“My inability to play the right games. My failure to behave in the way people expected. Aidan was a staunch friend. Over and over I hurt him, upset him, made things difficult for him. Over and over he forgave me, stood by me. He wasn’t perfect. Some things he did, I found hard to excuse.” He fell silent, perhaps feeling it was wrong to criticize a man so newly lost.

“Aidan did have a temper,” I ventured. “I saw it when the two of you were fighting, and it surprised me. He got jealous. And yet at other times he was such a sweet man.”

“He killed my dog,” Cathal said flatly. “Fleet. There’s a strip from her collar in your bag, among the things from the cloak. Even as a child he got jealous. Lord Murtagh gave me Fleet not long after my mother died. I’d never had a dog before and I loved her. Aidan resented that. Perhaps he thought it unfair that his father would make such a gift to me, the bastard foster son. At any rate, Fleet was kicked in the hindquarters. The injury didn’t mend. She went lame, then sickened and died. Aidan swore he hadn’t done it, but he was seen. That cruel streak in him was one of the reasons I tried to warn you off.”

“One of them?”

“My own feelings had more than a little to do with what I said to you.” A fleeting smile played across his lips.

Now was not the time to speak more about this, though his words made my heart beat faster. “What else was on the cloak, Cathal?”

As we lay there quietly and the day passed, he told me the story of each small item: a white pebble that had formed part of a childhood game, skipping stones across the stream, then using them in an elaborate competition of throwing and catching. An eagle feather, trophy of a climb up a perilous, forbidden rock face. Aidan had wrenched his ankle; Cathal had caught a pony from a nearby field and somehow conveyed his friend home. A piece of shimmering multicolored cloth: part of a gown once worn by Aidan’s mother, relegated to the scrap bag, retrieved by a small boy who had thought that this exotic fabric must surely have real magic in it. “She was kind to me,” Cathal said simply.

The plaited hair was his and Aidan’s, twined and fastened. “We did that when we were quite small,” Cathal said. “A ritual; we swore that we’d be true friends until death.” He choked over the words.