As it happened, there was no chance to talk to anyone but Deirdre, who came to the door of the prince’s establishment to shepherd Cara inside. The household was in a flurry of preparation. Oran had been called to court for an urgent council, and Flidais was going with him, along with baby Aolú and various attendants. They would be heading off first thing in the morning and might be away some while. Deirdre did not know who would be at the council. But she told me there had been more bad news from the south. Flidais’s parents had left Laigin and sought refuge at the court of Mide. There had been an attack on their holdings with many slain, and Lord Cadhan and his wife had been lucky to escape with their lives. Their territory was now in the hands of Mathuin of Laois.

Chapter Eleven: Bardán

11

~Bardán~

Falling asleep, shivering with cold, he tells himself the story. It’s not yet clear to him, not all of it, but what he can remember soothes his hurts. It takes him back, far back, to the time when he was a boy of five or six. His father showing him how to smooth a block of beech wood, stroke by careful stroke. Patient, so patient. His mother close by, in a gown of willow green, her hair spilling over her shoulders, the sun turning its brown to gold. The song she sings, so familiar that he feels it still, running in his veins, sounding in the depths of him. Every birdling in the wood . . .

His father grew up in that other realm. They stole him out of the cradle and left a changeling in his place, a wretched, wailing creature with a head like a turnip and beady, knowing eyes. Once they stole, twice they stole, stole them right away . . . Where else could his father have learned the making of a heartwood house, but in the realm of the fey? Down, down, deep, deep down . . . They brought him up as their own. They taught him. They made him theirs, or tried to. But he did not belong in that other place; could never truly belong.

In the fey realm he lived and grew and became a young man. And his eyes lit on a young woman who was neither fey nor human, but half and half. Trapped in that other world, like him. The young man fell in love; so did the young woman. Discovered, they fled, hand in hand. She found the way out. She led him from the deep realm and into the light.