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I swallowed. “What would you have me offer?”

“Your own hair, Cébha, spread in black ringlets over my pillow. Your rowan-berry lips, for mine to feast upon.” At the expression on my face, his smile reached his eyes, and his grip upon my arm softened to a caress. “Your white throat, arched like a swan and your white breasts, a pair of nestling doves cooing in my hands. All of that, sweet Cébha, and more.”

I blushed this time to the roots of my hair.

Diurán laughed and released me. “Take it,” he said to Brigit, still holding the basket and watching wide-eyed. “Surely, I will grow more.”

So it was done and the shorn locks of his oak-brown hair were piled atop the others. Brigit went away with the basket and we cleared away the towels and shears and bowls of warm water. In exchange we brought platters of food, so heavy the weight made us stagger. The men dragged their chairs to the long trestle table and began to pile their trenchers high with meat and bread, pouring foaming tankards of ale from the jugs we set on the table. Once it was done, we joined them.

The Lady sat in the center and presided over our meal, and Máel Dúin sat beside her. With his beard neatly trimmed and his hair combed smooth, he looked less like a fierce warrior, and more like a young King at her side. There was that air about him that drew the eye.

What had transpired between them, I cannot say, though I may guess well enough. They exchanged glances and touches throughout the meal. Outside the walls of the dún, night was falling. I think they would have hastened its coming if they could.

His men ate with a goodwill, trying not to rush in their hunger; still, hands and faces were soon smeared with grease. I swabbed a piece of brown bread in the juices of the meat and nibbled at it, for I had little appetite. Beside me, Diurán cut his meat into small pieces with his belt knife, eating slowly and with relish. He caught me watching him from the corner of my eye.

“You do not rush like the others,” I said to him.

“No.” He wiped his knife on a linen napkin. “I am accustomed to fasting.”

“You are one of the filidh, are you not?” I asked it quietly.

“I am.”Diurán lay down his knife. “It is no secret, little songbird. I am only of the third caste. Half a poet, no more.” He smiled at me. “Máel Dúin sails at the behest of a monk of Duncloone to avenge his father. But it was my master, who is a druid, who told him to build his curragh.We have no secrets from one another.”

He told me, then, of the voyage they had undertaken.

It was a terrible and wondrous tale. Their journey was fated from the outset. The druid, Diurán’s master, told Máel Dúin only seventeen men might undertake the voyage; but his three foster brothers followed and swam after them. Lest the brothers drown, Máel Dúin had pulled them aboard the curragh.

After, they were blown off course and had been seeking the island where the reaver who had killed Máel Dúin’s father lived ever since.

Although they had not found it, they had seen many marvels. Diurán told me of an island with ants the size of horses, and another with birds the size of cattle. On the island of the empty fortresses, one of Máel Dúin’s foster brothers sought to steal a collar of gold, and there a little white cat leapt at him like a fiery arrow and passed through him, and he was dead.Another of his foster brothers was lost on a strange island, where the folk wept and lamented without cease; when they tried to rescue him, he wept and covered his face and would not come.

Strange to tell, the third foster brother met a fate much the same, on an island where a company of men laughed and played without cease, and would speak to no one unless he join them. Máel Dúin had to sail without him, and that was the last of his foster brothers, though his fate happier than the others.

When Diurán finished speaking there was silence, for all around the table had fallen to listening to his poet’s voice, and Máel Dúin’s men mourned their lost comrades, filling