An Geas
Are you sure?
An Geas
Before the English came, before the famine ships, before the songs were silenced — there was a pact.
In the old tongue, they called it geas — a sacred bond that cannot be broken. Not by time. Not by death. Not by forgetting.
The women of the Liberties were bound to it. Healers, singers, keepers of the flame. When someone came to their door with a need, they were obliged to answer. Not out of kindness. Out of duty. Out of blood.
The price of refusal? Ní féidir é a rá. It cannot be said.
My grandmother Saoirse knew the old ways. She passed the geas to me the night she taught me the first sean-nós melody — hidden inside the song, woven into the notes like a curse dressed as a lullaby.
I oblige because I must.
And if you ask what happens when I can’t…
The last woman who refused was my great-aunt Brigid. They found her singing to an empty room, the same three notes, over and over, for seven days. On the eighth day, she stopped. On the ninth, they buried her.
The melody she sang? The same one I hum when I think no one is listening.
