There were levels of authority in the prince’s household, and they took me a while to work out. Him at the top, of course, though he didn’t go around giving orders – things ran smoothly without any need for that. Lady Flidais and Lady Sochla were family, folk of noble birth. Then came Donagan – both servant and friend, only a step away from the prince himself. Aedan the steward had responsibility for the smooth daily running of the entire household, and was assisted by his wife, Fíona. Brid ruled the kitchen; Niall was in charge of a great body of farm workers; the grooms and stable hands answered to the cantankerous Eochu. The guards were led by a big man called Lochlan, Prince Oran’s master-at-arms. At the bottom of the heap were ordinary servants such as kitchen workers, seamstresses, folk who scrubbed floors or dug the garden or looked after the cows. Lady Flidais’s waiting women seemed to believe themselves on much the same level as Donagan, superior to all but the prince’s blood kin. That made approaching them tricky.

I did not fit anywhere. A wise woman might have many folk coming in and out of her house, bringing gifts or bribes or payment, taking away herbs and draughts and good advice. But our kind generally lived alone. If I’d been attached permanently to a noble household – unlikely – I’d perhaps have been afforded the respect owed to, say, a druid. Perhaps. But at Winterfalls I was an oddity, and it was clear folk did not quite know what to make of me.

For all its smooth and seamless organisation, this was not a household in harmony. There was tension between the household guards and those who had come to Winterfalls in Lady Flidais’s escort. Nobody could fail to pick up on the unease when they were all gathered together at meal times. Maybe Grim could find the reason for this animosity, and whether it was important to us.

Something was going on between the prince and Donagan. If anyone had asked me, I’d have said the two of them were avoiding speaking to each other. Maybe they’d had a falling-out. And while I hadn’t been asked to investigate that, I was learning that the slightest oddity could prove important in hindsight.