Slowly he began to speak and to respond as if he knew us. Things were not, however, as they had once been. Our father now seemed like a man much older in years. The burden of what he had brought on himself, and on us, was near intolerable for him, and I fancied he sometimes held onto his sanity by the merest thread. Now Finbar watched over him, silent, always there in the shadows to one side, as if his mind held our father’s in check, weaving a net of protection about the gradually mending spirit. So father and son came to understand each other, and another wound was healed. But the victory had been hard won. Finbar grew thinner and thinner, eating little, speaking not a word. One could not give so much of oneself, without a terrible cost.

Father did not talk to me much. I told myself, that was nothing new. Before, he had seemed not to know what to make of his small daughter, who looked so much like her mother. Now, I was even more like Niamh, so alike that at first he had mistaken me for her whom he had loved and lost. My brothers had told him my story. He knew that I was wed to a Briton, one of that breed he despised so bitterly. One of those who had taken the islands that held the most secret of our people’s sacred places, and for nothing but a foothold from which to venture forth in anger and greed, to lay waste our lands. They told him that. But, Liam quickly assured him, it had not been a real marriage. The union could be annulled, said Conor, and in time, a suitable husband could be found for me. In time. There was no hurry. My father listened, and said nothing.

Chapter Sixteen

Midwinter passed, and with it my sixteenth birthday. The weather remained piercingly chill. I went early to the village, taking rye bread that Janis and I had baked, and an infusion made from the root of all-heal for Tom’s granddaughter, who was past the worst of her fever. Frost crunched under my boots. I went from one cottage to another, and I finished my errands while the sun was still creeping up behind the winter filigree of the birches. I heard the plaintive call of an owl, deep in the forest, and another answering. Instead of going straight home, I climbed up the hill path beneath the skeleton trees, my breath a vaporous cloud in the crisp air. At the top of the small rise I sat down on a flat rock and looked across the tangle of branches to the still water of the lake. There was a stone in my boot. I stripped off my gloves and reached down to unfasten it. It was only then that I looked at my hands and realized that the swelling was at last completely gone, the fingers small and fine as they had once been, the skin pale and soft. Almost as if they had never held distaff or needle, almost as if they had never heard of starwort. They bore the scrapes and bruises of my work in kitchen and garden, but that was nothing. Perhaps there had been forest magic at work there, for in all my time as a healer I had never seen such damage mend so fast.