‘No. We… She had to return to her encampment.’
‘You observed her face on the night we raised the power?’
‘Aye.’
‘How did you think she looked?’
He pictured her, pale, with grey circles round the eyes. He recalled how he thought she looked exhausted, as if the ordeal had taken all her strength. ‘She was tired. Very tired.’
‘Yes,’ Ruis breathed. ‘She was.’
‘It was taxing, what she had to do?’ Josse asked, desperate to know.
‘Very, although she was fully prepared for it and the extreme exaltation would have provided her with all the strength and energy she needed and more.’ He paused. ‘Josse, she was weary before the ceremony began.’
‘Why?’ The word shot out of him, for he was suddenly angry, so angry, with this calm young man who spoke for the strange people whom Josse could not understand and never would. ‘Just what was it you’d made her do?’
Ruis laughed softly, but Josse could not begin to imagine what was amusing him. ‘Neither we nor anybody else made her do anything. The days when Joanna could be forced into any act against her will were long gone.’ He turned to look at Josse, his eyes bright in the light of the stars and the slim moon. ‘She had a rare power,’ he added. ‘She was a great gift to us, and we shall honour her always for what she has done.’
‘What has she done?’ Josse whispered.
Ruis’s smile spread, as if he were suddenly suffused with joy. ‘She and the entity known as the Bear Man gave up their essence that night and merged themselves in the cone of power. It rose up to the heavens and drove down deep into the ground in that place that has always been sacred to us. The force that lies within the earth answered and it opened up to admit them. The power is now great — greater than it has ever been — and nothing can destroy it. Now and for ever we and what we believe will stay there.’
‘But what of the priests?’ Josse demanded. ‘They will finish their great cathedral and it will-’
‘Yes, indeed they will,’ Ruis agreed serenely, ‘but it does not matter. They cannot stop what now breathes through the very stone, wood and glass of their building. It will be there as long as the world lasts, for even if the cathedral falls, the power will remain. It was there at the beginning; it will be there at the end.’
‘And this… this mission was for Joanna to fulfil?’
‘With the one other, yes. It is what she was born for; her destiny was marked out for her.’
‘She knew? She accepted this?’ He had to ask.
‘Deep inside her, she always knew. When she received her orders, she welcomed them with joy. Her acceptance would have been total except for one thing.’
‘What was it?’
‘You, Josse. You and her children. She loved all of you dearly and did not want to leave you. It was only when we gave our solemn oath to do as she asked that her mind was set at rest.’
‘What did she ask?’ He could barely form the words.
‘She wished you to raise them. Meggie is already yours and devoted to you. She will sorely miss her mother, but she has the consolation of being able to see and speak to her in the form that she now takes.’
‘Aye, I know.’ Josse had seen Meggie chattering with Joanna.
‘Ninian, too, has found his way to you.’ Ruis glanced up the deck at the sleeping boy. ‘He will not return to his life as a squire, Josse. He will ask you in the morning if he may live with you.’
‘I’ll say yes, with all my heart!’
Ruis smiled. ‘I know. I see the love you have for each other shining around you both. It began long ago and now this journey that you have taken together has reawakened it.’
‘I’ll have a family,’ Josse said slowly, trying to envisage the life that now awaited him. ‘I’ll have two children to raise. Dear Lord, I’ve given my home to Dominic, Paradisa and their family! If only I’d known, I would have-’
‘No you wouldn’t,’ Ruis said calmly. ‘You gave away your house because you were lonely there and you knew others would come to love it much more than you ever did. It was never the right place for you, Josse,’ he added. ‘Now even more, it is not where you should be.’
Josse wondered what Ruis could mean by that, but his thoughts were interrupted, for the man spoke again. ‘There is another place far more suitable, for it is both within the forest, where your children’s blood calls out to them, and in the place where your own heart lies.’
‘Where? What is this place?’ Josse cried.
‘It belonged to the children’s mother. Now that she is no longer here, it passes to you and to them. Until they are of age, it is in your care.’
‘You speak of the house in the woods?’
‘Yes.’
‘She wanted this, that I should live there with Ninian and Meggie?’
‘She did.’
It was a great deal to take in. Josse stood silent, imagining..
As if the figure beside him were somehow putting pictures into his mind, he then saw the family that would live in the old house, waking it up from its long sleep with laughter and happiness. He saw Ninian grown tall and strong; saw Meggie with her healer’s skill tending all who came, human and animal, in the way her mother and grandmother had done before her. In her hand he caught a sudden flash of brilliant blue as she dipped a precious jewel into a cup of water.
‘Yes,’ Ruis said quietly. ‘You see true, Josse.’ He gave Josse some moments to enjoy the vision. Then he said, ‘There is one more thing.’
Josse’s breath seemed to catch in his throat. ‘What is it?’
Ruis took his arm and led him down the deck. In the stern, the woman Deidre sat wrapped in shawl and cloak. One baby lay beside her, fast asleep; the other was suckling vigorously at her breast. Embarrassed at being a witness to such a moment of intimacy, Josse turned aside.
‘It is all right, Josse,’ Deidre said gently. ‘You may look. I do not mind.’
Josse looked; it seemed that his eyes were drawn to the spectacle of the woman and the babies almost against his volition. As he looked, he noticed something. Deidre’s dark eyes met his; she smiled up at him and he thought she whispered, ‘Yes.’
Ruis said, ‘What do you see?’
‘They are not twins,’ Josse said wonderingly, ‘for the one now at the breast is surely several months older than the other.’
‘The one who now suckles is Iana,’ Ruis said, ‘and she is the daughter of Deidre and me. The other child, her milk brother, is not yet a month old. He takes little but his need is the greater, so Deidre feeds him first.’
‘I have heard him!’ Josse knew it; the small mewls and cries that had haunted him were the sounds of a newborn.
Deidre looked down at the tiny child, compassion in her eyes, but she did not speak.
‘You have heard with your heart,’ Ruis said, ‘for although we have been following you, we have not been close enough for you to have picked up such tiny sounds.’
‘But why…?’ The question died before Josse could finish it.
He remembered holding Joanna, feeling the bulk of her satchel beneath her cloak. He saw her face as she was wound up inside the cone of power, fulfilment, exhaustion and a slow, deep happiness turning her expression to one of joy. He thought back to September when, after the equinox ceremonies, he and Joanna had spent their days together and their nights making love.
He heard the echo of Ruis’s words: You have heard with your heart.
He stared down at the baby lying asleep in its soft blanket. His heart overflowed.
Ruis bent down, picked up the baby with gentle hands and placed him in Josse’s open arms. ‘His name is Geoffroi,’ he whispered.
My father’s name, Josse thought. She remembered.
Tears blurred his vision as he stared down into the face of his child. Settling the baby on the crook of his left arm, he touched the soft, rounded cheek with the tip of his finger. Geoffroi opened his eyes and looked up.
Josse had been told that newborns did not focus very well and he was willing to believe it. It must, then, have been some special quality in this third and last child of Joanna’s that made the gaze so purposeful.
