EPILOGUE

Of all those who could have come, it was Valerius who followed her to the river’s edge; she was surprised about that.

“Airmid is holding Longinus,” he said, by way of explanation. “Madb and Huw found him lying on the field, and brought him as they fled. He may follow you yet, but not if we can hold him with us awhile longer.” He smiled the wry, familiar smile. “It would be very hard to lose you both in the same battle.”

I am not lost.

“No. I have walked with the dead long enough to know that. But I will grieve none the less. And wake and know the pain of a day without you. The world is made lesser by your passing.”

You can make it better, if you try.

“We can’t defeat Rome. The spirit of the war host is broken. There is no Boudica now, to hold it together.”

And will not be for years and generations. We were privileged to see the last of the daylight; now we are at dusk, in a time of mourning, the onset of winter before the next spring. Night follows day and there is cold and grief in the darkness, but there will be dawn again, when Rome is gone, and all that follows from it.

“I won’t be alive then, or our children, or our children’s children.”

No, but you can set the seeds for what can grow when the night lifts and the sunrise brings hope. The gods know nothing of time. They will be here, when those who need them come again, but to reach them again, the children must know what they have been, and what they can be. That is the task for now: to make sure the seed lies ready for the daylight.

The river lay broad in front of her, and the stepping stones, and the welcome on the far bank. She saw Dubornos there, and the crows that would guard her passage over.

Bán, I must go. He did not flinch at the name. She said, Call your daughter Bán if you would not keep the name to yourself. It is as good for a girl and a woman as a boy and a man. She leaned in and kissed him and said his other name. For the first time, it did not stick in her throat. Valerius, you must go back, and find what it is to live with both of your souls in balance, holding the two gods within you. That is the gift of all you have been.

“I know.” He was weeping, silently. His tears fed the river, and made it fast and beautiful and safe, that kept the lands of life separate from the lands of the dead.

She felt the brush of his caress as he left her, and returned it.

The river called her, and the land beyond it.

“Breaca?”

The voice was one she knew, and had known, and would always know. She turned, and Airmid was there, at the end, a singular presence, indistinguishable now from Nemain as she herself was indistinguishable from Briga, who had guided her life.

They met in a place where time had no meaning. She said, I will wait for you. I always have, through all the lifetimes.

Airmid’s smile was the radiance of the moon. “Sometimes I have waited for you, and will do again. I will be there when you call me.”

They parted, in no-time, and she stepped out across the first stone.

Her mother was there, and her father, and Stone came, young again and joyful, and brought Hail, the hound she had loved first, and an old grey battle mare, and she saw, finally, what she had not seen when Dubornos stepped off the last stone; that the land beyond was the land of her heart, open, untouched, unsullied by human endeavour, and that the gods waited there, those she had followed and those she had not, offering the gift of their care, equally.