Mostly he would be himself again if he could, and not know what he learned up there at Caer Donn—do you understand that, Meadhbh and Ceallach?"
"Yes," said Meadhbh, and Ceallach nodded soberly.
"Do you?" their father said, staring at them strangely sharp. "Then get him ahorse again."
"We?"
"Not in the wood or down the road; not beyond sight of the walls. Say that I gave you leave to ride and ordered him to watch you."
Meadhbh looked toward the high hall, thinking of their mother, not wanting to ask whether their mother knew about this riding, because she wanted it. Ceallach had her hand and tugged it; so they went racing back to find Domhnull and get their ponies and a horse.
That was the best day of any day since their father had come home, even riding a sedate pace along the hedges close about Caer Wiell; for Domhnull's eyes grew bright again and he talked of the crops and the new foals and calves, and laughed to see the lambs playing in the meadow. Then they felt like laughing too, feeling that they had done something good and that the world was right again, at long last and overdue: that they had been wrong to doubt it.
But when Domhnull had come to the farthest point they might ride, at the end of the fence, he drew his tall horse to a halt and sat staring out north and west. The border lay that way. Caer Donn did. He only sat and sat, his horse cropping the grass, while the silence grew long and painful.
Ceallach urged Flann a little closer and looked up at Domhnull. "When we were lost," Ceallach said carefully, "there was a water horse; but Thistle sent it away."
"Thistle."
"We're too young, she said, to know her real name. When you have a name you can do magic on it. But I think it would be a mistake to try with her. The river horse—she gave us its name."
Domhnull was looking at them now, both of them. He was a man and grown, having gotten lines on his face and a new scar on his brow (too quick a scar), but he was looking at them eye to eye and heart to heart, as if he wanted to talk and had something boiling up inside him.
"I saw her," Domhnull said; but the greater thing stayed unsaid.
Meadhbh took that pouch which hung about her neck and offered it, although it was like giving her pony to someone else to ride, or letting someone rummage among her treasures. "It's my gift," she said. "You could carry it awhile. For memory, Thistle said. For hope, when there isn't any."
"Hope of what?" he said. He scared her, so harsh his voice was. But she doggedly refused to be put off, and covered her confusion by taking her gift out of its pouch so he might see it, a silver leaf held carefully between her fingers because of the wind. She held it to her nose, then offered it again.
"See. Smell. It's still new, after all this time. It makes me think how the woods smell when it rains."
He took it; and then he slowly rode away from them, beyond the point where they were to follow. He stopped and only sat there in the center of the pasture with his back to them.
She decided then what it was, and she reckoned that Ceallach understood, because he said not a thing either, but simply sat his pony waiting.
"I think we should ride back a ways," Meadhbh said finally, "and then maybe Domhnull will feel like coming home." "He might not, you know," Ceallach said. She thought of Donn then, of Domhnull riding that way alone. But she turned Floinn's head for home all the same, and Ceallach's Flann turned without his doing anything. "He has my gift with him," she said, though parting with it made her anxious, "and they have a magic on them, don't they? A virtue of finding. So he has to bring it back. Doesn't he?"
Ceallach simply shook his head, still looking worried, whether over the gift or for Domhnull or for both at once.
But in time they did hear him behind them, and turned to look when he came near, not riding fast, but fast enough for his long-legged horse to catch them.
"So, well," he said scowling. "You ought not to be off by your selves, didn't your father say that? Come on."
Their ponies took the pace of his long-legged horse, and they went briskly for a time—he would joke if he were men, or quarrel if we were his friends, Meadhbh thought, so he has to find some fault with us, that being all there is to do.
"Look," she said, finding welcome distraction, "the foal is lying down."
"Tired," said Domhnull after a moment, "and the sun is warm." He offered back her gift then. "It does smell sweet."
He pleased her by that last, that he thought her sensible enough to give a courtesy to, as if she were growing up all of a sudden. Then she spoiled it all by blushing. She felt the heat in her face and had to pretend to have all her mind on putting her gift away and hanging it about her neck.
She thought that she had made him feel better, all the same. He looked eased, could smile again—perhaps it was the Sidhe gift: she looked at Domhnull in a way she had never looked at any boy her age, and felt desolate and hopeless. He was a man already. Women from the smith's daughter to the scullery maids sighed after him; even Muirne, whose devotion they had had all their own—even Muirne had taken to doing small things for him; and somewhen she had gotten—happier, or younger, or at least different, for all that she was older than he was. So Meadhbh felt twice robbed; and once more —that it was the first thought in her life she was worried Ceallach might learn and laugh at her.
Then with a sigh she recovered all her sense and gave Domhnull up two breaths after she had first loved him, deciding to look him straight in the eye and to be his staunch friend, the way he was her father's; and Beorc was; and Rhys—o Rhys'.—and to go on riding out with him on summer days, as long as such days lasted.
Caer Wiell will not be here, she thought suddenly, having seen it the sudden way dreams unrolled at night between two blinks of the eye; and the leaf ached at her throat. She saw the land burned, changed, and smoke going up from blackened fields.
"Ceallach—"
He had got it too, the same awful dream. She saw it in the sudden pallor of his face, his glance toward her.
"What is it?" Domhnull asked, not the way someone might ask children, but anxiously.
"I had a dream just then," she said. "It seemed Caer Wiell was gone."
"There was a hill," said Ceallach while the horses plodded on, relentless, toward the walls. "It had bones under it."
"I never saw that," Meadhbh said.
"Caer Donn," said Domhnull, all hoarse. "It was Caer Donn you saw." He gathered the reins which he had let go slack. "Come." He put them to a quicker pace as if that could make them safe, to get them behind gates and walls.
"They had no business to be riding out in the first place," their mother said, over by the fire where she had gone to stand. Meadhbh looked at her distractedly, as if she had gone mad. With all that they had come panting up to the hall to say, that was what their mother settled on, with their father sitting still in his thoughts and Domhnull sweating and pale from their climb up the stairs. "The Bradhaeth loose and Caer Damh stirred up and they riding out as if there no trouble at all."
"I saw Caer Wiell burned," Meadhbh cried.
"Hush!" said their father. "Come here. How was it burned?"
Meadhbh shook her head and came to her knees by her father's chair. Ceallach hung on his other side.
"Perhaps," said Domhnull, "when she lent me her gift to hold, she confused things in it. Maybe it was some other place."
"And Caer Donn?" asked Ceallach. "I saw Donn, did I not?"