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It had begun two years earlier when the skies refused to clear. In the spring of 1315, rain fell across much of Europe with a stubborn persistence. It soaked the soil day after day, week after week. The spring turned to summer and still the rain did not relent. The air remained cold and damp, and under such conditions the grain refused to ripen. Fields that should have turned gold with harvest instead rotted where they stood. Farmers carried what grain they could salvage indoors, storing it in urns and clay pots in desperate attempts to keep it dry. Straw and hay could not cure beneath the endless wet sky, leaving livestock without fodder. The earth itself became too heavy with water to plow, making even the hope of the next season uncertain.
Food grew scarce.
Prices rose quickly—doubled in England and Ireland between spring and midsummer. Salt, the one reliable method for preserving meat, became nearly impossible to produce in the damp weather, as brine could not evaporate. What little remained climbed from thirty to forty shillings, a cost beyond the reach of most.
By 1317, the famine reached its cruel peak. That was the year Audloed was born.
The rains finally eased that summer and the seasons slowly returned to their proper rhythm. But by then the damage had already been done. People weakened by hunger fell easily to disease—pneumonia, bronchitis, tuberculosis. Seed grain had been eaten in desperation, leaving fields barren even after the weather improved. It would not be until around 1325 that food supplies steadied and populations began to recover.
Audloed’s first breath was drawn in a world already exhausted. His parents understood what such hardship meant. They had lived through it, and they were determined their son would never face it helplessly as they had. From an early age they taught him not merely how to survive, but how to read the land itself. From his father he learned the bow—how to track quietly through brush and meadow, how to draw the string without a sound, and how to hunt when livestock failed and granaries stood empty. From his mother he learned a different kind of knowledge. She showed him the plants that grew along hedges and riverbanks, the herbs hidden among grasses, and which leaves could soothe a fever or dull pain. In a world where physicians were rare and coin rarer still, such knowledge was life itself. Looking back, some might say that even then his path was beginning to take shape—that from childhood he was being shaped into a healer.
When he was older, another life entered his story.
She was four years younger than he was and would come to be known as his sister, Fiadh. But they did not share blood. Audloed found her one afternoon while wandering the meadows near his home, as he often did when the weather allowed. She was alone, a small figure among tall grasses and wildflowers, with no family to call her back.
At first they met only in those open fields, children inventing games beneath the wide sky. Eventually he spoke of her to his parents. They approached the girl gently, cautiously—like coaxing a frightened creature from the forest. In time she followed them home.
Her name suited her well. Fiadh came from an ancient root meaning “wild,” and for a while she lived up to it. Audloed had never had a sibling before, nor would he ever again. The small settlements around them meant there were few children his age, and those he did meet were only passing companions of an afternoon’s play. There were no schools for them to attend either. Outside of church instruction, formal education simply did not exist in Ireland at that time. The structured primary schools familiar today would not appear for another five centuries.
And so, in a childhood shaped by famine, wilderness, and quiet lessons from the land, Fiadh became the one constant presence beside him.
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Yet even while he worked, another curiosity tugged quietly at him.
He found himself drawn not only to the fields, but to the hearth—to the careful preparation of food, to the grinding of herbs, to the strange craft of turning leaves, roots, and bark into something that could mend a wound or calm a fever. Cooking and medicine stirred a deeper interest in him than plows or axes ever had. But such interests were not always welcomed.
In those days, knowledge of herbs and healing was often spoken of in hushed voices. It belonged mostly to women, wandering healers, or those whispered to follow the old pagan ways that still lingered in the forests of Ireland. Men were expected to till the soil, raise livestock, or fight when called. Even his parents—who had once taught him the forest’s gifts in his childhood—encouraged him now toward more respectable trades. Physical labor, they said, was the surest road to survival.
So he learned what was expected of him. But his heart wandered elsewhere.
She had grown alongside him in the years since he first found her wandering the meadows alone. Though she had been raised under the care of his family, something in her spirit never lost its wildness. The name they had given her still fit well—Fiadh, the wild one. Girls were rarely given the chance to learn beyond what their mothers could teach them, and so most of her education came from the same quiet sources that had shaped Audloed: the woods, the rivers, the endless patience of the land itself. Together they often slipped away from the village whenever they could. Deep within the forests and hills of Connacht, far from watchful eyes and whispered judgment, they walked for hours beneath oak and ash trees. There, among moss and wind and birdsong, they spoke more openly than either ever dared in the village. It was in those quiet places that Fiadh often urged him toward something greater.
“You are meant for more than fields and fences,” she would tell him. “You listen to the land as though it speaks back.”
She spoke of paths few dared follow—of healing, of study, even of religious life where learning and medicine were sometimes kept safe within monastic walls.
Audloed always shook his head.
Leaving the village meant leaving her. That was reason enough. Even the thought of it felt wrong, as though imagining a life where the sky had lost the sun. So instead they spoke of other things. They spoke of the old stories.
Among the forests they sometimes found fragments left behind by older worlds—broken stones marked with strange carvings, rusted metal tools half-buried in soil, rings of moss-covered stones that might once have held meaning. They imagined the lives of the druids and ancestors who had walked those woods long before churches or kings claimed the land. Often they made up stories of their own. Songs, even. Those hours wandering through Ireland’s untamed hills were the only times Audloed truly felt whole. Gradually, he found himself spending less time at home, less time in the fields or workshops, and more time beside Fiadh beneath the quiet shelter of the forest.
Then illness came to the village.
At first it seemed harmless enough—a common cold carried through the winter air. But as the weeks passed, it worsened. Fevers rose higher, coughs deepened, and strange marks began appearing on the skin of those who grew sick. What had begun as a cold became something far more dangerous. Winter in the north offered little mercy. The air grew bitter and dry, the ground hardened, and the forests lay stripped bare of the plants and herbs that might have helped them.
Many fell ill.
Fiadh among them.
Audloed did everything he could beside his mother, who still knew more healing craft than most. They boiled what herbs they had saved, mixed simple remedies, prayed for strength. Yet Audloed could not ignore the terrible truth pressing into his thoughts.
If only it had been summer. If only the forests were green.
There were medicines he had heard whispers of—remedies older than the church, remedies people no longer dared make openly. One night his mother spoke of a woman who lived far away in the deep forests. An old healer who still kept the ancient knowledge alive. But reaching her would take months. Audloed looked at Fiadh lying weak with fever and knew what such a journey might cost. By the time he returned…
He could not bear the thought. Yet he could not bear to do nothing even more. So he left.
The journey took him across long stretches of wilderness and empty hills. He traveled through winter’s last breath, when snow still clung to shaded valleys and cold winds scraped across the land. Once he was stopped by bandits along a lonely path. They searched him for coin or valuables, but he carried nothing worth stealing.
They let him go.
Strangely, the farther he traveled from villages and roads, the more at peace he felt. The silence of the forests welcomed him like an old friend. Eventually, in the fading days of winter, he began to see signs of what he sought. Old stumps of trees cut long ago. Moss-covered stone half-sunk in soil. Faint traces of human hands in a place the forest had nearly reclaimed.
At last he found the lodge. It stood crooked and weary among the trees, built from ancient stone and patched with wood that had long since begun to rot. Vines and evergreen branches crept through broken walls, as though the forest itself had begun to swallow the place whole.
Audloed stepped inside.
Dust lay thick over everything.
The hearth had long gone cold. Tools and small objects sat untouched where they had been left. But the silence told the truth before his mind wished to accept it. No one had lived there for years. For a moment he stood in the quiet ruin, surrounded by the ghost of a life that had vanished long before he arrived. He had imagined this moment many times on the road. Meeting the old healer. Learning from her. Bringing back something—anything—that might save Fiadh. Instead there was nothing. Worse still, he found himself wishing she were there beside him. Under different circumstances, they would have explored every corner of the place together, inventing stories about the strange tools and relics left behind.
But there were no stories now.
Only failure.
And a long road home.
When Audloed finally returned to the village, winter had begun to loosen its grip. Fiadh had died a week earlier. He did not speak much after hearing the news. But from that day forward he carried a quiet promise within him. Never again would he watch someone he loved fade away while he stood helpless beside them. Whatever knowledge had been lost, forbidden, or forgotten—he would seek it. And he would become the healer he had once been discouraged from becoming.
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