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could have many more winters of hunting Romans alone. Will you risk the loss of that, to hear my message?’
    Breaca closed her left fist, feeling the brush of pain in her palm that was the memory of a sword cut. It did not ache to warn her of danger. The spear wound in her upper arm throbbed alarmingly, but other wounds had been as deep and gone as bad and she had not died of them.
    She looked across the fire into the darkness of the cave but found no help there; the ancestor-dreamer was uncharacteristically silent. As at all the most important decisions in her life, Breaca was alone. There was a freedom in being so.
    She said, ‘There is not so much pleasure in killing Romans that I would want to miss a message from Efnis that has cost the lives of three warriors. Yes, I will share your risk.’
     
    II.
    ‘YOUR SISTER IS DEAD.’
    ‘I have no sister.’
    The air in the smithy was dense with the smoke of scorched metal and loud with the clatter of beaten iron. Sun streaming in through the smoke hole cast a puddle of light on the floor, missing both the stoked fire and the anvil. Neither was a mistake; the smith of Hibernia liked the red shadows of his work-world and had no desire to meet the exposure of daylight, particularly not in his current company.
    He played his hammer down the arm’s length of cooling metal that would one day soon become a sword blade and felt the rhythm rock pleasingly through his bones. Doing so, he ignored the visitor standing on his threshold. Quite deliberately, he did not invite him to cross it.
    Luain mac Calma, once of Hibernia, now Elder and foremost dreamer of Mona, was not used to being ignored. He had rarely been denied entry to the home of another and never when he had travelled ten days to bring news of some moment.
    Nor did he need light to see the body and soul of the man he had come to visit; a dreamer spends a great deal of his life in half darkness. Standing on the threshold, he studied the straight, blue-black hair, grown to shoulder length when once it had been cut short to please the legions, the lean lines of the body, once battle-fit and kept almost to that by the work of the forge, the sculpted cheekbones and high brow of a man whom the gods had spun far away from his life’s course, and not yet cast back. There was anger there, and a stubborn pride, and neither of these quite covered the fear, or the effort being made to hide it.
    All of this, he compared to what he had last seen of this man, and was not disappointed; three years’ peace and solitude had healed more than mac Calma had thought possible. His doubts, which were many, rested on the condition of the smith’s heart and soul.
    He drew a breath and let it out, slowly. Over the pounding clash of the hammer, he said, ‘You are Ban mac Eburovic, Harehunter and horse-dreamer of the Eceni, and I am growing very tired of your fictions. Your boy tells me—’
    ‘He is not my boy.’ The hammer missed a beat and, stammering, found it again. ‘He calls himself Bellos, after the Bellovaci who were his people among the Belgae. I may have bought him as slave but I have returned to him his name and his freedom. Nevertheless, he hates me. He remains here only because his fear of the Hibernians is greater than his hatred of me. Their menfolk are not
    gentle in the expressions of their affection towards well-favoured youths with gold hair and eyes the colour of the summer sky. He’s safer here than anywhere else and he knows it, or he’d be gone long since.’
    Mac Calma let one brow rise to the top of its flight. ‘He looks on you as a father.’
    The smith shrugged. ‘A man may despise his father and still be his son. Look at Caradoc.’
    ‘Or at you.’
    The hammering ceased. The silence after was hard on the ears.
    With exquisite care, the smith laid aside his hammer and, with his tongs, lifted the still-glowing blade on which he had been working. By the blood light of its shine, he spoke quietly and distinctly,