Winter's Mantle: (Daughter of Winter, Book 2) by Corina Douglas

Author:Corina Douglas [Douglas, Corina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780473512880
Publisher: Burning Legacies Publishing
Published: 2020-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

11

Cailleach

3rd Century BC, Ancient Scotland

Cailleach raised her hand to rub it against her brow, feeling every one of her thousand years after releasing the last mountain spring from winter’s icy grasp.

Her body ached as it always did near the end of winter, her soul drained from the power she’d exerted these last six months unleashing turbulent deluges, raging blizzards, and vicious thunderstorms. For nature required a balance, and it was her role to see its due.

And she had. Her lightning bolts had unerringly hit the trees struck by disease, her snowstorms burying the dens of those animals who had begun to dominate the forest, and the swollen springs and rivers had washed away all the dead debris, clearing the land like a fresh, blank canvas. And with the release of this last mountain spring, her role was finally complete. Because tonight was the eve of Beltane, the night before her sister, Brighid, would reign. Winter’s mantle had been paid in full, and Cailleach would finally be able to put her stone hammer away and replenish her power for the warmer half of the year.

The thought made her heart race. Because this summer she wouldn’t spend that time alone. This summer, she would share it with the Druid.

Tritus.

Against her will, her eyes shifted to the object of her thoughts.

Tritus was crouched protectively over some young seedlings, his brows knitted together in concentration as his hands hovered protectively around the delicate stem of a pine tree. She watched in silence as he used his magic to thicken and lengthen its thin trunk, at the pine needles that extended to twice their length until they resembled the fifty other seedlings that lay similarly nurtured along the bank of the stream.

Tritus had worked tirelessly alongside her these last six months, and Cailleach marveled at the power he now wielded. A power that had been awakened. She suspected that, just like his horns, his power had flourished when the prophecy enacted by her brother’s machinations had led them together.

It was a power inherited from his father, because Cernunnos, her older brother, had not only been able to master the weather as she did, but to nurture the earth as well. It was a complementary suite of powers that he, together with their mother and father, had wielded to establish this world they lived in.

When winter’s mantle had been forced upon her, the balance of that power had shifted. No longer was there a fair trade-off between death and new growth, because Cailleach had only been given the power to wield the weather—a power of death and destruction. Although she’d managed to twist and bend the role to her will. By living with mortals, and on the land itself, Cailleach had been able to understand where the scales of nature were unbalanced. So when she unleashed her power, she made sure that the center of her storms were directed to those areas that needed eradicating, and the periphery of those storms affected those areas that needed replenishing.

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