Good, thought Ronan. That was the correct response to the three of them showing up on one’s doorway.

She looked Bryde up and down and then she looked over her shoulder. “Is this him?”

Behind her, several voices rose in a chorus of youthful excitement.

“He’s here!”

“Is it him?”

“I said he was here? I said that already.”

“It’s Bryde!”

“What about Jordan Hennessy?”

“Yes! I see her! I see her!”

“And Ronan Lynch?”

“He’s tall and bald! He has the sword!”

The children had rushed up behind their mother like a wave blustering to shore, stopping just short of breaking out onto the porch. Five happy faces in five different heights. They hissed and poked at each other and pointed at Hennessy and Ronan standing behind Bryde.

Ronan and Hennessy exchanged another look.

This was not what Ronan would have considered the correct response to the three of them showing up on one’s doorway.

But he kind of liked it.

“You might as well come in so they can paw at you,” said the woman. “Not that you’re here for me, but I’m—”

“Angelica,” Bryde said as he stepped past her into the cramped hallway. “Angelica Aldana-Leon. Yes. I know. They told me.” As her mouth dropped open, he lifted a closed fist and said to the five children, “Presents, but not until you tell me what they are.”

“Are they the seeds?”

“Are you real?”

“He said not to ask that!”

Bryde opened his closed hand and let a single seed drop from it into each of their palms. “Now, how do you make them grow?”

They conferred like it was a game show. Then one whispered the answer to the other, and together they clapped the seeds in their hands. Each immediately exploded into a bright blue lily, and just then, Ronan realized, stupidly, that they were all dreamers, each of these children, and Bryde must have come to them in their dreams, too, and shown them these dreamt seeds he was going to give them.

Ronan searched inside himself for the same jealousy he’d first felt over Rhiannon, but that wasn’t what he felt at all.

“The children told me that it’s you who have stopped the …” Angelica asked them, making a gesture to her eyes and nose. The nightwash.

“The slop!” shouted one of the boys.

“Thank you. Thank you so much. I don’t know how to thank you for what you’re doing, so just, thank you, you have saved them,” Angelica said, with feeling.

“You’re welcome,” Bryde said. “I don’t know how long it will hold, but we will keep working.”