Merlin's Harp Read Free Page A

nearest coracle, poled across, and bore me just within the entrance.
      There at the entrance a pebble picture is embedded in the floor. A graceful girl carries a basket among tall, foreign flowers. Her back is turned to us. Her light brown hair—like Elana's—flows down her green gown. Her feet are bare. Thoughtfully she touches a flower as she would touch a friend.
      I was born on this picture. I learned to walk on it, and named my colors from it. I think my brother Lugh and I must be the only Fey children in the world who ever saw a picture—and such a strange picture, at that—of a foreign girl with foreign flowers. I think this picture prepared both of us for our unusual destinies.
      I named the girl in the picture Dana. After "Mama," "Dana" was the first word I said. Later I asked the Lady why Dana and her flowers had no auras.
      We stood together in the shadowed entry, looking down at Dana by our feet. The Lady said, "The artist who created her was Human."
      "Human!" My childish ideas about Humans danced in confusion.
      "Most Humans do not see auras. Many Fey do not."
      I stared up at the Lady. At that time—now long, long ago—she looked very much as I look now. Though she seemed tall to my young eyes, in truth she was smaller than Mellias; her grave, quiet features were delicately molded as if from brown river-clay. Her black braid swung below her hip. At home in the villa she wore graceful linen gowns that Merlin brought from afar.
      Her aura swirled slowly around her, a gently sparkling silver mist like sunny, windless water. It filled the dim entry where we stood; we were as though drowned in it, as if we stood at the bottom of a deep pool. I had no idea then that my mother's aura was extraordinary. I had not yet seen the usual narrow, muddy auras that herald small minds, or minds domineered by bodies—except, of course, for wild creatures. I knew the slow, green pulse of plant auras; the flashing, vanishing brilliance of bird or fish auras; and I had glimpsed from afar the wider, steadier auras of bear and deer. But I thought then that every thinking creature—Fey or Human— would naturally walk in a broad, bright mist like the Lady, like Merlin. If Lugh's aura was orange and narrow and sometimes muddy, well, that was because he was just a young boy. He, and his aura, would surely grow.
      Not to see auras would be half blindness. How would you know what to expect of a living being? How could you walk past it, or turn your back on it? You could not know what it felt, what it might do.
      The Lady laughed softly down into my upturned face. "Niviene, your aura leaps like a flame! You love to learn."
      I still love to learn.
      As the lone, and often lonely, girl-child of Apple Island I imagined the girl in the floor picture, Dana, and chattered to her, till she rose up off the floor, turned and showed me her homely, gentle face. She drifted with me through the villa, a secondary ghost, a thought-form I myself projected. There were other spirits there.
      At dusk I might meet a bent old woman straining under burdens. If I met her at the north end of the villa her burdens would be piles of clothes: laundry or sewing. At the south end she would struggle with a heavy sack of peas or beans.
      In the courtyard I sometimes glimpsed a merry little boy about my own age. He pulled a little wheeled cart over the paving stones, or lined up dim carved figures on the rim of the dead fountain. Once I saw him jump about in the fountain, splashing invisible water.
      Unlike the exhausted old woman, the boy seemed to notice me. He would pause in his play to stare in my direction. I tried to talk to him, but the Lady warned me.
      "Do not encourage ghosts, Niviene. Give them no power."
      "I want to play with him!"
      "You are lonely. One of these days you will go free in the forest and meet living friends."
      Doubtfully, I stared up into the Lady's calm, brown face. I knew a