“Their business is torture and death. How can they be of a mind with you, or with Conor, or myself?”

“I can’t answer that. Only—only that, if you believe the tales, it’s in the nature of our people to go to war and to kill, just as it is to sing and play and tell stories. Perhaps they are two halves of the same whole. I know that we seven are of the one family, and that we only have each other. It has to be enough.”

But there had been one brother missing; and when I opened the door for Finbar to go, we saw him, down the long hallway, as he slipped silently from a bedchamber that was not his own. She was concealed behind the door where she stood to bid him farewell, but we saw her white arm stretch out, and her fingers move softly down his cheek, and then Diarmid padded barefoot away, his face as dazzled and unseeing as some lad bewitched by faery folk. Finbar looked at me, and I looked at him; but we never said a word.

So they were married, she in her long gown of deepest russet, and my father looking at her as if there was not a soul in the world but the two of them, while all around them the family, the guests, the men of the garrison, the servants and cottagers muttered and exchanged sideways glances. I stood there in my green gown with my hair in ribbons, and by me my six brothers in a line. It did not seem to me a proper ceremony at all. In the tales, such things were done in the open, under a massive oak, and there would be playacting and mock fighting and riddles, and the druids would come out of the forest to perform the ritual of handfasting. There were none of the ancient ones at my father’s wedding, and no concession to the old ways. Perhaps the lady Oonagh came from a Christian household, but there was no way of telling, for none of her folk were there. Father Brien spoke the words tranquilly, as was his way, but it seemed to me his face was drawn, and his tone remote. As soon as the formalities were over, he packed his cart and left. A feast followed, with a laden board and flowing ale. And the next day things began to happen.

Eilis was taken ill, something she ate, they thought, but it went on too long, and I was called to her. Her face had lost its rosy plumpness, and she was purging and bringing up blood. I sent a boy for Father Brien, but he did not come, so I held her head and talked to her, and walked her up and down the room, and when she was done I made up a mixture for her, and sat by her bedside until she dropped into a fitful doze. Liam hovered outside, and so did Eilis’s father, muttering under his breath.