“I remember,” said Finbar, and turned his head away. I wanted him to go on, for I was fascinated by talk of our mother, whom I had never known. But he had fallen silent again. It was getting late in the day; long tree shadows stretched their points across the grass far below us.

The silence drew out again, so long I thought he might be asleep. I wriggled my toes; it was getting cold. Maybe I did need shoes.

“What about you, Finbar?” I hardly needed to ask. He was different. He was different from all of us. “What did she give you?”

He turned and smiled at me, the curve of his wide mouth transforming his face completely.

“Faith in myself,” he said simply. “To do what’s right, and not falter, no matter how hard it gets.”

“It was hard enough today,” I said, thinking of Father’s cold eyes, and the way they’d made Finbar look.

It will be much harder in time. I could not tell if this thought came from my own mind, or my brother’s. It sent a chill up my spine.

Then he said aloud, “I want you to remember, Sorcha. Remember that I’ll always be there for you, no matter what happens. It’s important. Now come on, it’s time we went back down.”

When I remember the years of our growing up, the most important thing is the tree. We went there often, the seven of us, southward through the forest above the lakeshore. When I was a baby, Liam or Diarmid would carry me on his back; once I could walk, two brothers would take my hands and hurry me along, sometimes swinging me between them with a one-two-three, as the others ran on ahead toward the lake. When we came closer, we all became quiet. The bank where the birch tree grew was a place of deep magic, and our voices were hushed as we gathered on the sward around it.

We all accepted that this land was a gate to that other world, the realm of spirits and dreams and the Fair Folk, without any question. The place we grew up in was so full of magic that it was almost a part of everyday life—not to say you’d meet one of them every time you went out to pick berries, or draw water from your well, but everyone we knew had a friend of a friend who’d strayed too far into the forest, and disappeared; or ventured inside a ring of mushrooms, and gone away for a while, and come back subtly changed. Strange things could happen in those places. Gone for maybe fifty years you could be, and come back still a young girl; or away for no more than an instant by mortal reckoning, and return wrinkled and bent with age. These tales fascinated us, but failed to make us careful. If it was going to happen to you, it would happen, whether you liked it or not.