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for the scum on the surface to harden. The fire, unfed, grew cooler, throwing redder light and softer shadows into the corners of the forge, drawing out the autumn tones of her hair and her eyebrows, making of the rest a silhouette. In profile, she was her mother. The high, flat brow led directly to the sweep of her hair. The nose was straight and firm, balancing the strong line of her jaw and the broad set of her cheekbones. Her skin was darker than Graine’s had been. She had that from her father: the ability to darken a little in the sun, not to the bark-brown of Macha and Ban, but neither to the sun-shy red of her mother. With age, he felt, she would be grateful for that. She had his height, too. He could tell, even now, that she had taken more of that from him than either of his other children and that, when grown, she and Ban would be of a height, with Silla that little bit shorter. When she stood and reached back for his smallest hammer, he could believe, in the lines of her movement, that she was growing into her mother’s grace. Then he watched her take a breath before she tapped the mould and the curve of her smile cut his heart in two. The hammer fell, splitting the mould, giving birth to the shining metal. His daughter raised her head and looked him straight in the eye, still smiling in the way she had in his dream. ‘You can come in now,’ she said. ‘It’s finished.’
    He faltered. He had never been unsure, entering his own forge. He was now. ‘How did you know I was there?’ he asked.
    ‘The fire told me.’ Her smile broadened. She was alive with the morning and the thing she had done. It shone from her as if she stood in full sunlight. She said, ‘The flames moved in the draught as you opened the flap. It had to be someone. When you waited I knew it was you. No-one else has the patience.’
    ‘You are learning it,’ he said. ‘You haven’t burned your fingers.’
    ‘Not yet.’ She frowned again at the piece on the workbench. ‘But it is hard and I have to think. You have it without thinking.’ She raised her head. ‘Don’t you want to see what I have made?’
    ‘What?’ He had believed it a secret. It had not occurred to him that he would be allowed to see it. ‘Yes. Of course.’
    It lay on his workbench, scorching wood already blackened by a hundred other new-cast pieces. He waited while she took the small hand-tongs and dipped it in the quenching bucket. The hiss of steam was one of the keynotes of his life. He closed his eyes and let the sound of it calm him. When he opened them again, Breaca had laid her work out on the bench and was standing by the forging block, waiting for his opinion. With some reluctance, he took his gaze from her face and directed it to his bench and the thing she had made.
    Like the best pieces, it was deceptively simple. At first glance, it was a small spearhead, the length of his middle finger, with a long leaf-shaped blade and a point as sharp as any got from casting. It was a thing of fierce beauty and she had clearly modelled it on the old one he kept in his work bag, which had been made by the ancestors and passed down through her mother’s line to him. He was impressed with the workmanship and the time she had taken to get the proportions right, scaling it up so that the end result was a third bigger than the original. At the same time, he knew a fleeting disappointment that she should have made something as plain as a spearhead in her first casting. He turned it over to examine the back, buying himself time.
    That was when he found the first deception. It was not only a spearhead; when she laid it on the bench, she had placed it carefully so that the back was hidden and he had not seen the detail on the reverse that made it also a brooch, cast in the old style of his forefathers, with a front face that showed to the world and two holes behind for the pin to pass through and hold it in place on the cloak. It was clever, and he felt a surge of warm