Father did not talk much. He liked to sit in my little garden, whatever the weather. If gentle rain fell, he spread an old sack over head and shoulders, and let it fall. If the wind was chill, he wrapped himself in a cloak. When I was not busy in the village, I worked close by him, digging, weeding, clearing, while my little helper busied herself in the stillroom.

As often as not I would find Finbar there in the garden too, a pale, silent figure whose face was still gaunt and wasted; whose eyes still held a wild knowledge beyond human understanding. Since that last night at Harrowfield, he had laid a shield on his thoughts to keep them from me, and his inner voice was all but silent. I could not tell how it was with him; but I knew he was speaking to his father, mind to mind.

Perhaps Father answered him in the same way. I remembered what Father Brien had told us long ago. How the ancient ones would have taken Colum, had he been willing to learn their secret crafts and memorize the long lore of their kind, to become in time one of their mystic brotherhood. But Colum had laid eyes on Niamh, with her dark curling hair and her skin like new milk and her wide green eyes, and he had lost his heart. After that there was but one path for him. And so Conor had been chosen in his place. Father Brien had spoken of love, and of our kind. What had he said? You know not, yet, the sort of love that strikes like a lightning bolt, that clutches hold of you by the heart, as irrevocably as death; that becomes the lodestar by which you steer the rest of your life…it is in the nature of your kin, to love this way.

I knew now, painfully, what it felt like to love thus, as my father had loved my mother. I understood that Finbar sought to help his father back to self-knowledge, back to a place where he could touch this world without being destroyed by his guilt, and regret, and anguish. So they sat there in silence, and I moved around them clipping lavender and rosemary, and failing utterly to quell the longings of my own heart.

The weather grew chill and more chill. The rains ceased, and were overtaken by clear, bright days, and nights of deep frost. The last leaves fell from ash and birch, from the great oaks whose spreading roots were now blanketed in the golden brown remnants of their summer cloaks. The legacy of Lady Oonagh was a long and terrible one. Old Tom died, and then his granddaughter developed a rattling cough and a feverish brightness of the eyes. I tended to children whose bodies were clammy with sweat, who cried out for cold water while snow lay deep outside the cottage doors. I saw strong men grow feeble as infants and clutch at my hand as if frightened of the dark. That winter we lost ten good folk from our village. Had they not been so weakened by neglect, they might have been able to fight back.