Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [99]
“Cataruna can do anything if she puts her mind to it,” he said with admiration. “Of course, you chose the right place, she tells me.” He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Mind you, we’re going to be right miserable before she is finished.”
Gwen was not certain she wanted to hear the rest, but Ifan told her anyway.
“She’s calling the rains. They should be here soon. And now that you are here,” he added with a smirk, “We can call the waters.”
Cataruna had spent the time while Gwen was gone in preparing her ground, creating a ritual circle by cutting into the turf and peeling it up, setting in a stone for an altar, and four more at cardinal points.
As directed, Gwen took her place at the southernmost stone; Ifan and Cataruna took west and east respectively, leaving Bronwyn with the north. And from that moment on, once Cataruna cast the boundaries of the circle itself to seal the power in, it was unlike any ceremony Gwen had ever taken part in before.
While Ifan played a small hand-drum, he and Cataruna chanted in a language that was nothing like anything that Gwen knew. The words sounded as if she ought to recognize them, but she didn’t; she did, however, get the sense that she knew the gist of what they were chanting without knowing the words.
It was vaguely disconcerting. After a while, she decided that they must be using one of the secret languages of the Druids, a tongue much older than the one Gwen knew.
As for the sense of what they were chanting—
They were begging the waters to rise to the surface and cover the land here. Begging the gods to allow this to take place, and asking the waters to remain this way for two fortnights.
This was not an exercise of power as such. This was more like going to an ally and asking for help.
At least that was how it felt to Gwen.
She began to lose herself in the chanting, and although it was broad daylight, she began to feel as if she were walking in a dream. A silvery mist crept over the valley, seeming to form from nothing and, in defiance of the bright sunlight, growing thicker by the moment. Soon it had closed in around them and rose to obscure the sky and the sun. Tiny sparks of glittering color hung suspended in it, winking gold and green. Each time she blinked, she got glimpses of . . . something else scuttling through the mist, just out of view. Something, or rather multiple things, just out of the corner of her eye, that vanished when she turned to look fully at them. She didn’t get enough of a look at any of these things to have said successfully what they were, but she did know that they weren’t, and had never been, human.
And she started to feel things from them; not all of them were particularly friendly. They weren’t inimical to the four of them, but as Gwen listened to the chanting, she understood that Ifan and Cataruna were striking a bargain with these creatures: For as long as the waters stood above the ground here, they were being given leave to do what they willed with any human (save the four of them) who tried to cross that they could catch and hold.
She shuddered a little; at first there was no acknowledgment from the creatures, but then, between one moment and the next, the circle was surrounded by them.
Their shapes faded in and out, ghostly and transparent at one moment, solid in the next. Nearest were the Gwragedd Annwn, the Ladies of the Lake, golden-haired and so fair of face that Gwen felt utterly coltish and rough hewn in their presence. Small wonder that they came; they were the guards and guardians of the Ladies at the Cauldron Well and were surely on speaking terms with Cataruna. They were tall, as tall as Ifan, and looking on them, Gwen suddenly wondered if the white-gold hair she shared with her sisters and Eleri