Tears sprang to my eyes. I knelt down and put my arms around her. She was ice-cold, preternaturally cold, and although she had substance, she felt nothing like an ordinary child—she was far less solid in form than Rioghan or Eichri. I suppressed a horrified shudder. There was nothing I could say that would help; no promise I could make that a small child might understand. I could not send her home. She had no home. I could not find her mother. I could not offer her a place to stay, a bed to sleep in. She was a spirit child; she did not belong with me.
“Your hair looks lovely now,” I said. “My name is Caitrin. What is yours?”
Her voice was like the passing of a breeze in the grass. “I don’t remember.”
Down in the garden, Fianchu exploded into a fanfare of barking, seeing off some nighttime creature. In my arms, the child vanished. One moment she was there, the next I was holding nothing at all.
“Caitrin?” Olcan called from outside.
My skin in goose bumps, I went out to the gallery. He and the dog were coming up the steps.
“Thought I might leave Fianchu with you tonight,” Olcan said.“You’ll be nervous after what happened earlier with your unpleasant kinsman and his cronies. You needn’t have this fellow in the bedchamber with you, though that’d be his preference without a doubt.You can leave him out here when you bolt your door, and he’ll sleep across the threshold.”
“Thank you.” Fianchu’s presence would be more than welcome.“I had visitors just now. From the host.Will Fianchu keep them away as well?”
“You’ll be safe, Caitrin.You’re Anluan’s friend.They won’t harm you.”
I considered this as I lay in bed a little later with the door shut and bolted and Fianchu on my side of it, comfortable on one of the two blankets, for I had not had the heart to shut him out. If dogs had been able to smile, he’d have had a big grin on his brutish features. Everyone seemed sure that Anluan could protect me; that his mastery over the host meant the uncanny presences of Whistling Tor would not harm his household or the chieftain himself unless he crossed that invisible line he had shown me. I wondered about that. The young man in the bloody shirt had seemed almost inimical when he accused me of lying.There had been anger in his voice when he bade me tell Anluan to let the host go. Anluan was Nechtan’s descendant, and Nechtan was the one who had brought these folk forth and, I assumed, condemned them to their strange existence on the hill.Were we really safe from them? Or might it take only a wrong word or a trivial error of judgment to turn them into the chaotic, destructive horde of Conan’s account, a force that destroyed friend and foe alike? When they had confronted Cillian this morning, they had looked ravening, fearsome, malevolent.
My mind went to Anluan. I recalled his courage as he stepped out to face my attackers, all alone. Now he was alone once more, probably in his quarters brooding over his father’s sad end. Alone save for Muirne. Solici tous, protective, devoted Muirne. Even if she had been a living woman, as I had believed until this morning, she was wrong for him. “He needs someone as perfect for him as Emer was for Irial,” I told the enormous hound. “Someone who will be kind to him, but not too kind. Someone who won’t mind living in this strange place. Someone with the patience to help him learn.”
Fianchu made no comment, only lifted his head, sighed, and stretched out luxuriously on the blanket.
“Someone who respects him,” I added. “Someone who sees him as strong, not weak. Someone who needs him as much as he needs her.”
The dog was asleep. I blew out my candle and pulled the blanket up to my chin. “And no, I don’t mean myself,” I murmured. “I’m not so foolish as that.Though I’d surely do a better job of it than
Despite Fianchu’s protective presence I slept badly. I rose at dawn with the tangled remnants of my nightmares hanging close about me.When I opened my door to let the dog out there was a sudden movement along the gallery, a blur, as if a ghostly presence had kept its own watch outside the door.
Mist shrouded the garden, creeping into every corner.Within the shifting shapes of it I could see them: the wounded, the sorrowful, the furious, the desperate folk of the hill.Their eyes were fixed on me.There were no threats, no entreaties, indeed there was no sound from them at all as they passed, but I heard the unspoken words in my heart:
