‘Thank you,’ I say under my breath. ‘You might save a life today. Two lives. Owe you a big debt.’ I’m not sure if I’m thanking the plant, or some sort of force that helps things grow, or maybe a god. Or God. Been thinking about him a lot since I was at St Olcan’s.

Got to rush back. ‘I have to go, Bardán,’ I tell him. ‘If I don’t get these leaves down there quick enough that woman could die.’ Leaving him here by himself feels wrong. I know he’ll be in big trouble with Tóla for going away. Even though today wouldn’t have been a work day, and even if he’s only visiting his old house. Don’t like the thought of him facing up to the master on his own. ‘I can come back in a bit, if you –’

He’s got his head in his hands. Shoulders shaking. The bit of cloth over his knees, where he sits on the steps. ‘The blood,’ he sobs. ‘So much blood . . . They didn’t come. They wouldn’t come . . . And she . . . she was so white, white as snow, and all the red . . .’

He’s weeping so hard I can hardly make out the words. Morrigan’s curse, I can’t walk off and leave him like this. ‘Who, Bardán?’

‘Dáire. My Dáire. Here, here, I’ll show you.’ He drops the embroidery on the steps. Takes my arm, leads me around the path and up behind the hut to a spot I can tell straight off is a grave. Everywhere else is overgrown. But this patch has been weeded today, from the looks of it. Pile of long grass and bits and pieces to one side. All freshly pulled. Must’ve been a hard job with his hands the way they are. What’s left is the remains of the grass and a few daisies popping their little heads up here and there. And three stones. Names carved into them, two I can’t read for the moss and the wearing away. Third one starts with a D. Dáire, I’m thinking. The others I can guess, since I’ve heard the story down in Longwater, or part of it anyway.

‘Your mother and father?’

Bardán manages a nod. ‘And . . .’ He kneels by Dáire’s grave marker, bows his head. Voice comes out sort of strangled. Seeing the past like he’s right back in it, that’s my guess. Back in the worst of it. ‘So much blood. How could there be so much? And the little face, the little eyes . . . She never even . . . she never . . .’

‘Dáire . . . your wife?’ Hard to think of the wild man as married, settled, plying the trade his father taught him. Sounds as if she died in childbirth. Poor sod lost wife and infant both. No wonder he’s a bit wrong in the head.