“Ah, well, old girl, remember the definition of an Anglo-Saxon: a German who’s forgotten his grandmother was Welsh. Back in the old days I did always note that it wasn’t the people from the Gaeltacht who went barking mad for the Celtic-Twilight, Deirdre-of-the-Sorrows bit.”

“No,” Juniper said shortly. “They were too poor and too sensible, both. What my mother would think of this festival of deranged romanticism run amuck I shudder to imagine. It was hard enough on her when I went over to the Old Religion.”

“She might note that it was an Englishman by the name of Rawlinson who invented the kilt.”

“He probably just stole the credit for it,” she said loftily, and saw the glint of amusement in his rather watery blue eyes—they’d been injured in some distant land in battle before the Change.

Oman, it was called, she recalled. Odd, to remember a time when places halfway around the world were more than distant rumor, when it really mattered what happened there. Nigel isn’t the only one who’s old. I’m spending more and more time remembering, and less than I should focusing on the future. It’s well that Rudi is High King now, a Changeling King for the Changeling world. Time for oldsters to take another step back.

They’d had practice talking quietly for each other’s ears only, but Juniper thought that Fiorbhinn caught a little of it. The girl had inherited the music from her side of the family along with a very keen set of ears, and her mother’s bright leaf-green eyes, though her hair was white-blond with summer. The eyes sparkled now, and she carried the case with her small harp proudly, with the gravity only eleven years was capable of.

Maude was fifteen, coltish and slim and slightly awkward with it, brown-haired and grave. She was also swallowing a little now and then behind her calm face. Maude had always been the good one, steady and sensible and clever and kindhearted but not foolishly so, without the tang of wildwood magic that rang in Fiorbhinn’s blood and out through her music. This wasn’t something she had anticipated.

Which just goes to show the limits of being sensible, my girl, Juniper thought sympathetically. For this is a matter of the Chieftainship, and truly that has something beyond the schemes and thoughts and reasons of humankind. There is a true magic to it, a thing that lifts us beyond the veils of the everyday. There always was.

Rudi stood waiting for her; he removed his bonnet and bowed, smiling. Their eyes met as if in complicity, sharers in some solemn game, and her heart twisted with love and the sorrow that was its shadow.

I loved him so as a baby, and a child, and now a man. I protected him from all I could, but in the end love means letting them go.