It was time to head for home again. My sister was getting married in the morning and I had a lot to do. Deirdre and I were twins. She was slightly my elder, but I was the one who had inherited the household responsibilities Mother was too tired to deal with any longer. It made sense. Deirdre was going. Tomorrow afternoon she and her new husband, Illann, would be riding back to his home in the south and she would have her own household to manage. I was staying. For the foreseeable future my life would be taken up with supervising serving people, ordering and checking supplies, solving domestic disputes and keeping an eye on my two youngest sisters, Sibeal and Eilis. I hadn’t expected this, but then, nobody had expected Mother to conceive another child so late in life. Now we were all on edge. Mother called this a gift from the gods. The rest of us tiptoed around the subject, fearful of speaking the unpalatable truth. Women of her age did not deliver healthy babes. Like as not, within two turnings of the moon she and the child would both be dead.

“Thank you,” I said over my shoulder as I walked away from the hawthorn and into the shade of the forest. It was best to keep on the good side of the Fair Folk, whatever one’s opinion of them. The forest of Sevenwaters was as much their home as it was ours. Long ago, our family had been entrusted with the task of keeping the place safe for them. This was one of the last refuges of the ancient races anywhere in Erin, for the great forests were being felled for grazing and the Christian religion had spread widely, displacing druids and wise women. The old faith was practiced only in the most protected and secret pockets of the land. Sevenwaters was one of these.