The ghost of a chuckle came from the dry old lips, soon turning into a wheezing battle to catch her breath. I helped her into a sitting position, my arm supporting her back. She was a bag of bones with the foulest breath I’d ever smelled, though not the worst stink; that description was reserved for Mathuin’s hellhole.

‘Some use you are to the dying,’ the crone rasped. ‘Call yourself a wise woman, and you can’t even tell a story to send me on my way? Holly, now, she knew a whole forest of tales. A whole fishing net of them. A whole starry sky of them.’

‘There’s only one in my head right now,’ I said, ‘and it’s not fit for sharing.’ And then I thought, no, there was another, not the kind she wanted, probably, but a tale all the same. ‘Ah; I have one. It’s about a girl who was riding to her wedding and stopped for a swim in a spot where she shouldn’t have.’

The old woman settled against my arm, trapping me where I was and making me feel a bit like a mother telling her child a bedtime story. Which was wrong, all wrong.

‘Her name was Lady Flidais from Cloud Hill, and she was riding north to marry the prince of Dalriada.’

I embroidered the tale a bit, had to, since I knew very little about the personages involved in the true story. I made Flidais a less than kindly young woman, given to ordering her women about on a whim. I made the dead girl, Ciar, a simple soul, ready to obey the most ridiculous commands such as to strip off and join her mistress in the forest pool, even though they were almost at their destination after days and days of riding, and there was a crowd of men-at-arms with them, and . . . well, there were many reasons why this had not been the wisest of ideas. I told of the drowning and its aftermath; Flidais being tended to by the local wise woman, Ciar’s body being conveyed away for burial, at least I assumed so, and Prince Oran riding up and whisking everyone off to his stronghold – as a prince in a story is expected to do – leaving behind bags of largesse for the underlings. It wasn’t much of a story. It lacked the element of learning that exists in the most satisfying tales. And most likely it wasn’t finished yet. Who knew what the ending might be?

‘Pigs,’ the old woman said when at last I fell silent. ‘Something about pigs.’

‘What about them?’

‘Old story, Holly used to tell it. About that pool. Pigs.’

‘Who is Holly?’ It was a wise woman’s name.

‘Lived there once. Long time ago. Dead now. Dead and forgotten.’