Page 161

Under any other circumstances, I might have laughed.

“Then he mentioned the attack,” Amelia goes on. “Not only that it happened, but the date of it.”

At that, she turns the sketch enough for all of us to see the lower corner.

“I sign and date all my work,” she says, barely above a whisper now. “Always.”

There, beneath the last harsh strokes of charcoal, is her name.

And beneath that, plain to see: 2 August 1798.

“I woke that morning sick with what felt like fever. I couldn’t settle myself until I put it to paper, shaking the whole time.” She swallows. “When I connected the dates… the feeling came back in full force.”

James stares stone-faced down at the page. “You drew it before you knew any of it had happened?”

Mannie’s voice stays low when he answers. “That was the moment she stopped thinking me mad. Or near enough. It was also the moment I knew for certain what she was.”

Ellen draws her arms across herself. “What’s that?”

Mannie doesn’t take his eyes off Amelia. “A Pastseer. Someone who can see through to what has been bound, buried, or left behind. A rare gift. Rare enough that I had thought it nearly gone from the world.”

Amelia gives the faintest shake of her head, as if the name still sits strangely on her.

“When Mannie put the tablet in my hands,” she says, looking at the tablet, “there was no room left for doubt.”

“What did you see?” James asks.

She doesn’t answer at once. She keeps her hand near the tablet, though not on it, as if even a finger’s breadth closer might drag her back into what she saw.

“It was as if I’d been set behind someone else’s eyes and made to witness what they had locked away. I saw a man standing apart from the rest, three others watching as if waiting for judgment. He had the look of a poet, with a harder held authority beneath it.”

“Amergin,” Mannie adds.

Amelia nods. “I saw him with the tablet, whole in his hands. I saw grief around him, but not his alone. The land grieving through him, or perhaps alongside him. I can’t say it rightly.”

“He named two outright,” Amelia says. “Two of his brothers, Éber Finn of the North and Érimón of the South.”

Alex looks to Róisín. “Are those names I should know?”

“You should remember them from our lectures in Early Irish Literature at Trinity,” I put in. “They were the two brothers Ireland was first divided between.”

Alex lifts a shoulder. “In my defence, I was excellent at attending those lectures and considerably worse at absorbing them.”

“Aye, I remember.” I say. “You absorbed every pretty face in the room and precious little else.”

Róisín arches a brow. “A shameless rake with a university education.”

Alex turned to her with that devastating half-smile of his. “All that looking was time wasted. The only woman who could ever turn my head was here in the Highlands all along.”

That earns him a reluctant twitch at the corner of her mouth.

“Now hush. Let Amelia get back to the important things.” Róisín says.

Amelia smiles faintly before the expression slips away. She lowers her eyes to the tablet again, and all the attention in the room returns to her.

“There was another name spoken, too. Not one of the brothers. Lugaid, son of Íth.”

“Lugaid,” I repeat. The name is not unknown to me, but it sits further back in memory, less often spoken than the others.