‘I go to the ash tree, still,’ Neasa says, ‘but sometimes I am too fat and lose my breath, and do not continue. Still, often I persist, but when I go back now, there’s nothing. For years it has given nothing back to me. Its secrets are its own, or perhaps the faerie in it has died, while the tree in it has maintained its life, though it does not produce. I put my hand in and feel damp, rotting wood. It is no longer a place of magic. The world is dying, and when the world dies, its magic and its spirits evaporate before the fleshier parts of the world do desist. Still, everything is full of symbols, they multiply and persist about us, but even so they’re all dead.’

‘She is too blond to be a Gael, and her nose is too fine,’ Concessa answers. ‘I have never seen a more beautiful child. She does remind me of Álmaith.’

The knocking begins at the door again, and the women ignore it. Ruth, peering close at the lines etched into the pillar, doubled over almost, suddenly gasps, and turns towards Neasa. ‘The child depicts all the sicknesses,’ she says.

‘They are but lines drawn by an idiot child,’ Neasa says. ‘They are childish, and I can make no sense from them. They are all tangled up, like rats’ tails in a mischief.’

‘Who is that widowed whore, that outsider, who thinks she is better than Nobber?’ Concessa asks. ‘The one who corrupted that young shepherd boy and he barely a decade of years on him yet. She sucks his cock dry every night in his sleep and he does not know it yet, the bitch. Do you remember her? Is she alive still? I would like to beat the brains out of that slut’s head until her skull was powder and her blood splattered across my cheeks, with her toothless mouth open all hours of the day, thirsty for semen. She sweats semen, the whore. On hot days like this, it pours out of her. The bitch; they’re all bitches.’

‘She was at every sickness, the child,’ Ruth says. ‘Here is an especially long one.’

Ruth drags her finger across a single curving line. The line loops, goes high, and then begins again, and it brings her over to the wooden part of the wall, near to where the child is sketching. Samthánn is almost at the door now, which is shuddering and straining with the knocking.

‘This sickness will last forever,’ Ruth says. ‘This is a big sickness and it will go on for centuries, millennia perhaps, and it is this one. I see it. I can read her, like she whispers in my ear, but this part here is my death.’

She feels faint, and leans against the wall, trembling.

‘I will not survive this drawing,’ Ruth says to the child. ‘Give me the rock.’