It was clear, however, that he could not yet leave our care. Late autumn weather was closing in and the nights were longer and colder. And Simon could not yet shake the demons that beset him during the times of darkness. Over and over, his torturers visited and tormented him, and he fought them, or fled from them, or gave himself up to their mercies. One night I got a black eye out of it, when he rose from his bed half asleep and tried to escape out into the night. Between us, Father Brien and I stopped him, but I caught the full force of his arm across my face. In the morning he would not believe that he had done this. Another time he caught me off guard, waking before I did, suddenly and in terror, but silent for once; and he had the knife in his hand and turned in on himself before I was aware of it. How I moved fast enough I’ll never know, but I grabbed his wrist and hung on, and screamed for Father Brien, and the two of us tried to calm him, while he wept and raved and begged us to kill him and let that be an end of it. And slowly, slowly I spoke to him and sang to him until he grew quiet and almost slept, but not quite. He had stopped talking, but his eyes spoke to me, and their message was plain. He understood too well what the future would be for him, and he asked me why I would not end his pain. What right had I to refuse this?

I had told him many tales. But I could not tell him why I believed he must live and grow well and move on. If he scoffed at the tales of Culhan and the old heroes, the sagas of the folk from the west, if he found the stories of the little folk and the tree people odd, though I myself had seen their work with my own eyes, how could I expect him to believe his destiny and mine were somehow linked in what the Forest Lady had told me? He would never believe that I had seen her myself, there in the clearing in her cloak of midnight and the jewels bright in her hair. Simon was of another folk entirely, a practical, earthbound people who could credit only the evidence of their own eyes. And yet, if ever I met a person who needed to let the magic and the mystery of the old ways flow through his spirit, it was him. I used it to heal him whether he knew it or not, but without his own faith in himself it could go only so far. Until he could be convinced of a reason to live, we could not safely let him go, even if his body was well enough mended, for he would not last even the first night without us.