will not tell me. When I asked her if she could recall what story or song it was that Lú Garrú's name reminded me of, she simply stared past me as if I had not spoken. My plea for herbs to quiet my dreams was met with a terse grunt of assent, but when she gave me wolfsbane instead of the expected valerian or chamomile and I questioned it, she snapped at me.
"And which of us is the priestess here, little ruadh?" she said peevishly. "I know my business. Do you want my help, or not?"
I tried to drink the tea, but it made me violently ill. I retched for hours as Brighid watched over me, dosing me with fennel to calm my stomach and willow bark to stem the high fever that had sprung up. "Forgive me, little ruadh," she murmured repeatedly as I convulsed. "But I had to try." She completely ignored me when I asked her what she meant by that. She started making me a potion every night of marsh wort mixed with the valerian and chamomile I expected the first time and it has been helping me to sleep a bit more easily.
Or rather, it had been helping, until tonight.
***
I woke tonight from a wild dream, in a tangle of sticky, sweat soaked bedding. The summer heat is oppressive right now; not a breath of air is moving and when I woke, I felt as if I was suffocating. I sat there for a moment trying to compose myself. This dream had been the most vivid yet. I could still feel the soft brush of fur against my bare skin, still hear the panting of his breath in my ear. Most disturbing of all, he had spoken to me in words this time: Calling my name, urging me to let him in.
Still half-asleep, I rose from the bed and fetched a mug of water but it was tepid and stale tasting. I looked out of my window and the trees of the forest seemed to shimmer in the waning light of the full moon. The thought came into my mind that it would be so much cooler in the forest, in the deep dales where the summer sun can barely reach and the springs flow cold and clean. But, unsure if the thought came from me or from him, I resisted the pull of the moonlight, the call of the trees.
I stood poised there for long minutes, struggling against his lure until seemingly out of nowhere, that snippet of a story I'd tried in vain for so long to remember popped into my head. So much that had puzzled, confused, and even frightened me quite suddenly made perfect sense and I gave into the wild yearnings coursing through me. Wide awake, clad only in my red cloak, I ran here to the forest path.
And so now, standing here on the very spot where I was born, I wait for my fate to claim me at last.
"I expected you long since, Ruadh."
I can see nothing in the shadows but by his voice, he is close. I can feel him, my nerve endings tingling with his nearness. "My command of the Norman tongue is poor, and I have only heard the term once, in a bard's story," I reply. The story had been about a Norman prince held hostage by Gaels, a wolf killed in senseless anger, and a Druid's terrible justice. Lú Garrú, loupe garrou; in the Norman tongue, it means werewolf. "Are you really a prince?"
"I was once, but I am something else now. Does it matter?"
I shake my head. "No. Not at all."
I hear him moving now, slipping deeper into the forest, away from me, and my whole being yearns after him. Then his voice floats out of the darkness again, velvety soft, caressing. I quiver at the sound, pulled by it, aching to run to him yet anchored in place by some remnant of caution. "It must be your choice, Ruadh. You must be sure."
The sound of his passage grows fainter, the need to follow him stronger. It takes me less than another heartbeat to make up my mind. "I am," I say softly to the darkness, letting the cloak fall from my shoulders. "Very sure." It lands in a puddle of dark crimson at my feet, like a pool of birthing blood in the moonlight. A trace of breeze I did not notice before washes over my bare skin, reminding me of the feather soft brush of fur.
Free now of the last tie to what I have been, I place my feet upon the path I was born to walk and follow my wolf into the forest. He waits there for me, and in his embrace, I am consumed.
***
The old priestess Brighid looks up at the pale moon, a single tear running down her cheek. "I will miss you little ruadh," she says to the empty night. "Farewell, Deirdre." As if in answer, two wolves howl in the distance. She gathers up the fallen cloak, places it in her basket, and turns away from the forest path, homeward.