The Forest Path

It was Brighid who gave me that first hooded cloak, sewn by her own hands of fine wool dyed a deep, rich crimson. She would wrap me in it whenever we would go into the village as a reminder to my father of his sin. The original scarf had long since fallen to pieces, but he did not miss the meaning of that cloak.

As I would outgrow one red cloak Brighid would fashion another, larger one until I was old enough to sew my own garments. I knew my own story well enough by then to keep up Brighid's torment of my father of my own accord. I became a familiar sight in the village and at the keep, always cloaked in red no matter the season or the weather, a basket on my arm, trading the bounty of the forest for things that Brighid and I could not produce on our own. I went out of my way to be sure my father saw me; it was like waving a bright cloth at a bull and I'm not ashamed to say I enjoyed it immensely. I was young, after all, and had all the hurt of a child scorned by her sire.

By the time I had matured enough to weary of the game, my cloak had become a fixture, a sort of personal sigil. And so I've kept to it, although I almost never wear it with the hood drawn up anymore unless it is raining and I sometimes trade it for a plain, serviceable grey one if I go up to the keep. I no longer have the desire to taunt my lord father and besides, the gods have repaid him handsomely. Of his six sons, five were carried off by the bloody flux that swept through the tuath four summers ago. The last, his heir, is little more than an idiot after his head was cracked open in a fall from a horse.

True to Brighid's words, he has never begotten another son but the keep overflows with daughters. As of last spring, I have nine half sisters. I have never spoken to a one of them, but I've seen them often enough. All of them have locks the color of the sunset, and I could use the eldest as a mirror. The gods have a dreadful sense of humor.

I am accepted readily in the village for all my rather unusual origins but I am not very comfortable there. I am only at home in the quiet of Brighid's glade or in the solitude of the forest where I forage for rare plants and gather berries. Brighid has shared with me all a priestess's knowledge of the earth that shelters us, of the plants and creatures with whom we share it, and I've made quite a comfortable living for us searching out those herbs, roots, and flowers that grow deeper in the forest than most dare to go. But I do dare for I know the forest intimately, or perhaps it is fairer to say the forest knows me. It was the place of my birth, after all. If Brighid has been my mother, the forest has been my father, shaping me to its rhythms and cadences, molding me into one of its creatures. I am at peace there as nowhere else, although Brighid fears it and often begs me not to go so far into the interior.

"Ruadh," she will say now and again, "the wolf waits for you there. I have seen it, when you were just a babe. The wolf will consume you and you will be lost to me. Stay away from the forest path, my child, for your doom lies that way."