And she was very good at holding the children’s attention. This morning she had shown them how to start a fire, with a bit of flint and a scrap of char-cloth. It was their most essential skill of all, and one that the children were shown over and over again, just as Brica had been taught as she had grown up. And buried in the fables Brica told the children were warnings that might ensure their safety: even this tale of the sidhe, the fairies.

Few adults believed in supernatural beings moving among them. But you would sometimes glimpse strangers: a very odd kind of stranger, moving over the sparely populated hills, often wearing green—just as in the stories. These were humans, no doubt about that, and they carried tools of stone or bronze. And they were robbers. Rather like foxes, they would take chickens and the odd sheep, or even—if they could get it—bread or cake. It was said they were dangerous when cornered, but they would flee when challenged. And it was true that they were terrified of iron—especially iron weapons, Regina thought dryly, against which their flimsy bronze was little protection.

Nobody was sure where they came from. Her own theory was that the sidhe came from the west, perhaps the southwestern peninsula or Wales, or even the far north beyond the Wall. Perhaps in those distant valleys an old sort of folk had persisted—older even than the barbarian culture that had preceded the arrival of the Romans—so old they didn’t even have the skills to make iron. Now that the legions were gone, and the land was emptying, they were, perhaps, slowly creeping back.

If they seemed to Regina’s folk as furtive, creeping, uncanny spirits, she wondered how her folk must seem to them. And after all, she thought wistfully, nowadays we can’t make iron, either.

The children all wore simple shifts of colorless wool. Some of them wore daisy chains around their heads or necks, and one small boy had a broad black stripe of birch-bark oil on his cheek, a lotion applied by Marina to a deep graze. Sitting there they looked like creatures of the forest, Regina thought suddenly, quite alien from the little girl she had once been.

At length Brica’s fable was done. The children scattered through the woods in twos and threes, to find mushrooms and other fruits of the forest for that evening’s meal, and then to make their way home.

Brica approached her mother and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Regina tried to be stern. But she cupped her daughter’s cheek and smiled. “Let’s just get on.”