“And she does that here, with the ley line as it is,” Bryde said, as if he could tell what Ronan was thinking. Perhaps he could. What do you feel? “Probably she would put you to shame, kids, if she ever left this place.”

Rhiannon tucked her hair behind her ear over and over, her cheeks pinked. “Oh, I don’t know about that. It’s my little thing, is all. And as I told you in the dream, I can’t leave.”

“I understand,” Bryde said. “We are not all born to be wanderers. But the world is changing. You won’t be able to stay here for much longer, not in this strangled valley.”

It seemed unfair for Bryde to ask her to come with them. Bryde had warned them that leaving with him would break their worlds, and it had. But Ronan’s and Hennessy’s lives had already been in disarray. Rhiannon’s life seemed as tidy and comfortable as a tray of newly baked cookies.

Rhiannon said uncertainly, “My great-grandfather built this house on the ruins of a house my great-great-grandfather built. My dad had turkeys in that barn. My brother, too, until he died. I raised my kids here. And I can only dream the mirrors, nothing fancier.”

Bryde folded his hands behind his back as he peered into one of the mirrors (from this angle, Ronan could not see what he saw, only the top of his own head), and then he said, “There used to be a great house full of nobles who oversaw everything important and good. Because they oversaw everything important and good, everyone began to think of the men and women who lived in this great house, this mansion, this castle, this tower on the rock, as important and good, too. This has always been the way of it; those who take the credit get the credit because, as Ronan Lynch has discovered, when the world shouts, other people listen, whether or not they are right.

“These men and women in the great house were listened to in all things and no one who was not a member of this house could make law or change the hearts of men; who but a fool or a traitor would speak against the holders of everything important and good, after all? A young man who was not known to them came to the great house and asked to be made a member of this household so that he, too, could change the world, and they asked him why he felt he belonged.

“I am a poet, said the young man.

“No, they replied, we already have a poet.

“I am a swordsman, he said.

“No, they replied, we already have a swordsman.

“I am a smith, he said.

“No, they said, we already have a smith.

“I am a wizard, he said.

“No, they said. We have a wizard.