“Look at it this way,” I said, glancing at the little round mirror on the table and seeing that this was indeed the source of the strange light that came and went. “If I’m a dream, I can’t do you any real harm, can I? And if I’m not, I’m an ordinary human girl, too powerless to have any effect on you, and certainly incapable of influencing such a mighty prince as your father. All I have is what you see before you.” I motioned to my own form in its plain homespun gown. “That’s what I have to trade, and that’s what I’m offering. Not forever; you’re right about that, he refused to allow it. Only for tonight. You called me beloved, once.” My voice shrank to a whisper, for this part of the game went very close to the bone. “For a little, I believed you thought me beautiful. Desirable. But perhaps I was fooling myself, as women do. We’re all too ready to believe the words of flattery men use to obtain what they want. To father the sons they want. I see in your eyes that you are as much of a liar as he is.”

His mouth tightened. It hurt me to wound him. I was by no means sure that the two of us were playing the same game, only that the intention was to deceive Mac Dara until we might evade his scrutiny for long enough to speak honestly. How might the Lord of the Oak be lulled? What would make him weary of watching us? Seeing my clumsy attempts at seduction fail, or the opposite? And how could I convey to Cathal that I, too, was playing a part for his father’s benefit?

“Here,” said Cathal, taking a comb out of his pocket and putting it on the table. “You may as well make yourself useful. But no tricks. I know what you are. I know why he sent you. You’re doing a more convincing imitation than the ones before you, but I’m still not interested. All my father wants is to see me use a woman as casually and heartlessly as he did my mother. You speak of fathering sons. If I accepted what you seem, rather ineptly, to be offering, if I lay with you tonight in the knowledge that you’d be gone tomorrow and I would never see you again, I would prove the point you just made—that I am my father’s son not only in blood, but also in character and intentions.” He sat on the stool with his back to me, and I reached to gather the dark hair that came well below his shoulders now. Seven turnings of the moon? Or far longer? Mac Dara was full of lies.

“You are his son, Cathal,” I said quietly. “That means I can never have you for my own. He told me so. As for my being a mere simulacrum of the woman you once loved, all I can say is, nothing here is what it seems.” I picked up the comb and began to draw it through his hair, working out the knots. I hoped he had understood me.