His throat is choked with grief. His eyes are pouring tears. His nose is running down into his beard. This is like losing her all over again. Get up, he orders himself. Go there. Go there now. Tell them you still love them, tell them you still miss them, tell them you were lost and could not come for a long time, oh so long. But maybe by now the graves are lost too, lost in the long grass and the brambles and the passing of time. Is the little house still there, and the bright hangings on the walls? What became of it when he – when they –

He shudders. Some bird of ill omen hovers above him; he feels its dark wings. The last doorway is still closed. Locked against him. The last secret still lies hidden. But Dáire . . . All those years in the other realm, and when he came home she was gone from his thoughts, gone as if she had never been. That is a betrayal that surely even a sweet soul like hers could never forgive.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers as he finds his old cloak, his worn and cracked boots, a length of wool to wrap around his head and neck. Everything damp; never mind that. ‘My wife, my love, from the bottom of my heart I’m sorry.’ He opens the door a crack. Looks out through the rain, down toward the barn, up along the track, all about. No sign of Gormán or Conn. No sign of anyone. If they have any sense they’ll be indoors eating their breakfast by a warm fire.

He steps outside, shuts the door behind him, and walks off into the forest. Fear jangles his bones and whips his heart to a gallop. What if he goes too close to the place where it happened? What if he falls? What if the nightmare repeats itself and he’s trapped in that other realm all over again? But Bardán has already paid his father’s debt to the fey. What was that long time of work and silence, if not recompense for the wrong they said his father did them?

Be careful, he tells himself as he passes along tracks only birds and animals and fey folk can find. No caves, no hollows, no dark corners. Watch out for odd groups of trees. Keep one foot on the ground. No mushroom circles, no rings of stones. Watch out for knotted grasses and lines scratched in bark and piles of white pebbles. Keep moving. Be back before supper time.