Somehow I managed to drag myself along the log until my feet touched the river bottom. I staggered up to the bank and laid the sodden, motionless Becan down on the sand, then turned aside to retch up the contents of my stomach. I looked along the river under the trees and out into the flow of the water. Empty; all empty. Cathal was gone. I blocked out the thought of him drowned or swept so far downstream he could not reach me. Right now I must save Becan. Dimly, I recalled an old rhyme for children about a dog that stopped breathing and a tiny magical woman who brought it to life by singing into its nostrils. If I could stop gasping and shaking I would try something similar, ridiculous as it sounded. I had nothing else. I bent over the baby’s still form. With every scrap of will I could summon, I steadied myself. I put my mouth over Becan’s and breathed for him. One, two; one, two. The forest shivered around me; the river passed on its way, the same as yesterday and the day before, oblivious to the small dramas of life and death that played themselves out on its banks. One, two; one, two. There was room in my mind for nothing more than this, the pattern of survival.

I knelt and breathed until my limbs ached with cramp and my eyes stung with tears. He was dead. There was no point in going on. I had lost him. I had stolen him away and now I had let him die before he had the chance to know anything of the world but loneliness, terror and flight . . . All the same, I kept breathing. I couldn’t bring myself to stop. And at last, twisting my heart within me, Becan coughed, choked, twitched, breathed. Cried. That woeful sobbing was the loveliest sound I had heard in my life. My hair, saturated from its immersion in the river, dripped cold water down my face to mingle with the warmth of my tears. Nothing to wrap him in. Nothing to feed him with. But he was alive. For a few moments all I felt was sheer joy, and then memory returned. Cathal. Where was Cathal?

“Clodagh!”