Page 40 of Boudicca

“Queen Boudicca, we will have the Iceni remains gathered by midday tomorrow and ready to rest in the barrow,” said Derwyn. The bottom of his white tunic was gray from ash. Dark circles bruised his eyes. With a jolt of shock I realized that he looked old and tired.

“Are you well, Derwyn?” I asked.

He sighed and ran a hand through his thick white hair. “Ynys Môn calls to me. Last night in my dreams the oaks keened.”

Beside me I felt Rhan stiffen.

Ynys Môn was more than just the island where the Druids trained and lived. It was their spiritual center. Their hearts were tethered there by the sacred oaks that grew thick and strong on Ynys Môn. Prasutagus and I had visited the island several times. From the first moment I’d stepped on the isle, I’d felt the love with which the Druids tended their oaks—much like they were beloved children. “Do the oaks keen because I have declared war on Rome?” I did not want to hear Derwyn answer yes, though I had to ask.

He shook his head. “No. Andraste has been clear. She supports you; your vengeance is hers. The oaks grieve, but I do not know why. I planned to remain here, with the Tasceni, until much closer to Samhain and harvest, but I cannot. I must leave tomorrow, and I must take all of my people with me except Rhan and Adara.”

“Of course you must,” I said quickly as dread fingered up my spine. “Derwyn, have the oaks keened before?”

“Never in all of my days have I heard such a sound.”

“We should make offerings to Andraste,” said Rhan. “And ask her to comfort the grove and hasten your return to the isle.”

“Yes,” said Derwyn, though he stared to the west, toward the distant place that was his home.

I looked around us and motioned for a young villager to approach.

“My queen,” the boy said after he bowed to me.

“Go to the lodge. Tell Wulffaed I need libation bowls for Andraste—honey and milk. Bring them to the altar by the oak.”

“Yes, my queen.” He sprinted off.

“Come,” I said to Rhan. “Let us go to Andraste.”

Wordlessly the seer and I moved through the practice field, skirting the huge ash pile and the Druids who pecked through it. I wanted to avert my eyes. I did not want to see my mother’s bones, but the ash drew me as surely as Andraste had compelled me to the forest. The evening clouds parted and the setting sun caught the remnants of treasures burned with our dead so that the field sparkled, and my dread quieted. I had no reason to turn my face from the remains of my mother or my people. They had been precious, the living jewelsof the Iceni. I changed direction so that I walked through the ash and stopped, bent, and scooped up a handful of it. Resolutely, I spit into my hand and swirled my finger through the hastily made gray paste before I drew a line down my nose and two down either side of my cheeks from the corners of my eyes to the strong edges of my jaw.

“You will not be forgotten,” I promised the dead.

Rhan nodded, and silently we continued to the altar. It was darker under the boughs of the massive oak, though the waning sunlight glinted through the thick canopy of leaves. Before I approached the altar I rested my palm on her skin. “I greet you, Grandmother Oak.”

“Can you still feel their breath?” Rhan asked.

I nodded, surprised that she remembered.

My friend smiled. “I remember everything.”

“Or you really can read minds,” I quipped as I joined her at Andraste’s altar.

Rhan didn’t respond. Instead she gazed up at Andraste. “I love the fierceness of this likeness of the goddess.”

I kissed my fingers and pressed them to the goddess’s feet. “I have thought that since the first day I glimpsed this altar when I was little more than a girl, and a very nervous new bride. When Prasutagus and I rode past her, I felt her welcome me—not with the gentle touch of a mother or matron, but with an intensity and a strange kind of joy. I thought her beautiful then and think her even more so now that I have seen her in person. Her fierceness is blinding in its magnificence.”

“That is because Andraste was not welcoming a young bride to Tasceni,” said Rhan as she continued to stare at the statue. “She welcomed Victory.”

I continued to press my hand to her feet. “Let it be so.”

We moved the tribe’s offerings so that we could clean the leaves and forest debris from the altar. I lifted my skirt and used it to wipe clean the statue. We were replacing the offerings around the feet of Andraste when the boy hurried to us. He clutched two large wooden bowls close to his narrow chest and placed them carefully on the flat sandstone on which the goddess’s image stood.

“Now return to Wulffaed and tell her that I said you are to be given an extra seed cake and your own bowl of honey to drizzle over it,” I told the boy.

His smile lit the clearing. “Yes, Queen Boudicca!”

With the altar cleaned and tended, Rhan faced me. “Andraste has chosen you, so it is you who should invoke her aid while I pour libations and call nwyfre, the life force that fills the world, to carry your prayer to her.”