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his hand. Today we head off into the forest for a few days’ solitude. It is our habit to make these quiet journeys from time to time. Ciarán gathers herbs, prays, meditates. I keep him company, making myself useful when I can.
     
    We’ve been together many, many years. His father brought him safely to the nemetons but died not long after, and Ciarán was raised by the druids. A choice was made to let the boy forget what little he knew of his origins. He grew up unaware that his father had been lord of Sevenwaters. In time, that proved costly indeed.
     
    Ciarán became a fine man; a better man than I ever would have been. He had his own share of sorrows. Love drew him away from the druid path awhile. What our mother did to him and his sweetheart was crueller than the punishment she meted out to Lóch and me. Ciarán rose above it. My brother; my strong, clear-headed brother.
     
    ‘Come, then,’ he says. I fly to perch on his shoulder, and together we walk off into the forest of Sevenwaters.
     
    * * * *
     
     

 
    AISHA
     
    ‘Go,’ my father said. ‘Go and find out for yourself.’
     
    It was fair enough. I was a woman grown, and though there were certain expectations I had not fulfilled — by my age, a woman was supposed to have a husband and children — my life so far had contained more than its share of adventures. I could always rise to a challenge. I was my father’s daughter, wasn’t I? He’d done both, the adventures and the family. It was family we were discussing now, the shadowy, mysterious part of it that was away to the northwest in Erin. I’d travelled to many places, but never there.
     
    ‘I will,’ I replied. ‘And you can come with me.’
     
    Father laughed, his eyes crinkling up. He had my smallest half-brother, Luis, on his knee and was whirling a wooden rattle. The baby reached for it, shrieking with delight. ‘Me? I’m an old man, Aisha.’
     
    In years, perhaps he was. He didn’t look old, save for the touch of snow in his dark hair and those smile lines on his sun-browned skin. ‘Is that what Mercedes says?’ I asked, knowing my stepmother said nothing of the sort. Mercedes was a few years my junior: my father’s third wife, and mother of his youngest children. Ours was a noisy, busy establishment that saw a constant stream of visitors, mostly folk from the village wanting Father’s advice on matters of law or religion or the care of sick animals. He had become a father to all of them since we settled here. His seafaring days were done; in that sense, perhaps he was old, but there was a vigour about him like that of an aged olive tree, hardy, tough, his roots sunk deep in the land. And fruitful; the children kept coming. The place was full of toddlers and animals — Father had never learned to resist the pleading eyes of a homeless dog.
     
    ‘Never mind that,’ he said now. ‘You go. Sail on the Sofia when Fernando next takes her to Dublin. You’re an enterprising girl, Aisha; you can make your own way from there.’
     
    ‘And what do I do when I get to Sevenwaters? March up to the front door and say, Good morning, I’m your — what, great-niece? Second cousin? Sorry my father couldn’t come; it’s only been forty years.’
     
    ‘Closer to fifty,’ Father said, lifting Luis up against his shoulder. ‘Just as well I taught my children Irish. At least you’ll be able to introduce yourself. Tell them your father’s a doddering ancient who has trouble hobbling as far as the front door. Tell them whatever you like.’
     
    I wondered, for the hundredth time, why the bonds of family had not drawn him home in all those years. With his ships loading and unloading in Dublin regularly, he could easily have gone. Sevenwaters was not so very far north of that port, provided one could negotiate the borders between Norse and Irish territories, which were under ongoing dispute. But while Father had a hundred stories of his boyhood, and a hundred more about heroes,