‘It means,’ she says, eventually, ‘that if I bear a child it will have Colca’s properties, but you didn’t need a dream to tell you that, no?’

Raghnailt is silent, staring at the jugs of powder on the floor, Colca’s tools in the corner, and wonders at how so many unwanted secrets have accumulated around her little family.

‘Do you suffer?’ Alannah asks.

‘I did not wake well. The day has already been too much for me, though it has just begun. Another Colca cannot be heaped on the next generation of Nobberians, or the town itself will surely die.’

Alannah, her face still soft with the sleep it has recently abandoned, sits up and stretches out her body. She goes to the door the men have left open behind them, looking out at the day.

Her husband is dragging corpses by the legs from his forge to the abandoned monastery, where he conceals them beneath the thick tangles of ivy the centuries have bequeathed upon the crumbling structure. He resembles some scavenger of carrion with his black face. His wide movements and darting eyes are shy in an animalistic fashion, full of a constant fear that has been bred out of a lifetime’s worth of hiding.

‘I do know it,’ she says.

‘When that man took over the town,’ Raghnailt says, ‘I was almost happy, for I believed his evil was so great it would eclipse our family’s disgrace, like brighter stars blotting out lesser ones, but their evils have only complemented one another. He colluded so quickly with the outsider.’

‘You shouldn’t be afraid,’ Alannah says. ‘He has not had me since our wedding, and he did not perform well on that night. Your line will die out.’

‘That is also sad,’ Raghnailt says.

‘Your line has done much great hurt to its own town.’

‘We were very upstanding once in our community,’ Raghnailt says.

‘As was I,’ Alannah replies.

Raghnailt cannot give answer to this, and Alannah’s thoughts are elsewhere. Having finished disposing of the bodies, her husband is now standing tall, caressing Emota in the distance, giving her kisses all along her long neck.

The perpetual curfew on the town has made Colca brazen. There has been much superfluous carnage and reordering, and Colca, always quiet and slinking, has now been unnaturally writ large on the town, and it has allowed him to become more like himself. If he had acted in this manner on the street even a month ago, Alannah thinks, his neighbours would have killed him before they could tie the knot to hang him. Now he is almost Nobber’s ruler.

‘Do not fret over your dreams,’ Alannah says. ‘Perhaps superior beings like Gaels have dreams in which the unfolding of the universe is inscribed, but there is no meaning in your dreams. They are just the errata of a life, and life is strewn with symbols that do not chime with anything.’