“Leave it to me, my lady. All will be ready for you.”

• • •

Later still, as her household busied itself with the arrangements—horses, supplies, weaponry—she climbed back up to the high chamber and looked out once more on the Tower of Thorns. All day its tenant had shouted, wailed, howled like an abandoned dog. Now his voice had dwindled to a hoarse, gasping sob, as if he had little breath left to draw.

“This time I’ll make it happen,” she murmured. “I swear. By every god there ever was, by the stars in the sky and the waves on the shore, by memory and loss and heartbreak, I swear.”

The sun was low; it touched the tower with a soft, rosy light that made a mockery of his pain. It would soon be dusk. There was just enough time.

With her gaze on that distant window, she began the nightly ritual. “Let me tell you a story.”

1

Blackthorn

I sat on the cottage steps, shelling peas and watching as Grim forked fresh straw onto the vegetable patch. Here at the edge of Dreamer’s Wood, dappled shade lay over us; the air held a warm promise of the summer to come. In the near distance green fields spread out, dotted with grazing sheep, and beyond them I glimpsed the long wall that guarded Prince Oran’s holdings at Winterfalls. A perfect day. The kind of day that made a person feel almost . . . settled. Which was not good. If there was anything I couldn’t afford, it was to get content.

“Lovely morning,” observed Grim, pausing to wipe the sweat off his brow and to survey his work.

“Mm.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Something wrong?”

A pox on the man; he knew me far too well. “What would be wrong?”

“You tell me.”

“Seven years of this and I’ll have lost whatever edge I once had,” I said. “I’ll have turned into one of those well-fed countrywomen who pride themselves on making better preserves than their neighbors, and give all their chickens names.”

“Can’t see that,” said Grim, casting a glance at the little dog as she hunted for something in the pile of straw. The dog’s name was Bramble, but we didn’t call her that anymore, only Dog. There were reasons for that, complicated ones that only a handful of people knew. She was living a lifelong penance, that creature. I had my own penance. My fey benefactor, Conmael, had bound me to obey his rules for seven years. I was compelled to say yes to every request for help, to use my craft only for good, and to stay within the borders of Dalriada. In particular, Conmael had made me promise I would not go back to Laois to seek vengeance against my old enemy. I’d known from the first how hard those requirements would be to live by. But my burden was nothing against that borne by Ciar, who had once been maidservant to a lady. For her misdeeds, she had been turned into a dog. Magic being what it was—devious and tricky—she had no way back.