Page 55 of Boudicca

“I believe it is time.” I gazed up at Grandmother Oak. Her leaves were just beginning to turn yellow as the days became shorter and the nights longer and cooler.

Beside me Rhan nodded. “I shall petition Andraste.” She didn’t need to ask me to explain what I meant. In the almost six months since the Romans had attacked Tasceni and Rhan had become seer of the Iceni, she and I had grown even closer than we’d been as children. “I assume you want the petition to be public.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “How soon can you be ready?”

“I am ready now.” Her grin flashed. “Last week when you commanded that the harvests begin, I prepared. I have been leaving offerings to the goddess every day since then. It has been seven days. Andraste will give an answer should you ask today.”

“Reading my mind again?”

She laughed softly at our old joke. “It’s much simpler than that. You called for the harvest to begin, and then my father followed your lead by commanding the Trinovantes to harvest as well. I expected him to come to Tasceni to announce his crops had been safely stored just as the Iceni’s are now at the winter stronghold in the forest of Thetford. I knew you would want my father present for Andraste’s response, so I prepared.”

“And this morning Addedomaros arrived. Your seer gifts are impressive,” I said as I pressed my hand to the skin of the oak’s bark in greeting before Rhan and I continued walking.

Rhan snorted. “Foretelling my father’s visit has far more to do with the fact that he cannot seem to stay away from Tasceni than any gift I’ve been given.”

I glanced at Rhan. Her face was shadowed and difficult for me to read. “Have you quarreled again with him?”

She sighed. “Not directly. But I believe it will always be awkward for him to be near me. He cannot seem to reconcile the fact that I am more seer than daughter now.”

“Why can’t you be both?” I asked.

Rhan waited so long to answer that I was trying to think of another way I could frame the question when she finally said, “Because my father is frightened of me.”

“You’ve not told me that before.”

She shrugged. “I’ve only come to realize it is true these past months, but I’ve suspected it since just before I left for Ynys Môn those many years ago. Remember the look on Father’s face that day I had my first vision at the pool?”

“I remember the day, of course,” I said. “But all I recall about Addedomaros is the fear I saw in his eyes when I recounted how you almost fell into...” My voice faded as I realized the truth. “The fear he showed wasn’t because you’d almost drowned.”

“No,” Rhan said softly.

“And that is why he sometimes speaks abruptly to you, or ignores you completely.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll talk with him about it,” I said.

“It won’t help,” Rhan said quickly. “It will only humiliate him.”

I was silent as we continued to walk toward Andraste’s shrine. We had taken to visiting the goddess together every day after I trained with the warriors. Sometimes Rhan and I left the goddess offerings. Sometimes, like today, we brought beeswax to rub into the wood of her statue to protect it against the rain so that Andraste would shine her welcome on all who passed this way to enter Tasceni. As the large wooden statue came into view, I said, “Rhan, if Addedomaros is frightened of you, then why does he keep returning to Tasceni? He could simply wait for me to send word when it is time to attack Camulodunum.”

“It is not to me he is returning,” she said.

Before I could ask Rhan what she meant, Enfys and Ceri ran up to us, both girls talking excitedly at once. They were followed closely by the two half-grown wolves who never let my daughters out of their sight.

“Mama! Mama! We did it. Sunne and Mona and Briallen helped, but we did it!” Ceri shouted.

As they reached us the scent of blood came with them, metallic and heavy. The girls’ tunics and faces were blood spattered. Their braids were coming undone. Ceri’s sleeve was torn almost all the way off. From the wrists down, their hands were scarlet, like they’d dipped them in a vat of blood. They carried bows slung across their backs, but their arrow quivers were empty.

My stomach went hot as my face went cold. I thought my knees would buckle and automatically reached for the short sword I strapped around my waist every morning. “Where are you injured? What has happened? Where is Briallen?”

“Oh, Mama, we are fine,” Ceri said with the same innocently dismissive tone children always use with worried parents. “Briallen’s back there with—”

“We killed a boar,” Enfys interrupted as she placed her bloody fists on her narrow hips and beamed with pride. She even smiled, reminding me of the open, happy child she had been before the Roman attack.

Ceri frowned at her big sister. “I wanted to tell Mama!”

Enfys raised one brow. She looked and sounded so much like my mother that longing for Arianell speared through me. “It wasmyarrow that brought him down,” she insisted. “Briallen even said so.”