The Forest Path

On the warm autumn day of my birth, my lady mother had gone down to the edge of the forest to gather the oak nuts falling like rain from the huge old trees. She had with her some few of her ladies and several serving women to carry the large baskets. It had still been some weeks before the expected birth and the duties of the mistress of so great a keep as my father's did not permit much leisure for even a heavily pregnant woman.

But as the day wore on her labor pangs came upon her suddenly and fiercely, and for all that I was early I was impatient and would not wait for the shelter of the keep. Thus, I was born not as planned, in the luxury of a fine bed with hangings of silk, and midwives and Druids to ease the birth and drive off evil spirits. No, I arrived amid the leaves and moss at the verge of the cursed forest as the sun slipped behind the hills and the shadows blurred the sight of those who bore witness.

My mother's ladies were experienced in such things and delivered her of me without incident. One of them wrapped me in a soft woolen scarf she'd been wearing. It was a rich crimson - the first of many red wrappings to cover me.

Perhaps it was some dangling piece of the mother-cord and the gathering gloom that deceived their vision; perhaps it was the stress and anxiety of the unexpected delivery; perhaps it was simply a case of seeing what is expected. To this day, I do not know why. But when at last a litter had been brought and my mother and I borne back to the great keep, my mother's attendants announced she had been delivered of the seventh son. So, when my father took me from my swaddling to inspect me and found not another dark haired son but a red headed daughter, they tell me his shout shook the very stones of the keep.

The High Priest sent his underlings to fetch the afterbirth that he might read what it could tell as my father interrogated the women. With sword points at their throats, they all swore oaths to the gods old and new that they'd seen a son, even after my father slew one of them while the others watched. Old Siona the washwoman, who witnessed it all, told me once that the mutterings began right then.

When the Druids returned hours later, they reported the afterbirth was gone. The High Druid then declared I must be a changeling, that the spirits of the forest had stolen the magical seventh son for their own and left me in his place. No one ever thought to wonder how this could have been managed when I had been in plain sight of a half dozen women from the moment of my birth. No one ever thought that perhaps the beasts of the forest had devoured the afterbirth or that the Druids, being unfamiliar with the country, had simply looked in the wrong place. No, the High Druid had spoken; I was a changeling.

Siona says that my lady mother alone refused to believe the High Druid's word and perhaps if she had lived all would have been different. But she sickened of the womb-fever and died three days later, before she could even give me a name. Any lingering doubts about my status were then removed and my lord father, seemingly twice bereaved in a matter of days, took swift action.