Druids Read Free Page A

but insistent. “Turn the wheel,
    turn the wheel, change the seasons.” The druids were circling again. “Turn the wheel, change the seasons, join with us, accept our gift, now. Now!” The voices rang with desperate urgency.
    Aberth paused beside the shrouded figure on the altar stone. He pulled away the cloth, baring the body for his knife. In the moment before I meant to drop my eyes, I had a clear look at his intended victim.
    My grandmother lay with her gentle face turned toward the sunless sky.

CHAPTER Two
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    At first I could not imagine who screamed. Who     Then I realized I was screaming. Like some madman, I had burst from concealment and was running recklessly into the glade, waving my arms and yelling for the druids to stop.
    I expected lightning to strike me and shrivel me into a cinder at Menua’s command.
    Instead, he and the others merely stared at me. Aberth’s upraised arm hung in the air, holding the knife above Rosmerta. Only the chief druid seemed able to move; he tried to catch me as I flung myself protectively across my grandmother’s body. I beat him off with clubbed fists, then took the old woman in my arms. I was surprised to discover how thin she was. It was like holding a bag of sticks.
    We lay together on the stone of sacrifice with the knife poised above us. I did not look up. I pressed my lips against Rosmerta’s cheek, feeling the dry old skin, inhaling her scent, her individual odor of woodsmoke and desiccation.
    Her flesh was cold to my lips.
    Menua’s hand clamped on my shoulder. “Step aside, lad,” he said, more kindly than I expected.
    I intended to obey him; we always obeyed our druids. But instead my arms tightened around Rosmerta. “I won’t let you kill her,” I said in a muffled voice, my face against hers.
    “We aren’t going to kill her. She’s already dead.” Menua waited for his words to sink in. Aberth took a step backward, perhaps in response to some signal from the chief druid.
    I lifted my head so I could look down at Rosmerta. Her eyes were closed, sunken into pits lost amid the wrinkles. When I
     
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    DRUIDS 13
    raised myself higher I could see her scrawny neck, where no pulse beat. Her chest did not rise and fall.
    “You see?” Menua asked in the same gentle tone. “The knife is only a formality to conform to the ritual of sacrifice. Rosmerta chose, with nobility and fortitude, to die for the common good. When she thought you were asleep last night, she drank a potion we had given her. Winter-in-a-bottle, we call it. She took winter into herself, she became winter, the season of death. Then she came to my lodge and we brought her here before dawn. Her spirit left her body just before sunrise, which is the time spirits prefer for migrations.
    “This is the new ritual, Ainvar. Rosmerta shows winter how to die so spring may be born. In such ways, with such symbols, we encourage the healing of the pattern.”
    He was only speaking words, they meant nothing to me. All mat mattered was my grandmother, who could not be dead. As clearly as if I still saw it, I remembered the look on her face the night before as she gave me my meal—a thin gruel and a lump of badger meat. She had claimed she was not hungry.
    Now I held her with arms nourished by the food she had denied herself. I would never surrender her.
    Above my head Menua said to the others, “This may be the help we sought. The Source of All Being has sent this lad to us. Think on this symbol. What better way to show the seasons how to change than by tearing a boy in the spring of his life away from the corpse of winter?”
    He seized my shoulders and tugged. I sobbed in grief and defiance. Later they told me I had actually twisted around and bared my teeth at the chief druid.
    “She isn’t dead. I won’t let her be dead.”
    “You have no choice. Come now, Ainvar.” He pulled harder. There was an edge to his voice; the time for handling