“Felix. You are transparent. Your feelings for her are written on every part of you. I saw it the moment the two of you stepped off the boat. Your plan is nothing but a rod for your back, and perhaps for hers as well. Go home to Armorica. Before ten years have passed you will have found a wife, fathered a child or two and made your parents happy.”

I spring to my feet, too angry now to guard my words. I meet the druid’s impassive gaze full on. I square my shoulders. “You diminish what I feel, and what she feels, when you speak thus,” I tell him. “What is between us is as deep as the earth, as wide as the sky, as boundless as the great ocean. To deny it is to deny the turning of the seasons, the ebb and flow of the tide, the journeys of sun and moon. I have always respected Sibeal’s vocation. I have not tried to divert her from it against her will; all I have done is confront her with the need to be honest in her choices. I know how unhappy she is. She grieves for the parting to come. What I suggested to you is not what my heart most desires. I make no secret of that. I want her to choose me as her husband and the father of her child. I know the little girl she has seen in visions is our daughter, hers and mine.”

A subtle change crosses Ciarán’s face at this, masked almost as soon as it appears.

“But Sibeal believes there is no third choice, no compromise by which she can honor both her feelings for me and her love of the gods,” I say. “I cannot leave her forever, Master Ciarán. I cannot bear to be parted from her. If we cannot be husband and wife, then let me be close to her, let us live as colleagues.” I bow my head. “I will never wed another. She is the other half of me.”

“Are you sure Sibeal’s feelings are as powerful as your own?”

I would like to strangle him, right now. “Perhaps you dismiss her sorrow as fleeting and insignificant,” I say. “Maybe you do not know her as well as you think.”

He opens his mouth, and I expect that he will say something like, All things pass, or You are young. But what he says is, “I respect your sorrow, Felix. Tell me, how old are you?”

“I am in my twentieth year, Master Ciarán. You will tell me, no doubt, that I am too young to know my mind on such matters; too much of a boy, still, to understand true love with its wild joy and its piercing heartache.”