Donncha and I did not ride back for a good while. He bathed the old man, settled him to rest again, then went outdoors to chop more wood. I told Ana I would watch the baby while she snatched some sleep. She looked at me as if I had just offered her riches beyond compare, and went off straightaway, leaving little Fursa asleep in his basket. There was a lot churning around inside me—I felt sad and powerless and angry. I hated the folly of humankind. There was cruelty and injustice everywhere. Deaths that were unnecessary; loneliness and deprivation where all that was needed, really, was for one person to hold out a helping hand. Ana reminded me of Mathuin’s victims, the women I had tried to help back in Laois after he had stamped roughshod over their lives and left a broken mess. Still, after everything, she was trying to keep going. Within that frail, tired body there was a spark of will, a flame of hope. Her son’s death, when it came, might be the chill wind that finally extinguished that flame. And there was nothing I could do. I knew no way to keep a child alive and well when his heart had most likely been failing from the moment he was born. Nobody could do that; not the most skilled physician in all Erin.

Since I could not rid myself of my furious thoughts by throwing things—in this house every item, however lowly, must be conserved with care—I set to with broom and cloth and bucket, and gave the place a good cleaning. When the woodpile was replenished, Donncha came inside and stopped short when I put a finger to my lips, signaling silence. He took off his boots and made himself useful, doing the jobs I could not reach such as getting the cobwebs out of the rafters. Fursa slept peacefully as we worked around him, a frail waif whose transparent pallor almost suggested fey blood. There’d been a child long ago in a time of my life I preferred to forget, a boy whom the other village children, and some men and women who should have known better, had called the changeling for his spindly limbs and white skin and for an invisible difference everybody felt, but nobody could quite put their finger on. He never talked much, so people thought him a dullard, a half-wit. Called him those names to his face. Teased and tormented him. I hadn’t thought about him for years. I hadn’t wanted to revisit that time. But I thought of it now as I mopped the floor of Ana’s cottage, then went outdoors to wash out a heap of soiled cloths in the water Donncha had heated for me. That long-ago boy had also been a son without a father; his mother was a woman who was rumored to be no better than she should be, and was generally shunned in the village. I’d heard folk say that the lad could have been sired by anyone, though at eight or nine I’d hardly understood the implications. One thing I’d had then that I still possessed now, and that was a fierce love of justice. I could see myself standing with legs apart and hands on hips, between the boy—what was his name?—and his tormentors, delivering a withering speech about tolerance while they gaped at me, dropping the stones from their hands as if they’d never had any intention of throwing them. I recalled threatening to set their hair alight, or send bees to torment them while they slept, if they did not cease persecuting my friend forthwith. Not that he was a friend, particularly; our paths had sometimes crossed, and when they had done we’d talked a bit, that was all. Thinking back on it, maybe I was the only person who ever talked to him. In a way we were both outcasts: he because of his odd appearance and his mother and his unwillingness to stand up for himself; I because I had been sent to live with my mentor, and she was the local wise woman. A proper wise woman, the kind with a wrinkled face and long white hair and frightening objects strung around her neck. The difference was that folk found me frightening too. If I told them to stop doing something, they did. Even when I was eight or nine years old. That was probably why my parents sent me away.