“You can do that? See whatever you seek in the water?” Sibeal did sometimes scry for answers to particular problems, but her visions were just as likely to show her something entirely unrelated.

“I’ll either see that or just a jumble, like last time.”

“Are you sure you don’t mind doing this?”

“I’m going to be precious little help to you from this point on, I suspect. This is relatively easy. If it will reassure you, I’ll do it gladly.”

“Thank you, Cathal. I’ll stay over here, out of your way, and keep a lookout.”

“Come and sit with me if you want.” The offer was made with diffidence.

“Are you sure that won’t distract you?”

“Quite sure, Clodagh. It might even help summon the vision we want. I should salve those cuts again first. They’re looking better. Starting to heal.”

“If we’re going to be sitting by the pond, I can do it myself. I haven’t dared look at my reflection yet. I have to face it some time.”

Later in the morning, the two of us sat side by side at the water’s edge with Becan tucked into blankets and shawls close by. While Cathal settled immediately into a seer’s pose and fixed his eyes on the unknown, I confronted my own image in the still surface of the pond.

If my cuts were looking better now, I hated to think how they’d looked yesterday. One was a slash right across my forehead, straight and deep. A second marked me from the outer end of my right eye halfway to my chin. A third complemented it, tracing an untidy shape resembling a bird or a bat on my left cheek. I imagined people looking at me as they had at my sister Maeve after she was burned, seeing only the disfigurement, not the girl underneath. I wondered if Muirrin might have any treatment that would make these marks fade, or whether I would bear the wounds of my self-appointed mission for the rest of my life. I pressed my lips together and began to anoint my face with salve.

I was almost finished when Cathal made a slight sound, then stretched out toward me without taking his eyes from the water. I took his hand; it was trembling. His face had gone ghostly white. My gaze stilled, following the line of his sight, and a jolt of shock went through me. The water that had shown me my own damaged face a moment ago was now full of movement and color, images of a man riding, of trees, of cloaked figures moving in and out of dappled light . . . It seemed that as soon as I had taken Cathal’s hand I had been drawn into his vision. His gift must be powerful indeed.