Merlin's Song of Binding

I swung around to face her. “You should never have come with me! You should have stayed back at Arbassa, where at least you’d be safe.”

Her gray-blue eyes examined me. “I don’t want to be safe. I want to be with you.”

I squashed a vine under my heel. “Why bother?”

“Because . . . I want to.” She glanced sadly at the dark water. “Despite what the lake told me.”

“What did it tell you?” She sighed heavily.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Remembering my own vision of Balor’s eye, I nodded. “All right. But I still don’t know why you want to stay.”

Something in the sky caught her attention, and Rhia looked up. Following her gaze, I found two distant shapes, weaving their way across the horizon. Although I could barely see them, I knew at once what they were. A pair of hawks, riding the breeze together. They flew almost as one, bobbing and turning in unison, in the way Rhia and I had moved as fishes.

“Aren’t they lovely?” she asked, her eyes following the birds. “If they are like the hawks in the Druma, they not only fly together, they build a nest together, a nest they share for their whole lives.”

All at once I understood. What tied the hawks to each other, what tied Rhia to me, had nothing to do with vines. Or ropes. Or chains of any kind.

I turned back to her. “I guess, Rhia, the strongest bonds are invisible. Maybe . . . the strongest bonds are of the heart.”

***

Merlin's Song of Changing

“No!” shrieked Cwen. “Pleasssse, Rhia. I am sssso full of remorsssse. Won’t you forgive me?”

Rhia crossed her leaf-covered arms. “Never.”

I felt a strange pang. The word never rang in my ears like a heavy door slammed and barred. To my own surprise, a feeling of sympathy rose inside of me. Certainly Cwen had done something terrible. Something she regretted. But hadn’t I also done things I deeply regretted?

I stepped close to Rhia, lowering my voice. “It’s hard, I know. Yet maybe you should forgive her.” She stared at me coldly. “How can I?”

“The same way my mother forgave me after what I did to her.”

At that instant, Elen’s parting words came back to me. The butterfly can change from a mere worm to the most beautiful creature of all. And the soul, my son, can do the same. I bit my lower lip.

“Cwen did something awful, to be sure. But she deserves another chance, Rhia.”

“Why?”

“Because, well, she could change."

"All of us, all living things, have the potential to change."

***

Blessed