‘The next time I went to examine the hollow my father told me to close my eyes, and he had tied some coloured cloth round a low-hanging bough,’ Neasa says. ‘He always told me to put my hand in first lest it see your eyes too soon and give you back what you want to see instead of what is the truth. I still did not believe in any sorcery.’

‘But you believe in trees?’ Concessa asks. ‘I do believe in them. It would be madness to not. They move so much, even without wind. Sometimes they are sad, sometimes lonely. I believe they talk to one another when we don’t disturb them. I think they speak to one another with their roots. The way they twist around each other is the way that we hold hands when we are fond of one another.’

‘I do as well,’ Neasa says, ‘but the next time I went there my Cormac said he would stand at a distance, and it was not fully dark. It was twilight and the birds were creating storms with the beatings of their wings and everything was orange and tinted as though seen through some warped glass, and I put out my hand and felt some soft and fleshy resistance, a slit that was opening. A frog was hopping about my feet. I am terrified of them. My mother was the same. If I said to my mother, “Imagine the texture of a frog,” she would jump, yell, knock over her dinner, perhaps feel ill for days.’

‘Álmaith was Segnat’s favourite daughter,’ Ruth says.

‘I called my father and said I did not wish to proceed—’

‘People will begin believing in trees again, the way it’s going,’ Concessa says. ‘You must have a strong head about you in such times as these, or you will wander into ungodly pastures like the straying lambs now all the shepherds are dead of the sickness. Do you remember the pox when the Preston family began praying to bulls?’

‘I do not remember the father’s name it was so long ago,’ Ruth says.

Samthánn stands up and pads along the walls, dragging her hand against them. Parts of the house are made of wood. One of the walls is wattle, but four portions of it are stone pillars; they hold up the roof. Samthánn runs her hand over a pillar and, finding it flat enough, taps her rock against it, and begins etching a picture with the sharp point.

‘They tried getting back into Communion but were not let for a month of Sundays,’ Concessa says, ‘for Father Unction had said if you disbelieve when the animals are sick, how will you fare when the men are sick? And the sickness is coming, he said. It is riding towards us sinners, across the valley. It does not trip. Its steps are clean. It is so hasty it appears before its own shadow.’