“You were in that place?” Flannan was shocked—it was well-known that few survived incarceration there. “For how long? And how did you get out?”

“For a year. Me and Grim. The details don’t matter. I’m out now and making my life again.” I held back from telling Flannan any more, though I knew he was trustworthy. Grim’s story was his own to tell, and as it had been tangled with mine since the day Conmael’s magic freed us, I would not share either. “Strange, isn’t it? After everything that’s happened, here we both are. You and me.”

“Here we both are, safe, well, and out of Mathuin’s reach.” There was an odd quality in Flannan’s voice as he said this, something that made me look at him more closely. But his gaze was turned on the floor. “And I feel ashamed,” he said.

“Ashamed? Why? We’ve all made errors. We’ve all done things that are uncomfortable to own up to.”

“All this time,” he said. “All these years, and I never went back. Not once.” His hands were clutched tightly together. He looked up, not at me, but across the chamber to the spot where Grim’s big cloak and my smaller one hung side by side from pegs on the wall. He was avoiding my eye. “Messages came from Laois. I heard that the others had been taken into custody. I knew what that meant; knew none of them would survive Mathuin’s attempts to force information out of them. What could I have done to help them, all on my own? I got on with life, as you have. I spend my time between one house of learning and another, copying, writing letters—safe, innocuous letters—reading, discovering, making notes.”

“Notes?” It was a short enough tale after nearly thirteen years of silence.

“For a book. A collection of old tales with a scholarly commentary. In Irish, not Latin. Magical stories related to the elements.”

I grimaced. “And how do your monkish hosts view such an un-Christian project?”

“You’d be surprised,” Flannan said, flashing a smile that brought back the young man in an instant. “Many of them have a love for the old tales, the kinds of stories druids and wise women told more widely before the brethren brought their new teachings to these parts. They’re well practiced in shaping the old stories to fit Christian rituals and beliefs. I may be providing more grist for their mill. For me, the exercise is to preserve this ancient lore before it is forgotten; to record it for posterity.”

I held back my opinion that such tales were better passed on from mother to daughter, from father to son, from elders to community. Fixing them with pen and ink felt wrong to me, like forcing a flowing river into confines it would always fight to escape. But he was a friend, and he meant well.

“A woman came here recently with a very odd tale,” I told him. “Lady Geiléis of Bann. She’s still at court. Brought a sort of petition to the prince, one he had no real answers for. I’d never heard the story before, though I thought I remembered the Tower of Thorns from somewhere. Is that name familiar to you?”