PrologueÂ
Hiraeth (Welsh): A proto-Celtic word that describes a longing for one’s homeland, grief for a past that’s lost. A deep homesickness. It has no direct translations.
There are times when I wake in the darkness before dawn
with that familiar feeling of displacement.
Everyone has this sensation from time to time—
it’s a product, perhaps, of a life well traveled or shifting circadian rhythms.
Anyone roused from a deep sleep too quickly
may wake with hackles raised in anticipation of some ancient predator.
But I wake in a vortex of vertigo,
wondering not where I am but when I am,
and no matter what princely place or quaint cottage I find myself in,
my ancestral home is my touchstone—my true north.
It is the longing before I open my eyes.
But time grinds us down like grain on the quern.
We are alchemized by those who came before us,
and so are these places and monuments they have touched.
What home do I have to hope for anymore?
Everywhere we look, the complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.
– Vincent Van GoghÂ
Introduction: The Ancestors
My great-great-grandmother was born ninety-nine years before me. She was known throughout the isles as a great healer. Men came down from the highest mountains and up from the singing-sand beaches of the mainland to seek her wisdom. She refused to sleep inside her roundhouse, preferring the stars as her blanket. The stories of her told around the hearth are the tales of a wild woman with something in her older than even the stone circle she danced around. But as wise as she was, she was also feared. “Women are always feared for their knowledge,” my grandmother told me.Â
This wild-wise woman, my grandmother’s grandmother, was called Ailsa too. She died before I was born, her namesake, but she speaks to me through the whistle of wind in the trees, the chatter of the birds deep in the forest, and the practical wisdom my grandmother has raised me with. Like Enheduanna from the first civilization, she was the original astronomer priestess of our island. Our family were Druids before they were called Druids: me, my uncle Jord, and our first ancestor on this island, my seven times great-grandfather Ailef, who moved here carrying the stones that would become the great stone circle on the moor where I stand now. Our descendants would eventually call themselves Druids, a name meaning “knower of the oak.”Â
We walk barefoot, even in winter, to feel the story of the earth unfolding. It’s how we tell the future—through connectedness to the earth, not divination of the heavens. This is important to remember. Often, when our eyes believe they see magic, what we actually behold are the simple laws of nature, malleable in the hands of those who share the wisdom of the earth that is available to all. As a Druid, I can wield fire, heal the sick, predict the weather and the tides, and change the future, all without breaking the laws of nature. I am a vessel for wisdom, but there are things I’ve seen that even I couldn’t explain at first: solid rock melted, time stopped, and the true power of the standing stones.
And now, as I go about my daily routine—walking to the oak grove to pray, meeting with the other Druids for council at the stone circle, hanging fish in the smokehouse, tending the barley my father planted, and grinding grain and herbs—I feel a deeper purpose in the mundane because I can feel that the earth is preparing to change again, the way it did three hundred years ago when Ailef brought the stones here. There is another Great Shift afoot, and there will continue to be shifts in the earth’s energy as long as time exists. It has always been the way. Long ago, this land beneath our feet was covered by ice and uninhabitable to us. The same land we live on, which flourishes now with thick forests and groves, will one day be cut away. These isles will be treeless, with rolling green hills shorn for the animals that graze them, and eventually, one day, not so far off, the ice will come back to them. It’s hard to imagine, but all things are circular in nature. That’s why the stones take that shape. You see, one doesn’t need to be a time traveler to see the future. Foreknowledge simply requires a different perspective.Â
When you enter into the Druidic Order, there is a rite-of-passage ceremony on one of the main festival days: Yule, the winter solstice; Ostara, the spring equinox; Midsummer, the summer solstice; or Mabon, the autumnal equinox. Because I was born on the summer solstice, it happened on my seventeenth birthday, the first after I bled and developed my own moon cycles that initiated me into womanhood. We all gather for the main festival days, so everyone on our island and the surrounding islands was there to bear witness to my initiation into the order. And often, on the cross quarter days, those days that fall directly in between the main festival days, we travel to nearby stone circles on other islands to bear witness to their ceremonies. This occurs on Imbolc, between the winter solstice and spring equinox; Beltane, between the spring equinox and summer solstice; Lughnasadh, between the summer solstice and autumnal equinox; and Samhain, between the autumnal equinox and Yule, the winter solstice. If you are chosen to become the head Druid one day after you have proven yourself to the order, then you have another ceremony in which you have to die to your old self and be born again on one of these cross-quarter festivals.Â
It is told that when my ancestor Ailef became the head Druid after the stones were erected, he disappeared into the stones as a man and came back something more. My great-great-grandmother Ailsa drowned and came back to life. Ray, the head Druid before me, lived on the snowy mountain peaks alone for seven moons and froze into a block of ice before he came back to tell the tale.Â
Logically, I told myself this ceremony occurred so there was not great competition over who would become head Druid. People in the village weren’t lining up to die because there was truly no magic in this reincarnation, only sheer will. Death stalked us enough in this time and often found us, so no one chased it down. Only one person in each generation would be willing to sacrifice themselves to be reborn; one courageous leader would emerge. Both of my parents left this world as smoke, and I had no interest in following them any time soon, or in being the head Druid, but the ancestors had different plans. In fact, the time between my entering the Druidic Order and becoming the head Druid was the shortest on record, and this is the chronicle of those seven hundred days.Â
Chapter 1: A Winter Solstice Wedding
An island off the western coast of Scotland, known today as the Outer Hebrides, 1800 BC
Ailsa
We were standing among the stones for the solstice ceremony just hours ago, as the Druids called the sun to ascend her throne for the shortest day of the year. Now, under the light of the stars and the surrounding circle of peat torches, I spoke different ancient vows, but a promise just as powerful. At sunrise and sunset on the solstices, the headstone in the stone circle was illuminated, and the ancestors came down to live among us and retrieve those who had died in the past wheel of the year from their burial mounds. The stones were the symbol of eternity, and rituals that extended beyond the realm of the living were saved for the sacred circle, performed the same way for a thousand years or more. I turned seventeen and officially became a Druid at the summer solstice ceremony. And today, at the winter solstice ceremony, I became a wife.Â
It was an honor to have my wedding to Aric coincide with the solstice celebration, and the landscape couldn’t have been a more welcome wedding guest. It was an open, windswept valley near the water that any bride from any time would have chosen as an ideal spot for her eternal vows. The fog had lifted, revealing the rugged cliff edges behind us, like ancient groomsmen standing in attendance. Any bride sound of mind would also have chosen my bridegroom, and the women in the village made that very clear, yet he was not my first choice. The more I tried to put that thought from my mind during our vows, the more it crept in, like a silent, unwelcome frost on a spring morning.Â
Everyone from our island and the surrounding islands attended our wedding ceremony. The people whose ancient roots were tied to the island gathered around their family symbols, primitive markings carved into the large menhirs, just as old as the blue and green-veined stones themselves. The more recently assimilated northerners, my bridegroom Aric among them, stood out in these most sacred of ceremonies, where they were gathered between stones or on the peripheries, not having an ancient, designated footing like those of us whose ancestors moved the stones into place. In the harsh firelight, their broad foreheads, straight noses, and towering height seemed enhanced. They were the predecessors of the Viking race, and their shadows on the stones gave them such formidability, towering over us during our vows.Â
Despite our differences, the overwhelming atmosphere of the ceremony was a joyful one: enhanced by melodious singing, the sound of waves crashing below, and the warm faces of friends and neighbors I had known my whole life looking rapt, proud even, as they watched a Druid priestess and a renowned warrior commit their lives to one another in a blood oath. Because our culture is matrilineal, I am considered elemental to this island and its ancient stones through my mother’s lineage, which goes back to the first inhabitants of the island. But my father was actually a foreigner too, and I look exactly like him. Tall and dark, heads above the other girls, I have none of the roan and honey of my mother, whose coloring was identical to my grandmother’s, whom I had lived with since my parents’ deaths. Until tonight. Tonight I moved out of my grandmother’s house and moved into Aric’s roundhouse. I felt like a plucked violet being passed around and sniffed, roots dangling in search of loamy soil I could belong to.Â
I don’t remember my mother, but my father has never left me. Five years ago I watched his funeral boat float away, aflame, as was his people’s custom. But as he gained speed and distance down the river that would empty him into the southern sea, I gathered him into me, and there he stayed. I wish he could see me tonight, in the light of the fires: my wild black hair braided neatly; the opalescent mother-of-pearl necklace that his own bride had worn catching the light, warm against my skin; my dark amber eyes reflecting the torch flames that lit up the night. He would be so proud to hear the people who said—in hushed tones, as if it were bad luck—that I looked just like him.Â
It’s true that the way in which you miss a parent that you knew and loved in this life is different from the longing for a parent you never knew. I have wished so many times to feel the embrace of my mother or have any recollection of the few days we had together before she died, especially now as I stood at the altar of wifehood, but the way I longed for something I had never known, a mother, was a duller ache than the sharp pang of grief that burned inside me since my father left me.Â
As our palms were bled and bound together to complete the ancient marriage rite, I wondered if other immigrants felt the same loneliness my father must have held inside him for so many years. I tried to look into my new husband’s lapis-colored eyes to reckon this, but he could hold my gaze for no longer than an instant before he darted his eyes elsewhere to meet congratulations with a smile or bowed his head in deference to Ray, the head Druid who performed our wedding ceremony. Why wasn’t he looking at me? I squeezed his huge hands, which lightly held mine, and asked him without words, heart to heart. Is it hard to wander the hills and river valleys of someone else’s ancestral home? To hunt and kill in a strange forest? To marry someone your parents never knew?
My father was from a land not unlike ours, and he knew that the boats were getting longer, the sails larger, and the voyages easier. Traveling from island to island was becoming our way of life, and cultures like ours were more mixed with the increased exchange of people, goods, and ideas. Despite this, my father never tried to return to his ancestral home. He acted like the only thing that had tethered him down to the earth was my mother. I often wondered why, in the twelve years I had with him after she died, he didn’t pack us up and take us back to his family. I guess it was because he knew I belonged here. And here I was on this day, so much a part of that place that I didn’t know if I lived in it or it lived in me.Â
I was called by the elder Druids when I was born because the earth sent them a sign that day. My father obeyed and agreed to rear me as a future Druid priestess. Maybe if he had gone back to his home or been allowed to take me, he wouldn’t have been so sad for all those years. I looked down at my pale, bare feet in the dark peat, and my vision went blurry with tears. I had thought of what I was trying not to think of.Â
Do not cry, I said to myself, gathering strength and grounding from the earth through my feet and up into my heart. I took a deep breath, feeling more present, and when I looked up, there he was, walking toward me from the cliffs with a defiant look in his eyes. He was the baby I was raised at the breast with, the boy I frolicked through the grain with, and the young man I had fallen in love with: my best friend, Ros. I hadn’t seen him in some time, but his presence made me feel less alone. I couldn’t help but smile at him over Aric’s shoulder, and in that moment, Aric smiled back at me, and our fate was sealed with a kiss.Â
The crowd cheered, and thoughts of my parents faded as quickly as they had overcome me. Evergreen garlands were draped around us, and winter flowers like viburnum and holly flew through the air and were tucked behind our ears and into our braids. Everyone was singing and kissing, huddled together under furs, and despite myself, a warmth crept over me. I wanted to believe it was for my marriage and the love showered on us by my people, but I knew it was because my best friend was back. I searched the crowd for Ros, instinctively, as I felt Aric’s large hand slip around my waist, guiding me on a path I could have, and had, walked in my sleep, down from the stone circle to the village longhouse, where we would celebrate the rest of the long night.Â
Chapter 2: The Wedding Feast
