In the dense, moist heat of noon, Brica’s gentle, lilting voice carried easily through the trees. “. . . The sidhe live in hollow hills,” Brica was saying. “They are invisible. They can be seen when they choose, but even then they are hard to spot, for they always wear green. They are harmless if you are friendly to them, which is why we drop bits of bread in the furrow when plowing, and pour wine on the ground at harvesttime . . .”

Not wishing to disturb her daughter, Regina approached as silently as she could. Not that that was so easy now she was forty-one years old, and already an old woman, and anyhow her forest skills would never match those of the younger folk.

“. . . But you must never eat sidhe food, for they will lead you into their hollow hills, which are entrances to the Otherworld, and you may never find your way out—or if you do, you might find a hundred years have passed, and all your family, even your brothers and sisters, have grown old and died, while you have aged only a day. But if a sidhe frightens you, you can always chase her away with the sound of a bell—but it must be made of iron, for the sidhe fear iron above all . . .”

Her daughter sat at the center of a ring of children, their faces raised intently. Nearby a fire flickered. Brica saw Regina, and held up a hand in apology. She had been due to meet her mother at the farmstead.

Regina was content to wait in the cool of the shade and let her heart stop thumping from the climb up the hillside from the farmstead. The sun was almost overhead now, and its light, scattered into green dapples by the tall canopy of trees, lit up the curl of white smoke that rose from the fire. Regina recognized the rich, strong scent of burning oak, stronger than beech or ash. She sometimes wondered what Julia would have thought if she could have known that one day her daughter would become an expert on the scents of burning firewood. But they had all had to adapt.

Brica, given an old British name after Regina’s own grandmother, shared Regina’s features—the pale, freckled skin, the somewhat broad nose, lips bright as cherries, the eyes of smoke gray. But at twenty-one years old she was more beautiful than Regina had ever been. Her face had a symmetry that Regina’s lacked, and there was a kind of exquisite perfection in the oyster-shell curl of her ears, the fine lines of her eyebrows. Even her one undeniable gift from her never-seen-again father Amator, her black hair, was thick and lustrous.