"By the taste. You can only know a good wine if you have first tasted a bad one."
Wicca turned Brida around to face the fire, then moved on to the next Initiate. The fire picked up the energy of her Gift so that it could be made manifest in her. At that moment, Brida was watching a sunrise, a sun that would, from then on, light the rest of her life.
"Now you must go," said the Teacher as soon as the sun had risen.
"I'm not afraid of my Gift," Brida told him. "I know where I'm going and what I'm going to do. I know that someone helped me to arrive here.
"I've been here before. There were people dancing and a secret temple built to celebrate the Tradition of the Moon."
The Teacher said nothing. He turned to her and made a sign with his right hand.
"You have been accepted. May your path be one of peace in times of peace, and of combat in times of combat. Never confuse one with the other."
The figure of the Teacher began to dissolve, along with the desert and the stone. Only the sun remained, but the sun began to become one with the sky. Then the sky grew dark, and the sun became more like the flames of a fire.
She was back. She remembered everything now: the noise, the clapping, the dancing, the trance. She remembered having taken off her clothes in front of all these people, and now she felt rather awkward. But she also remembered her meeting with the Teacher. She tried to master her feelings of shame and fear and anxiety--they would always be with her, and she must get used to them.
Wicca asked the three Initiates to stand in the very middle of the semicircle formed by the women. The witches joined hands and made a ring.
They sang songs that no one now dared to accompany; the sounds flowed from their barely open lips, creating a strange vibration, which grew ever shriller until it resembled the cry of some crazed bird. At some point in the future, she would learn how to make those sounds. She would learn many more things, until she became a Teacher, too. Then other men and women would be initiated by her into the Tradition of the Moon.
All of this, however, would happen at the appointed moment. She had all the time in the world, now that she had found her destiny again, and had someone to help her. Eternity was hers.
Everyone appeared to have strange colors around them, and Brida felt slightly bewildered. She liked the world as it had been before.
The witches stopped singing.
"The Initiation of the Moon is finished and complete," said Wicca. "The world is now a field, and you will work to make sure that there is a good harvest."
"I feel strange," said one of the Initiates. "Everything's blurred."
"What you're seeing is the energy field that surrounds each individual, their aura, as we call it. That is the first step along the path of the Great Mysteries. The sensation will soon fade, and later I will teach you how to awaken it again."
With one swift, agile movement, she flung her ritual dagger to the ground. It stuck fast, the handle still trembling with the force of the impact.
"The ceremony is over," she said.
Brida went over to Lorens. His eyes were shining, and she felt how very proud he was of her and how much he loved her. They could grow together, create a new way of living, discover a whole Universe that lay before them, just waiting for people of courage like them.
But there was another man, too. While she was talking to Wicca's Teacher, she had made her choice, because that other man would be able to take her hand during difficult moments, and lead her with experience and love through the Dark Night of Faith. She would learn to love him, and her love for him would be as great as her respect. They were both walking the same road to knowledge, and because of him she had reached the point where she was now. With him, she would one day learn the Tradition of the Sun.
Now she knew that she was a witch. She had learned the art of witchcraft over many centuries and was back where she should be. From that night on, Wisdom and knowledge would be the most important things in her life.
"We can leave now," she said to Lorens. He was gazing with admiration at this woman dressed all in black; Brida, however, knew that the Magus would be seeing her dressed all in blue.
She held out the bag containing her other clothes.
"You go ahead and see if you can get us a lift. I need to speak to someone."
Lorens took the bag but only went a little way toward the path through the forest. The ritual was over and they were back in the world of men, with their loves, their jealousies, and their wars of conquest.
Fear had come back, too. Brida was behaving oddly.
"I don't know if God exists," he said to the trees around him.
"And yet I can't think about that now, because I, too, am face-to-face with the mystery."
He felt he was talking in a different way, with a strange confidence he had never known he possessed. But, at that moment, he believed that the trees were listening to him.