Chapter 8 Gwynedd
Gwynedd
The night we were born two comets appeared in the sky. Cathan would later say, one for each of us.
Ailith, head Druidess and the most talented midwife in Strathclyde, had known ours would not be an easy birth.
Months before, she had foreseen our delivery in the twilight of her dreams. She told no one of her vision in the hope she was wrong.
For in her dream, the birthing room became my mother’s grave.
Ailith worried, even with all her knowledge of ancient medicine, she would be unable to stop what would come to pass.
The Druidess searched the whole countryside for the legendary Holy Flower, which bloomed for one hour in the light of a full moon next to a stone circle’s most northern stone.
Picked within that window of time, the bud contained immense healing properties to extend one’s life threefold.
Picked at any other time, the flower was deadly poison.
Centuries ago, Holy Flower grew near every stone circle along the Ley Lines, those powerful streams of Earth’s energy. But knowledge of the flower, like the Ley Lines themselves, had become lost to time. Now only the legend of Holy Flower survived as a memory from the magic of old.
Ailith wondered if Cathan secretly had Holy Flower in his purse, harvested in the days before the Roman occupation.
He was the oldest Druid in the land, and no one knew his age or could remember when he had not been an Elder.
He was a towering man who looked like a winter tree with his long white robes and silver hair—and he had not aged further in all the years Ailith had known him.
His skin still glowed, his teeth were strong, and his eyes held the brightness of youth.
Ailith, either from pride or embarrassment, never asked Cathan if he had Holy Flower or knew where to find its bloom.
She had been unable and felt if the Earth would not relinquish the herb to her, then she was not meant to have it.
Instead, she used every medicine in her arsenal she could for my mother.
She made tinctures of black haw and burdock root, and brewed dandelion with lady’s mantle.
The risks of childbirth were always great, but my mother was strong and full in her maidenhood.
On the eighth moon, Ailith gave her a daily infusion of motherwort and lemon balm to strengthen her. The time for our arrival had come.
When the twin comets appeared, streaking across the sky in a trail of heaven’s fire, the celestial event caused Cathan to leave his observatory on the Druids’ island and make the journey to Cadzow, where my father was chieftain.
Our lands were the wealthiest in the Strathclyde kingdom, and my father, the great warrior Morken, was the king of Strathclyde’s right hand.
Cathan arrived at our doorstep looking like he had stepped from the mists of an ancient dream.
Brilliant gold plates adorned his neck and wrists, and he was dressed in his finest white ceremonial robes.
His right hand gripped an enormous wooden staff that extended from the floor to his shoulder—a staff most assumed was for walking, when really its purpose was to measure the stones and the stars.
Morken greeted Cathan with surprise and hoped the High Druid’s presence would bring good fortune for our birth. My mother had only recently revealed to my father she believed there would be not one of us but two.
My mother’s labor was surprisingly short. The pains came quickly but were well managed by the herbs, and much to my brother’s chagrin I was born first. Ailith cut the cord, and my mother sat back on the birthing chair to calm her breathing again.
“We’ll call her Gwynedd,” she said, having already chosen our names many moons ago.
She often had dreams of us in the chasm of sleep while we grew in her belly.
She knew with certainty we would be a boy and a girl.
She foresaw my fire-red hair, red as Boudicca’s, and she bet her favorite gold pendant my brother’s hair when he arrived would be black as pitch like our father’s.
Ailith’s assistant took me to the birthing waters to be cleaned while Ailith rinsed her hands and prepared for the second birth. She gave my mother a sip of warm bone broth. “Well done, Vanora. Now once more.”
My mother nodded when pain lanced through her like a sword, causing her to cry out. My father abandoned his seat by the hearth where he was sitting with Cathan and pulled back the curtain.
“There is trouble?” He knelt beside them and took Vanora’s hand.
Ailith looked to him. “The baby has not yet dropped. He is turned.” She tried to right the wrong but could not. Too much time was passing. “I believe the cord is wrapped around him.” Her dream nine months before had not been a dream but a prophecy.
My mother had aided in enough births to know my brother’s life was in peril. Her tone brooked no question at what must be done. “Then make haste. Do it quickly.”
Ailith nodded and readied the dagger, but still her hand waivered.
My father paled when he saw the blade. “Wait,” he said, suddenly breathless. “Will she survive?”
Ailith’s stricken look was answer enough.
Cathan, who had stayed silent in his chair by the fire, watched the flames bend and bloom in the hearth and spoke softly to the room. “Ailith. One twin cannot survive without the other. They both must live.”
Still tethered to her pain, my mother managed to give my father a smile.
In that moment she was the vibrant girl he had married in the sacred grove on Partickhill, the young beauty the Bards sang songs about.
“I will see you in the next life,” she promised, knotting her fingers tightly in his. “Remember my wishes.”
My father nodded, unable to speak. He was the fiercest fighter in all the North, but on this night his back was bowed, the weight of the Fates too much to bear. He watched helplessly as Ailith guided the blade.
“Forgive me,” Ailith pleaded to them both, for in the end she had failed.
With the blade’s cut, my mother’s blood became a newfound river on the floor.
Ailith dropped the knife with a clatter and pulled my brother out.
She worked quickly to unravel the cord wrapped tightly around him and help him find air.
My brother let out a wailing cry, his chest blowing a bright horn announcing that he lived.
My mother reached out to touch his face and said his name. Then she closed her eyes.
My father was the one who held my mother’s hand as she died.
His eyes remained fixed on her with the unflinching gaze of a warrior on the battlefield, watching another leave this world.
When her life ebbed and her spirit departed, a new vacancy filled the room where she had once been. No one spoke in the aftermath.
He carried her body from the birthing chair and laid her gently on the bed, where he sat beside her and smoothed her hair.
His eyes met Ailith’s, and his gaze settled on the midwife’s hands covered with blood.
He turned to Cathan, barely able to contain his anguish.
“Did you know she was to die? Is that why you came tonight?”
Cathan shook his head. His eyes held no answers, only the reflection of the firelight. “I knew they were to be born.”
Morken turned to Ailith. The Druidess midwife was a seer, and she must have foreseen the death. “The truth!”
Ailith nodded, the salt of tears on her tongue. The price for our survival had been too great. “I dreamed of it once. But I’d hoped I could change the outcome.”
Morken turned away, no longer able to contain his grief.
He and our mother had been married barely a year.
In that time, he had given her all his tenderness, and she took it with her to the afterlife.
The door to my father’s heart all but closed on that day to everyone, including us.
He turned to Cathan, his voice harsher than he ever would have dared to talk to the High Druid before. “Tell me. Why did you come tonight?”
“The twin comets in the sky,” Cathan said softly. “Twins bring the waters of magic into the world, and I believe your children will bring an ocean.”
Morken scoffed with a bitter laugh. “An ocean of magic? Yet not enough to save their mother.”
Years later when my brother and I learned how to sift memories, we sifted this moment. My father’s words wounded us the most because they were true. My mother had surrendered her life for us, and my father never forgave us.
Ailith’s assistant held my brother swaddled. Her white Druid’s robes were stained with blood. Red and white were the colors of the Netherworld, the place where the living cannot go.
A hard, cold flatness entered my father’s eyes as he stared at his crying son with hair as black as his own.
“Would you care to hold him?” she offered.
He ignored her and strode to the door. His grief unbridled, he barked out orders to ready his horse as if there were a great battle to be waged outside.
After he had gone, Cathan allowed the full weight of his remorse to show.
“Ailith, forgive me,” he whispered, because he knew Ailith, deep in her heart, believed he had the knowledge to save my mother.
“Some magic cannot be wielded. Some paths cannot be changed. In the wild of the world, there are happenings set in stone.”
Even if Ailith understood, she did not agree. There were many myths of divine children left motherless in order to set their feet firmly on their path. But Vanora had died in her care, not some legend of old.
The Bard to Cadzow, a man named Oli, appeared at the door in solemn silence with the birthing book in hand. Crushed befuddlement rested in his eyes. Only the eve before, he had been leading the court in merry song for preparation of our birth. How quickly life had turned.
“Record their names in the book,” Cathan ordered. “Both their names.”
Usually a girl, unless she was born a queen, was not recorded in the birth registry. Oli did not question Cathan’s order, for the Druids followed the Old Way, with the belief there was no difference between sex.
He wrote our names in the finest script:
Gwynedd and Merlin, born in the year 540.
Before Cathan left, he hung a birch tree branch above our cradle. The birch is the first tree at the edge of the forest and marks the beginning of a journey. The tree possesses both male and female catkins. So too did the birch mark the beginning of ours.
The fact you are reading these pages now means your journey has begun, and the time has come to unearth my memories, for the world is depending on us.
You are wondering how my diary came to be in your hands.
The simplest answer is by design. Merlin had the idea, and Taliesin swore he would help protect the book, and we have tied these words to each other through time with a powerful triskelion.
For a single lifetime is only a small part of a much bigger story, and to understand the part you play, first you must know mine.
We may not share the same memories, but we are the captain of an ancient ship, and as powerful as the mightiest magicians of old.