Now Blackthorn did smile, a nice smile that lit up her face. ‘Only good things, Cara. He thinks a great deal of you. Did you know he once lived at Wolf Glen for a while?’

‘No! When?’

‘Let’s make another brew first, then I’ll tell you about it.’

She made a point of showing Cara the right proportions for chamomile and lavender. ‘You could add a pinch of mint if you like,’ she said. ‘It livens up the flavour and helps give folk heart.’

Cara wondered who needed heart most, herself or Mistress Blackthorn. ‘But at bed time, skip the mint?’

‘Correct. I’ll make a herbalist of you yet.’

‘That’s for Emer,’ Cara said. ‘While she’s being a wise woman, I suppose I’ll be at Wolf Glen, being a sort of farmer. Unless Father makes me marry someone who doesn’t want to live there.’

‘However your life unfolds,’ Blackthorn said after a bit, ‘I hope you will be happy, Cara. Now let’s sit down, and I’ll tell you something about this lad, Fedach. Who will one day be a farmer and a horse breeder like his own father, provided his life takes a straight path.’

‘I hardly know him,’ she said a bit too quickly. ‘I’ve only met him twice.’

‘You made a big impression, then.’

‘I did?’

‘You did.’

‘How could he have lived at Wolf Glen without my knowing? He’s only about the same age as me.’

‘He was a tiny baby. His mother went there as a wet-nurse. Your parents hired her.’

‘But . . .’ Cara tried to work it out. Tried to remember what she’d been told about her mother and the brief time when the two of them had both been alive. ‘I don’t think that can be right,’ she said. ‘How long does a baby need a wet-nurse? When do they start eating real food?’

Mistress Blackthorn smiled. ‘There’s nothing more real than mother’s milk. A baby lives on that alone for maybe six turnings of the moon. Most women go on feeding their infants far longer, but at that age they can start on what you call real food as well, thin porridge and suchlike. And they can drink goat’s milk.’

‘Then the story must be wrong. I wasn’t born at Wolf Glen. My mother went away to her kinsfolk for the birth. We didn’t come home until I was getting on for a year old. So I couldn’t have been nursed along with Fedach.’

‘Cara.’ Blackthorn’s voice had gone really serious. Something bad was coming, Cara knew it. Some kind of secret, and not a nice one about a boy thinking kindly of her.

‘What?’