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drivel!” he
yelped again. “There’s a man about! An old one, aye, but I still quake in the
presence of lace and love and matches and florals and all else womanly!”
    My cheeks flushed. Just how
much had he heard?
    “Sorry, we were chatting
like old birds, so we were,” Cath said pleasantly. “And what are you doing
lurking in the forest when there are strangers about? Were you trying to give
us a scare?”
    “Eh? Did you not hear?” Pat
said. “The stranger left this morning.”
    Cath’s mood immediately
catapulted, and a bright grin stretched across her face. She’s not plain , I thought absently. If she thought she was plain, what did she think of me?
    Cath continued to fire off
questions about the stranger toward our old neighbor.
    “Stop, child, stop!” he
finally cried. He leaned against a tree near me, pulled off his plaid cap, and
dragged a sleeve across his forehead. “I know nothing. He slept in my barn and
left this morning. That’s all I know.”
    “But what did he want?”
Cath went on.
    Pat’s faux shocked stare
came to me. “Oh dear lord and savior!” he cried dramatically. “Has the child
gone deaf? Has she not heard me say I don’t know?”
    I smiled, but my heart was
too heavy to trifle with the old joker. If Cath knew my deepest feelings about
Wyn … who else did? Was it possible that Wyn did? And if so, why hadn’t he kissed me? Maybe he didn’t want to. It was a
plausible option, I thought as I pressed the tip of my finger to the beastly ridge
in my nose. Was I too plain?
    I’d worried about many
things before. Whether I was a good person … if my real parents were good
people. If I’d live a long and happy life. Whether I was smart or funny.
Whether my parents were mages. But I’d never worried about whether or not I was
plain.
    Every bit of me felt hot as
I realized with humiliation that I’d just discovered the worries that plagued
the other young women of Killybeg on a daily basis. If I opened that chest of
pain and nerves, I’d surely become one of them, prattling on about kissing and
dresses and other things I’d never cared about before.
    “What are you doing out
here?” Cath asked the old neighbor once again, determined for an answer.
    This time, he answered
simply, “Visiting my wife.”
    Pat Manor’s wife had been
dead these ten years.
    Cath rolled her eyes, but
my heart rate picked up and my eyes must have been the size of oranges.
    “You see her during the
day?” I asked breathlessly. The little hummingbird stirred in my hand, as if it
could feel the pluck of my tightly strung nerves.
    “Ruby!” Cath cried,
appalled that I would exhibit even the slightest interest in such a topic. The
topic of a lunatic.
    “Aye, and the night, too,” he
replied, as if seeing visions was the most natural thing in the world.
    “Every time?” I asked. “Do
you call for her? How do you find her? Or does she find you?”
    His eyes narrowed. “Does
the child see her own phantoms?”
    The silence went on a beat
too long, and I took in a deep breath of woody forest air to prepare my lie.
    But I didn’t have to.
That’s precisely when the familiar toll rang out.
    It was the deep, booming
bellow of an old bell, and it reverberated around the trees and roused the
hummingbirds to the sky in a thick flash of dangerous color.

Chapter Seven
     
    We left Pat Manor to hobble along behind as we
dashed out of the woods. I paused at the edge to place the little hummingbird,
still deep in torpor, on a low branch. He blinked gratefully at me and I dashed
away after Cath.
    My first worry was for
Maisie. Her stiff, wrinkled hands and tired eyes came to mind. Surely they
wouldn’t have sounded the alarm if Maisie went peacefully …
    “What’s happened?” Cath
demanded, huffing and puffing. We’d come upon George and Mary Finney on the
lane.
    “I don’t know, child!” Mary
cried.
    “Has the stranger come back
for us all?” Cath cried, tears springing to her eyes.
    My thankful