"Deirdre says to tell you about the sickness. But, Commander, you know about that! I've been talking about the way she was before the sickness. It was only after that she changed."
"Sickness? What sickness? And what should I know of it? We've had no talk of sickness, Donuil. You're saying a sickness changed her?" I looked intently at Cassandra, who gazed solemnly back at me from great, pale grey eyes. "A sickness changed the colour of her hair and eyes? Donuil, are you talking about magic again?"
"Aye, Commander Merlyn, I am." He nodded and his gaze was as unblinking as his sister's. "And my sister is the living proof of its existence."
I moved across to share Cassandra's couch, drawing her into the bend of my arm and kissing her temple, looking across the top of her head at her brother. "Tell me," I said.
The story he told me was a strange and wondrous one, and I believed it, word for word. Whether it told of magic or not, however, is something I cannot say, even to this day.
On Midsummer's Day, in the ninth year of little Deirdre's life, through the freakish anger of some Erse god, the light of high summer had been almost completely eclipsed by the darkness of an enormous storm that uprooted trees and blew down buildings and caused rivers to overflow their banks, flooding fields and houses. Scores of people were killed and hundreds injured, and cattle drowned by the dozens. And in the middle of the confusion, young Deirdre of the Lilac Eyes disappeared.
Her father's men searched for her in the aftermath of the great storm, hunting high and low for three days, at the end of which they pronounced her dead. And as they were preparing her funeral rites, she walked into the middle of them, dazed, with eyes staring.
They dried and cleaned her and put her to bed, and her father's finest healers cared for her, feeding her potions to break the fever that racked her. Watched over and protected by the tribal priests, the child tossed and turned for four days and her fever persisted, burning up her tiny body and ravaging her reserves of strength. Then, on the fifth day after her return, the fever receded and she awoke and described, with crystal clarity, the place where she had been during the storm. She told of a rocky cavern, reached by a passage slanting downward from a cave on die side of a hill, and filled with skeletons and treasures. When questioned as to how she had reached this hillside, who had shown her the place and why she had gone, she would not answer, but she described the route she had taken, and the landmarks that marked the way.
Her father Athol sent a group of warriors immediately to seek this place, and they found it without difficulty, although more miles away than they had thought to look. And they found the skeletons, and the treasure—a hoard of ancient weapons made mostly of bronze, and bars of gold, silver and iron, as well as jewellery.
In the meantime, however, even before the searchers had set out, Deirdre's fever returned, more virulent than ever, and the child fell rapidly towards death. The fever rose and rose, beyond the point where any healer had ever known a fever go without causing death, and then it levelled off and stayed at that pitch for days. The flesh fell, almost visibly, from the child's body until nothing was left but bone and sinew. The priests and healers tried everything to keep the child hydrated. They bathed her constantly. They fed her with water sweetened with honey, administered through tubes of animal intestines fed down her throat. And they waited for her to die.
But she did not die. She hovered on the edge of death for six full weeks, and then she began to recover. She regained her weight and her strength and her smile. But her hair had lost its colour and so, to the horror of everyone who saw it, had her eyes. People began to whisper, and then to say aloud that Deirdre of the Lilac Eyes had died, and had been replaced by a changeling. And the only person who might ever have convinced them that the truth was different—the child herself—made no attempt to do so. She came back from her illness to live an alien life among them. She never responded to their voices and she never spoke again.
In spite of the fact that they had all benefited by the child's experiences and been enriched by the treasures of the cavern she had found, her people grew more and more afraid, as people will, of what they saw as her magical experiences. As time passed and the strangeness of the changes in her became more and more widely known, the word was put about that she had been accursed, and that no good would come to anyone associated with her. The treasure, people whispered, was but the god's replacement fee for having abducted the child. It was obvious, they said, that the child had fallen-or been cast down-from being blessed by the gods. From being a child beloved by all, she became a creature feared without cause and shunned by all but those who loved her most dearly—her father Athol, and her favourite brother, Donuil.
In die aftermath of the illness, unable to understand what had happened to her, but convinced that she was still his beloved sister, Donuil had spent long hours and days with the child, learning again, from the beginning, how to communicate with her. He learned that her mind had emerged unscathed from her illness, that her soul, the essence that made her who she was, had remained intact. And, over the next five years, they had developed the hand-language they used between them. At the end Of that time, Deirdre had fallen sick again, although not so seriously. She had developed a fever and had taken to her bed. The following afternoon, while Donuil and his father were hunting, she had disappeared again, unseen by anyone, and this time she had not returned. They had all assumed her dead, until today, five years later. And now I had to sit in silence, seething with impatience, while Donuil learned the story of his sister's disappearance, by watching and translating the messages of her flying fingers.
It was a story that did not take long in the telling, although there were aspects of it that were both confusing and mystifying. In listening to Donuil's translation of what his sister's hands were telling him, I was frustrated by 'my inability to question her directly. There was far more to her story, I felt, than what she was telling us, but I had no way of asking her for more details, not knowing what details there were to be added.
She remembered nothing of her second illness, nothing at all. She had no memory of leaving her bed or her father's hall. She knew only that she had awakened one bright summer morning among complete strangers who, by their familiar treatment of her, were obviously not strangers at all. These people knew her extremely well, although she had no recollection of ever having seen them before. They knew, for example, that she could neither speak nor hear, and they communicated with her by touch and by broad hand-signals, Their treatment of her was rough, but neither intolerant nor unkind, and yet she was treated as a servant, a menial. Knowing who she was, but not how she had come to be where she was, Deirdre had tried to run away from the encampment that night, but she had been caught without difficulty and put directly to work, performing tasks that were strange to her, but to which her body responded with the ease of long practice.
She had noticed her clothes, too. They were alien and coarse, but they clung comfortably to her body with the ease of long wear and they were very obviously hers. Frightened and confused, she suspected that she was no longer in the land her father ruled, but she had no idea where else she might be. She had never travelled beyond her father's lands.
Days later, she came face to face with her own reflection in a bronze mirror and fainted dead away with terror. She did not recognize the face she had seen. It was a woman's face. Hers had been a girl's. A second, fearful look had convinced her that she had not lost her mind and was not insane, but that somehow, by some evil magic, she had lost much of her self; she had lost years of her life, during which she had grown from being a child to being a woman, with no knowledge of the change or the passing years. And now she lived a life of silence among strangers.