I toyed with the possibility that Bardán and Suanach had been lovers; that baby Cara had been Suanach’s daughter but not Tóla’s. That would certainly account for Tóla’s hatred of the wild man. It might account for Suanach’s choice to leave Wolf Glen so early in her pregnancy, perhaps as soon as she had suspected she was with child. It might even be connected with Bardán’s flight through the woods and his fall to another world. The piece that did not fit in that particular puzzle was Brígh. Nobody denied that Brígh had existed. She had been born, her mother had died and been buried, her father had taken her to Wolf Glen. And she’d been abandoned in the woods. Or she hadn’t. Had Bardán fathered two little girls, one destined to die alone in the chill of the forest, and the other to grow up as a rich man’s daughter? Or had there only ever been one child? If Brígh and Cara were one and the same, if the willowy girl who talked to trees and crafted little creatures from wood was the daughter of the wild man, the master builder, then some truly appalling lies had been told. Lies that had broken hearts and destroyed lives. Lies that had severed the sacred bond between father and child. The damage those lies had done was surely beyond mending.

Maybe Gormán was right. Maybe I should let this go. Maybe I should trust that Cara would not find the story of the heartwood house, or that if she did, it would not lead her to the truth. But then, if the tale held no enlightenment, why had Gormán reacted so strongly to the news that Cara was searching for it? There must be something revealing in it, some insight. I did wonder how an ancient tale of magic could shine any light on what had happened here. This was a human story, not one of those grand accounts of gods and monsters. It was a story in which the threads of truth had become hopelessly tangled with what might be, with what could be, with what one person believed and another discounted. Bardán and Suanach? I didn’t think so. Tóla would have killed him. He might have killed her too. A man like him wouldn’t be able to bear such a blow to his pride; that kind of man believed he had a natural entitlement. In that, Tóla was like Mathuin of Laois: both would ride roughshod over others to get what they believed should be theirs.