By mid-December in the islands, the sun is low on the horizon, its light in islanders’ eyes, ears, on their skin and tongue. The strong winter winds, which strip the silver birch trees of their little dancing leaves in seconds, blow the leaves out to sea, blurring the boundaries between earth and water. The sea rises. Everything empties. Only the trees stand out on the horizon, tall and black and spare. And so the sun comes in, resplendent.

In Her House, the sun was flowing in from the garden, filling the house with its colour. Zoe’s feet crunched in the broken glass at the bottom of her grandmother’s bed. There was a photograph of young-Eva that she hadn’t seen before. Somebody, a ghost, had placed it on the bedside table. She opened the window to let the wind waft in the smell of earth and sea. The heartless, ever-restless, elsewhere-bound sea. Then she lay on her grandmother’s bed, tears running down her cheeks. She lay there, listening to the wind. She could feel it, all around her, rattling the window, bringing in its sea breath. The wind and the sun, speeding Eva away on her migration.

NINA: She might’ve sat there forever if we hadn’t gone to get her.

The correct thing would have been to have laid out the body in her best dress, with white quartz pebbles over her eyes, because quartz is the stone of second sight; and her ears stopped with beeswax, in case the spirits took her on a tour of hell; and a crab apple in her mouth, for nourishment on her journey – crab being the most fertile of fruit trees, and its fruit the most long-lasting. (The goddess Anu eats the crab when she wades at dawn through the Moon-drawn waters.) The dress should have been of undyed hemp or linen, the weave of kindness and compassion, with a belt incorporating one strand coloured with woad, to signify the Isles of the Blessed and the waters of these islands. And in her hands they should have placed a wand of hazel, for divination, and around her hair a thong of birch and mistletoe, for shape-shifting, and twisted around the second finger of her left hand, a ring of amber, showing her wisdom. And her grave should have been orientated to the rising winter solstice sun, and her bier scattered with hazelnut shells, because the nut of that tree is so plentiful and tasty, even a small child will eat it. And the mound covering the grave should have been so huge that every passing boat would have known that a great woman lay there, and hence to feel fear and respect, as well as great sorrow. And her followers should have been allowed over the water to pray at her grave, once the mound had been raised, and to remember her with songs and weeping. Yes, all that Cwen would have done.