IT was the girl Cadal had spoken of who opened the nunnery gate to us. She must have been waiting to receive us, for almost as soon as Cadal’s hand was lifted to the bell-pull the gate opened and she motioned us to come in. I got a swift impression of wide eyes under the brown hood, and a supple young body shrouded in the rough gown, as she latched the heavy gate and, drawing her hood closer over her face and hair, led us quickly across the courtyard. Her feet, bare in canvas sandals, looked cold, and were splashed with mud from the puddled yard, but they were slim and well-shaped, and her hands were pretty. She did not speak, but led us across the yard and through a narrow passage between two buildings, into a larger square beyond. Here against the walls stood fruit trees, and a few flowers grew, but these were mostly weeds and wild-flowers, and the doors of the cells that opened off the courtyard were unpainted and, where they stood open, gave on bare little rooms where simplicity had become ugliness, and, too often, squalor.

Not so in my mother’s cell. She was housed with adequate—if not royal—comfort. They had let her bring her own furniture, the room was limewashed and spotlessly clean, and with the change in the April weather the sun had come out and was shining straight in through the narrow window and across her bed. I remembered the furniture; it was her own bed from home, and the curtain at the window was one she had woven herself, the red cloth with the green pattern that she had been making the day my uncle Camlach came home. I remembered, too, the wolfskin on the floor; my grandfather had killed the beast with his bare hands and the haft of his broken dagger; its beady eyes and snarl had terrified me when I was small. The cross that hung on the bare walls at the foot of her bed was of dull silver, with a lovely pattern of locked but flowing lines, and studs of amethyst that caught the light.

The girl showed me the door in silence, and withdrew. Cadal sat down on a bench outside to wait.

My mother lay propped on pillows, in the shaft of sunshine. She looked pale and tired, and spoke not much above a whisper, but was, she told me, on the mend. When I questioned her about the illness, and laid a hand on her temples, she put me aside, smiling and saying she was well enough looked after. I did not insist: half of healing is in the patient’s trust, and no woman ever thinks her own son is much more than a child. Besides, I could see that the fever had gone, and now that she was no longer anxious over me, she would sleep.