When I had gathered enough, I returned to the fire with my materials in my skirt and settled beside Dog Mask. The watery being was pouring milk into a dish; there was a cloth ready for feeding my brother. The Old Ones seemed to know what they were doing.

And then I went about mending my little one. Stitch by stitch, leaf by leaf, twig by twig I remade him, and if I watered him with my tears as I went, none of my companions uttered a word of criticism. Where I could weave or knot his pieces together without using my needle I did so, thinking that more natural. Besides, I was in danger of using up Cathal’s stock of thread too quickly. Cathal . . . He was just down there, a short walk from me . . . I yearned to run back, to find him now, straightaway, to get him out and safely home this very night, for I had not forgotten the quirks of time in this place. I might come back and find a hundred years had passed. He might be an old man; his human blood meant he would not live as long as his father’s kind did. He might be gone far away. I might search until the day I died and never find him. My heart shrank at the prospect.

I straightened Becan’s remaining eye as best I could, stitching a patch of moss in beside it to hold it firm. I took the other pebble from my pouch and set it in place. He did not look quite as he should.

Dog Mask was feeding Finbar from the bowl of milk. Suddenly the eldritch voice cried out, and this time it sounded as if it was right outside the gate, screaming a sorrow from deep in the bone. The sound turned my blood to ice. “What is that?” I whispered.

The eyes behind the silver mask turned toward me. “His mother,” said my companion. “She grieves.”

“His mother?”

“She is powerless against Mac Dara’s magic,” Dog Mask said, squeezing milk from the cloth into Finbar’s mouth. “She has followed us, watching, listening, racked with sorrow. Help her.”