Donagan arrived just as the three of them were being ushered in, and suddenly my council chamber – not, in fact, used for formal councils, but for writing, thinking and occasionally meeting with visitors – was quite full. That was very much down to Grim, who seemed to take up the space of at least three ordinary men. Blackthorn, a woman with oddly cropped hair of a startling red, had an intensity about her like that of a wild creature caged. I had never encountered a person with such blazing eyes or such a tightly held body. She was thin as a lath and not especially tall, with a tooth missing and a face that wore its years hard. But from the moment she walked in she filled the place with her presence. Between the two of them was the girl Aedan had mentioned. I recognised her as the young sister of Fraoch the smith, but I could not recall her name. She looked as if she had been crying.

‘Sit down, please.’ I motioned to the bench opposite me, but none of them sat. ‘You are Mistress Blackthorn, I presume. Grim I have already met. And . . .’

‘Emer,’ Blackthorn said. ‘She helps me in my work sometimes. My lord.’ There was a criticism in her tone; she expected the prince of Dalriada to know his people’s names. I did, mostly.

‘Thank you, Mistress Blackthorn. I understand there’s been some trouble at Silverlake. What has happened?’

‘Trouble,’ growled Grim. ‘You could call it trouble. I might have another word for it, a stronger one.’

‘It’s all right, Grim,’ Blackthorn said. ‘We’d best tell the story.’

The three of them told it together, and a terrible and violent tale it was. The baker, Branoc, abducting the miller’s daughter and keeping her locked up for his pleasure over several turnings of the moon; the strange death of the miller on the same night his daughter was taken, perhaps not the accident everyone believed after all; Emer, the loyal friend, pleading with folk to believe her when she refused to accept that Ness must have run away with her traveller boy and her father’s savings. The truth made a bizarre and unlikely story, and it was easy to understand why so many folk had long accepted the most plausible explanation. But Emer had never believed the loyal daughter would have abandoned her widowed father.

It had been Blackthorn and Grim who’d worked out the truth, by piecing together a collection of clues nobody else had understood. And yesterday, the two of them had gone up to the baker’s loft and found the girl abused, half-starved and filthy, but alive. Too scared to call for help; chained up so she could not escape. With a whole village of folk only a short ride away, blind to the shocking truth. No wonder Blackthorn was angry.