I sit down anyway. Legs don’t want to carry me one more step. Sit there and watch my clothes dripping onto the paving stones, making a pool around my feet. Think of blood pooling under Brother Galen’s head, his snowy hair turned sticky red. Hero, me? Not likely. Anyway, who was there to see anything? Nobody.

The fellows go inside for a bit; then Brother Ríordán’s back, standing next to me. “It helps, sometimes, to take things one step at a time,” he says. “It’s cold, you’re wet through and you need to change your clothes. Do it out here and you’ll get even colder. Or take one step inside and you’ll be in a small chamber where you can put on these dry garments and wrap a blanket around your shoulders.” When I start to say I can’t, he goes on. “I don’t suppose it will help if I suggest you hand your burden over to God. Not at this moment. But the first step toward lightening the load is to take control. This is your first step.”

“Why would you want me here?” I say, not understanding. “Why don’t you throw me out, after what happened?”

“Come in,” he says, as if I haven’t said a word. “Come and warm yourself. Time for talk when you’ve got dry and had a bite to eat. There’s nobody else in the refectory; they’ve all gone to the chapel. Just me and Brother Fergal, and he is the gentlest of souls.”

I take the step. Shivering, and not only from cold. I’m inside. Fergal helps me take off my wet things, put on a shirt and trousers, bit small but not bad. Blanket on top. Feels good. I was colder than I knew. Remember Blackthorn suddenly. What about her, if I’d wandered off and got led astray and died of cold?

Warm and dry. But trembling head to toe. If I can take the first step, the second might not be so hard. Into the refectory. Fire burning on a hearth. Long tables with benches. Clanking and clinking next door, that’ll be the kitchen. I sit down. Ríordán sits next to me. Fergal’s taking my wet things out, talking to someone, but nobody else comes in.

I’m thinking, what can I say? I’m thinking, what’s he going to say? Holding myself together by a thread, but I’m here; I’m inside; I’m working hard not to see them lying in their blood, and everything ruined.

“Brother Galen was my mentor,” says Ríordán. “He taught me everything I know. I completed my novitiate at St. Erc’s. Before your time, Brother Conall.”

Stray tear dribbles down. Can’t speak for a bit. Then I ask, “How . . . ?” All I can get out.

“After I came to St. Olcan’s, he and I corresponded for some years. Galen always loved to write. You’d know that. To write and to draw. He was fond of you. Said you had a great deal to give.”

Now I’m crying again. Different sort of tears. Don’t wipe them away. Feels like I should let them fall. “But how . . . ?”