Ah, Conmael; my mentor, who was one of the fey. A mysterious stranger, or so I’d thought at the time, who had saved me from execution and released me and Grim from vile imprisonment, but only after I’d promised to adhere to his rules for seven years, gods help me. Those rules were three: I must live here in Dalriada and not go south to seek vengeance against my enemy, Mathuin of Laois; I must say yes to every request for help; and I must use my abilities only for good. To someone who did not know the angry, bitter creature I had become, that might not have sounded so hard. But it was hard. Making Mathuin pay for his crimes, not only against me but against a whole host of wronged innocents, had become the only thing that mattered to me; even more so after a year’s incarceration in his cesspit of a lockup. I had struggled to keep my promise. Twice, I had come within a hair’s-breadth of breaking it, even in the knowledge of the punishment Conmael had threatened. As for saying yes when folk asked me for help, that was not always as simple as it sounded.

We’d had to lie once or twice, Grim and I, or at least to withhold part of the truth, and when the person being deceived was Oran or Flidais, lying did not come easily. They had been good to us, generous and understanding. They had demonstrated that not every person of noble breeding was a heartless piece of scum like Mathuin.

Nobody at Winterfalls knew that Grim and I were escaped felons. Nobody knew about Conmael – most folk did not believe the fey were real anyway, or thought that race had died out long ago. And now we had another secret, an unpalatable one. Last summer we had headed west, with Prince Oran’s blessing, to assist a lady with a monster that had taken up residence on her land. An old friend of mine, a man who knew of my past, had accompanied us on that journey. He and his dog. When we had returned with the dog but without the man, we’d had to lie about the reason. To tell the truth would have required us to reveal far more of our story than was safe. So we’d said simply that Flannan had travelled on elsewhere, and that sometime later we had found the dog, Ripple, wandering in the woods, with no sign of her master. If Flannan’s remains should be found buried under a tree somewhere between Winterfalls and Bann, who was to say we’d had anything to do with it?