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enough I lay awake for an age after the ceilidh died, my mind buzzing, wishing Orach was with me. The sleep that eventually came was light, the sound and movement of strangers more than enough to penetrate it.
    I sat up, listening, frowning. My head was clear, but I was surprised anyone else’s was. Clearly I’d misread something during the evening, and that irritated and intrigued me. Of course I was going to get up and investigate. Who wouldn’t?
    Anyone with half a brain, I suppose.
    I was alone, and just as well. You can’t skulk and prowl with a partner, not without getting caught. I knew this by instinct and I’d proved it to myself by taking Feorag with me once or twice, just for fun. He wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t clumsy; he just didn’t understand the importance of not being seen. He grew bored, breathed or moved at the wrong moment, or simply didn’t think it mattered a damn if some guard caught us eavesdropping. A couple of hidings later—which I blamed entirely on Feorag and not on the guards—I stopped taking him with me. I liked Feorag. It didn’t mean he was stitched to my backside, and I liked my own company better. Sionnach I could have taken, because Sionnach lived in calm silence the way he lived in his clothes: the boy wasn’t even capable of excessive noise. I’d have taken Sionnach with me anywhere. It was just that Sionnach would never have been stupid enough to come.
    The halls and passageways were preternaturally quiet. That felt different. On any ordinary night, and especially in the wake of a party, you’d have heard people still stumbling towards bed or a lover or another drink. I certainly expected to have to dodge sentries, not to mention the filthy-tempered Fionnaghal who ran the kitchens I had to creep past. But no-one moved, no-one stirred, no-one breathed. I didn’t like it. If no-one was about, what had I heard?
    I felt her before I saw her, and I went still as a stone. I’d never worked out why Leonora hadn’t had me killed, and I wasn’t at all sure the decision was final.I wouldn’t have admitted it, back when I was young, but she scared me. The funny thing was, I think I scared her too. Not in quite the same way, of course.
    It struck me that I hadn’t seen the old witch since she’d demanded music in the great hall. She’d slipped away, as she often did, and now here she was, walking silently away from the kitchens. What she’d be doing there, I couldn’t imagine: not indulging a late night hunger, anyway. Not unless she drank the blood of foxes or bats, because all I could smell on her was night air. I could smell Outside; I could smell the moor. She’d been out of the dun, and recently, but I was damned if I could imagine how, or why, not to mention why she’d make a detour to the food stores on her way home.
    At that point I almost lost my nerve and went back to my rooms, but my luck held and she didn’t sense me hiding there. Preoccupied, she dusted cobweb and earth from her embroidered coat, and passing within an arm’s length of my hiding place, she walked swiftly towards the passageway and the stairs that led to the west side of the dun.
    Yes, of course I should have turned back then. No, of course I didn’t. She was only joining the night wanderers. Of course I was going to follow. I thought, as idiots do, that I’d die if I didn’t know what was going on. And I knew my curiosity was justified when she turned the corner that opened into her anteroom, and I slipped silently after her, and I saw Lilith.
    For a few mad seconds I thought it would be an assassination; then I saw the others. The anteroom was vast, and more like a network of rooms, with its alcoves andrecesses and aisles. Griogair stood waiting, and so did Conal: dragged prematurely away from his redhead, poor sod. Kate sat smiling at Leonora in her deceptively vacuous way, and at her side stood my mother, impassive as a carving. On the back of an oak chair Leonora’s raven companion