Magdalen Rising by Elizabeth Cunningham

have to tell me anything at all, but giving words to your vision accomplishes two things. One, the visions you speak will travel with you between the worlds instead of sinking back into the earth. Then when you encounter them in another time or
place, or even another form, you will be alert. Second, the more I know, the better I can prepare you.”
    â€œPrepare me?”
    â€œFor whatever is to come. Surely you understand that’s why you’re here with me.”
    â€œYes, but what I still don’t know is do you or don’t you know what’s going to happen to me?”
    â€œThere’s knowing and knowing,” she said unhelpfully. “I may catch glimpses of the cloak—the metaphorical cloak, remember?—but I don’t know the exact pattern or how it will look when it’s not just wafting in the air but flowing from your shoulders. Still, with my experience, there may be things I recognize, even at a distance. Places, languages.”
    â€œHow did you recognize the place with all the walls? I thought you had always lived on Tir na mBan.”
    â€œNot always. For a long time, but not always. For an even longer time, I wandered. I spun a very long tale before I wound it back into this Valley.”
    Her voice changed its tone. It was no longer the voice of admonition or instruction or wry observation. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that it was no longer her voice alone. It seemed to come right up through the earth floor. It resounded in my head, as if the voice were also mine.
    â€œI have lived for ages and ages on this earth. I have been a queen. I have been a warrior. I have been a renegade. My life has been full of endings. Full of last battles and bitter retreats. Now I am a spinner of cocoons, a weaver of shrouds, a keeper of one of the secret places of refuge. There are others like me. We stir the cauldron of changes. We gaze on the moon’s dark face. We know that what seems dead and gone forever will one day return, throw off the shroud, burst from the cocoon.
    â€œO Maeve Rhuad!” She suddenly wailed my name.
    The hair rose on my neck. Inside my head bees woke and swarmed. She stared, the thread suspended in the air. She wasn’t seeing me, there before her in the earth shelter. She was seeing. And true seeing is a wild, alive thing.
    â€œO Maeve Rhuad, thou new moon, jewel of guidance in the night.” She chanted the words I’d heard in my last vision. Then she added a new one:

    O Maeve Rhuad, bright butterfly
how bright your flame
how bright your pulsing wing

    spread to the strong wind
spread to the fierce light.

    She cried out and stretched out her hand as if to stop someone or something.
    â€œIs it too soon?” she muttered to herself. “Is it too soon?”
    I could not see what she saw then, or know what she knew: how fragile those wings, how easily torn.
    When the Cailleach came out of her trance, she was tired and cranky. She scowled at me. Never mind that she had just called me jewel of the night, bright butterfly, and so forth. She didn’t seem to remember any of that.
    â€œNo more late hours on a school night,” she snapped. “Class begins tomorrow at dawn.”
    And it did. That morning and every morning for almost a year and a half I stayed with the Cailleach. It’s not easy to learn three and a half languages in that amount of time. (In case you’re wondering, I am counting as the half the P-Celtic more commonly spoken in Britain and Gaul.) The other three languages I acquired were Greek, Latin, and, yes, Aramaic. I also learned the rudiments of their alphabets, including the Celtic Ogham alphabet.
    It was a hell of an immersion course. I was awash in a rolling sea of languages. I’d no sooner master one vocabulary and grammar when another loomed, broke over my head, and took me under again. This crashing course might have been cruel if it had not been so