The Hallowed Isle Book Three by Diana L. Paxson

multitude below. The men were tired, food was low, and their water was almost gone. With the dawning, they would stake all on one last throw and ride against the enemy.
    The priestesses, huddled in their pale mantles against the chill, sat like a circle of stones, and like the stones, their strength was rooted in the earth of Britannia. With Igierne, they were nineteen—all the senior priestesses, and the most talented of the girls. She signaled to the drummer to begin her steady beat. Then she took a deep breath and let her own awareness sink down through the fluid layers around the island and deeper still into the bedrock that supported them. Slowly her pulsebeat steadied and her breathing slowed. Here, at the foundation of all things, there was neither hope nor fear. There was only pure Being, changeless and secure.
    She could have remained in that safe and secret place forever, but though her anxiety had faded, the discipline of years brought her back to awareness of her need, fueled by her determination and deeper even than her fear for her country, to protect her child. Slowly she allowed her awareness to move upward, trailing a cord of connection to the earth below, until she reached the level where her body sat once more.
    Igierne lifted her arms, and the drumming quickened. With the precision of long practice, the other priestesses stretched out their arms. One by one they connected, and as the circle was completed, a pulse of power flared from hand to hand. Now, with each breath, power was drawn up from the depths and through the body, out through the left palm to the hand it clasped and onward.
    Around and around, with each circuit it grew, a vortex that spiraled above the hearth. Igierne kept it steady, resisting the temptation to release it all in one climactic explosion of energy. In her mind she held the image of Merlin, offering him the cone of power to support his own wizardry. As the link grew stronger, she sensed men and horses, confusion and blood-lust, exaltation and fear.
    She held the circle even as she felt something flare towards him like a spear of light. But the shock as Merlin caught it shattered the link. For one terrified moment the spirits of the priestesses were tossed like leaves in a high wind. And then another power blossomed in the midst of them, rising from the hearth like a flame into which all other powers were subsumed.
    Bright as fire, serene as pure water, strong as the earth below, Brigantia Herself arose from the midst of Her priestesses and directed their joined powers towards the goddess image on the boss of Artor’s shield. Through Her eyes, Igierne saw the image blaze, saw an answering radiance in the faces of Britannia’s warriors, and saw, as the Saxons felt the land itself turning against them, the enemy break and flee.
    To Igierne, Aquae Sulis had always seemed an outpost of civility and culture in the midst of the wild hills. The warm stone of the temple of Sulis and the enclosure surrounding the baths in the center of the city glowed in the afternoon sunshine, and the tiled roofs of the Roman buildings around them had the mellow beauty of an earlier age. Even the Saxon war had not really touched it, though the land to the north had been trampled and torn by the two armies. Igierne had wept, passing the twin mounds where they had burned the bodies of the slain Britons and those of their foes. In life, she reflected, they had been enemies, but in death they all fed the same soil.
    The Saxons had kicked down a few doors when they searched Aquae Sulis for foodstuffs, but by Artor’s order, the town had been stripped of booty and abandoned before the armies arrived. If the place had not been full of wounded soldiers, she might never have guessed there had been a war.
    Those fighters who were still fit to travel were already off to their homes, or harrying the retreating Saxons. Most of the warriors who had been badly wounded were dead. Those who remained in Aquae