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splayed flat on the edge of his workbench, her whole body shivering like a leaf under rain. The vertical line of the frown was etched into her brow, so like her mother. She took a breath to speak again and he silenced her, reaching across the gap between them before it became an impassable gulf. Carefully, because it was clear she was near to breaking and did not want to do so, he wrapped an arm round her shoulder and folded her into him, drawing her down until they sat together in the shadowy corner behind the furnace where she had spent so much time as a child. He stroked her hair, talking to her as he would a newly gentled horse that might still take flight, the rhythm meaning more than the words.
    As the rising sun warmed the frost from the grass and the hens roused themselves from their roost in the granary, she became less stiff under his touch and her breathing, although stilted, felt less forced. He moved her round so her back pressed on his chest and linked his arms in front of her.
    With his face close to her hair, he said, ‘Breaca, I am sorry. I have spent all winter nursing my own pain and had thought you free of yours. We can talk of your mother, of course we can. We should talk of her. It is only her name we cannot say. Her spirit is still making its way across the gods’ river to the lands of the dead. It won’t reach the far side until we burn her bones at the start of winter a year from her death. Until then, she is finding her path and we should do nothing that might draw her back.’
    ‘She is already drawn back.’ Her body had stiffened again and her voice was wooden. ‘I have dreamed her. I said her name in my dreams and she came. She keeps coming.’
    He had not expected that. Ice ran in his veins and he fought to keep himself from stiffening as she had. His mind groped for a response. ‘What does she say?’ he asked, eventually.
    ‘What she always said: that only the gods know the future and it is not for me to judge them; that I should not bear anger towards the Coritani, for they are not our true enemies. She said the council was right when they decided not to attack in the winter and that I should use my voice to warn against it when we meet again in the spring.’ She softened a little, letting her head tip back on his shoulder. ‘I don’t want to do that.’
    ‘No. But it would be a good thing to say, and they will listen to you. You are her daughter and will one day lead in her place. And you’re a warrior now. They respect you.’
    ‘I know.’
    She spoke with a new and unexpected gravity. In killing her attacker, his daughter had made of herself a warrior and earned a place on the council ahead of her time. It was a thing unknown in living memory but it was not unique. Once or twice in the tales of the heroes and their deeds there occurred a child who had killed young and gone on to greater things. They had no singer - her mother had been that - but there were those who knew the tales and could speak them well and it seemed each one who rose to speak in the slow nights of winter had picked a tale of a young-made hero. Eburovic, who knew the tales they chose not to tell, of those who killed young and died young and left no-one to mourn them, had listened with mixed feelings and nursed his own thoughts. Only now, looking back, he saw the shadows that had gathered around his daughter.
    ‘Did your mother tell you to make the brooch?’ he asked. ‘Or the elder grandmother?’
    ‘No. It was Airmid’s idea. She understands.’
    Airmid; the tall, silent, dark-haired girl, recently passed into womanhood and accepted as a true dreamer by the elders. In the autumn, before the Coritani attack, she had not been a special friend. That, too, had developed over the winter without his knowing. He reached up and lifted the brooch from the workbench and pressed it into her palm. ‘We could go this morning. If we ride now, we would reach the platform and be back before the morning is half