“The rope is woven from courage, comradeship and hope. It is strong enough to bind an evildoer and bring him to justice. I promise.”

No denying it had sounded good; inspirational, almost. Enough to make a woman turn her back on her other allegiances and march forward with the flag of justice held high, disregarding common sense entirely. Enough to make offending Lady Flidais and deceiving Grim unimportant. But something in the detail had troubled me, even so. “Flannan?”

“Yes?”

“When Grim and I met you on the road, were you really on one of your usual trips between monasteries? Did you encounter us purely by chance?”

“How could it have been otherwise, since I didn’t know you’d survived? If I had known, I’d have gone looking for you in the south, not here. When I saw you down on the shore . . . When I realized who it was . . .” I’d seen a look in Flannan’s eyes then that startled me. Had my survival truly been such a miracle for him? “Finding you again—it was a gift, pure and simple.”

For a while I’d fallen silent, for his eloquence had made it hard to go on arguing. “All very well to talk of being brave,” I’d said eventually. “But I suspect you haven’t thought this out properly. I was only in the lockup a year.” Only. Hah! It had been the longest year of my life. “What about before? Yes, I went south after Cass died. Stayed away years. But I came back. I told you before, I was in Laois for months, talking to the folk Mathuin had wronged, gathering what evidence I could, until eventually I confronted the man in public and got myself incarcerated. Why did nobody tell you about that? Even if they didn’t know we’d been friends before, I made enough of a stir to have folk talking. Or I thought I did. Surely someone in your network must have known about it.”

“Mathuin is expert at making his enemies disappear. I don’t need to tell you that, surely. Besides, I imagine you were not using the name I knew. No word came to me at all, either from the community or from my fellow plotters. Nobody would have had cause to associate you with me. To all outward appearances I am a mild-mannered scholar, a quiet person who keeps out of harm’s way.”

“Seems I made less of a stir than I’d hoped to.” All for nothing. All of it. Could I bear to go through the struggle all over again, perhaps with as little success?

Flannan had made no comment. Into the silence had come the sounds of footsteps passing, conversations, the distant ringing of a bell beyond the closed door of the stillroom. Only a matter of time before someone interrupted us. “I knew, you see,” Flannan had murmured, “that you’d want to be part of it. Need to be part of it, once you heard. I knew how you’d feel if we confronted Mathuin at last and you weren’t there to add your voice. You were always so fierce in your quest for justice, even before Cass died. It was one of the things he loved about you. That your spirit burned as brightly as your hair.”