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when you weren’t looking for them. I did not know whether that was true, for I had never seen clurichaun or sylph, Fair Folk or Old Ones myself. Only, sometimes, I’d thought I glimpsed a gossamer creature darting through a sunbeam, or heard the shuffle of odd little feet in the ferns. No more than that.
    It took the rest of the day to reach the keep. We stopped by a stream to rest, and while the men were watering the horses Rhian broke the food she had brought into small pieces and wedged each in turn between the inflexible first and second fingers of my right hand so I could feed myself. Long practice had made us efficient at this, and I was done by the time the men returned. I’d have eaten quite happily in front of our grooms and men-at-arms, but doing so before my father’s guards was another matter.
    As we rode I considered what lay ahead. I pictured the stone walls of the keep, tall and grim. There had always been men-at-arms by the gateway, their tunics bearing the family emblem, two torcs interlinked, in blue on a white background. Within the gatewaylay the courtyard, with stables and other outbuildings at the far side. My mind took me through the main door of the keep and into the living quarters. The grand dining hall housed several tables where family, guests and other members of the household all sat together to eat and be entertained in the evenings. There were musicians, storytellers, druids. Such visitors were often accommodated in the annex set within the walls but apart from the main building. To reach it, you went out the door from the kitchens and across the courtyard. But perhaps the annex wasn’t there any-more. Hadn’t someone told me, back when I was too sick to listen properly, that Father was having that whole building taken down? That, after the fire, he could not bear to look at it?
    “Are you still comfortable?” Rhian asked me as we rode down a steep track with a gushing stream to one side. The ferns that hugged its course were spangled with tiny droplets. It was the sort of place where my sisters and I had often played in the old days, floating leaf boats, building dams, picking herbs.
    “Comfortable, no,” I said. “I’m coping. How about you?”
    “I’m fine.” She shifted a little in the saddle. “But tired. I’ll be glad to get there.”
    “If they were expecting us to spend two nights at the inn, they may be surprised to see us today.”
    There was a silence; then Rhian said, “Your family will be delighted to see you, even though this must be a sad time for them.” This remark showed her uncanny ability to guess what I was thinking.
    “I hope so. And I hope they don’t assume I’m back for good.”
    She waited again before answering. “They’ll want that,” she said. “Didn’t you say all your sisters have moved away now, even Eilis?”
    “So I heard, though the news about Eilis sounded odd. She went to Galicia. That’s a long way.”
    “There will be lots of stories to tell,” Rhian said, and then, in quite a different voice, “Maeve?”
    “What?”
    “You’ll think I’m being silly.”
    “Tell me what it is and I can make up my own mind whether it’s silly.”
    “I keep seeing things. Or half-seeing them. Figures moving about under the trees, only when I look again they’re only shadows. And things flying that aren’t bats or birds.”
    I considered the stories my handmaid so loved to hear, full of quests and spells and beasts that changed into human folk. If anyone was going to turn a trick of the light into a dragon or a flying horse, it was Rhian.
    “Don’t you remember what I told you?” I kept my tone light. “The Sevenwaters family and those who travel with them are always safe in this forest. So even if you do see something, you need not worry about it. We must be nearly there by now; it’s almost dusk. Besides, you were the one who wanted to see clurichauns.”
    “This was much too big for a clurichaun.” Rhian’s voice was a