It helped that she did exactly what her father had advised. He was dead a year by then already. When she saw the boat coming across, and saw who disembarked, she drank a tincture of nightshade root against the pain. It was two men. They were unknown to her but she knew what they were there for, and who had sent them.

They smelt of expensive oils and incense, and the fresh heat of their excitement. Thanks to the nightshade, she was easily able to make her eyes roll back in her head. They took their fill of her limp body, almost completely unaware of the little nick in the soft skin of a neck, and wrist, which she made with her thorn, tipped with juice from the shiny dark berries. Father had never done it himself. But he had kept the thorns ready, for that purpose.

Once the poison was in their blood, she was able to watch beneath her eyelids as they got to their feet, and stumbled, dressed only in their shirts, down to the shore. By the time they got to their boats they were puking. But they cast off anyway, and after that there was no hope for them.

Cwen had no control over the weather during her life, but maybe the seas were already answering her thoughts, for the boat was swept quickly around the north side of the island and out towards the skerries.

Cwen went through the belongings they had left behind. She burnt their clothes on the east beach, so that the islanders opposite wouldn’t get wind of it, but not before feeling in all the pockets and removing three coins, which she stored in the cairn. She ate the cheese and bread, and sharpened the knife. The metal brooch which she unpinned from one of the jerkins was the most cleverly worked thing in metal she had ever seen. She looked at it for a long time, tracing the pictures engraved there with her finger. Around the edge were dogs, interlaced, and in the centre was a man, looking out, with big wide eyes. Framed on four sides of him were four further men, one holding his nose, the second with his hand cupped to his ear, the third licking his finger, the fourth stroking his cheek. Cwen laughed out loud when she realised: the five human senses.