“Grief does strange things to a person,” Biddy said. “You maybe haven’t lived long enough to see it. When I lost my first husband I lost sight of hope for a bit. If it hadn’t been for the boys, Sam and Clem, I would have found it hard to go on. But when you’ve got little ones wanting their supper or climbing on your knee to give you a hug, you do go on, no matter how badly it hurts. I felt alone. That was the worst part of it. And then the fellows came, Snake and Gull, all the way to Britain, and fetched me and the boys back here. I had no intention of marrying again; the hurt was too raw. If anyone had told me I’d wed that wild-looking black man with feathers in his hair and less than his full complement of fingers, I’d have thought it was a bad joke.” She smiled, the knife stilling in her hand. “Every day I ask the gods to bless Bran for his goodness in sending them for me,” she said softly. “I’m the luckiest woman in the world, Sibeal, to have found two such men in one lifetime. My Evan was the kindest husband anyone could want. Gull is . . . well, he’s like no other. He and I, we’ve each been through our share of sorrow and loss. And we’ve had rare happiness together.” Abruptly, she turned a searching look on me. “You’ll miss that, with the future you’ve chosen for yourself. You’ll never know the joy and terror of loving someone the way I love Gull, or the way your sisters love their men.”

“But I hear the voices of the gods,” I said. “And the great silences. The joy of the spirit must surely surpass the joy of the flesh.”

Biddy smiled. “It’s not just the flesh, though that is certainly a good part of it. If it was up to me, which it never would be, I’d say a person should wed first and have a couple of little ones, and then decide whether the life of the spirit is better and finer than an ordinary sort of existence.”

“But then, if you decided it was, you’d have to leave your family to become a druid. That would be doing things the wrong way around.”

“I’d have thought a person could do both,” Biddy said. “I’d have thought being a wife and mother, or a husband and father, might make a person wiser and more thoughtful. And that might make them better at being a druid or a priest or whatever it was. But nobody’s asking me.”