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With a suddenness that startles the room, Mannie rises to his feet and crosses back over to the table. He places his palm against the basalt, and it answers the touch with a sudden thrum.

Then he moves to lift it, and the moment his fingers close round it, the broken tablet gives a great pulsing thrum.

Every one of us feels it. Breath catches all round the room. More than one startled gasp slips loose before it can be checked.

And at that, Mannie smiles.

“So I ask you now, in full knowledge of what you may be called to bear: will you swear yourselves to the Emerald Oath? Will you vow to protect the land and its people, to do what must be done though the end be hidden from you, though the burden be heavy, though the cost be dear?”

He lets the silence gather after the words.

“If you speak from here forthwith, the oath will hear you. Having heard you, it will not forget.”

Mannie turns his palm upward. In it lies a single stone that’s small enough to rest easily in the centre of his hand—smooth and rounded by long years, dark as river-wet earth, with faint carved markings.

“This is an oathing stone,” he says, “meant for the making of vows such as this one. If you will swear it, come forward. Lay your hand upon it, speak after me in the new tongue, and let the oath know your names.”

I look at Róisín. Her eyes are bright still, her face pale, and yet there’s such steadiness in her that it shames my hesitation. She gives the smallest nod.

I don’t trust myself to speak, so I answer her with one of my own. I help her to her feet and step forward with her by my side to the table.

The light above the basalt shifts as we near it. In a saner world, I’d call it a trick of the light. But sanity has been taking a real beating since I arrived here, so that explanation is out. The pale lines tip toward me, slow and curious, and I dislike that immediately. There’s not much more unsettling than sentient-adjacent objects taking interest in you, which isn’t a sentence I ever thought I’d be stringing together.

Up close, the thing looks so old it ought to have turned to dust centuries ago.

“Your hand first, Alex,” Mannie says softly.

The instant I touch it, the skin there prickles as though I have set it over a flame too strange to burn. The air suddenly smells like wet mossy stone, and cold clean biting wind rolling off the salty sea.

Mannie begins again in the old tongue.

“Tongu do dia toinges mo thúath.”

The words move through the room like the toll of a bell sunk deep under water. I don’t understand what he’s saying, but I can sense the weight of it, the solemn rise and fall, and I feel something old being called back to life.

Then he gives it to me in the new tongue, one line at a time.

“I swear by the gods by whom my people have long sworn.”

My voice catches on the first word and steadies on the next.

“I set my hand, my will, and my living soul to the keeping of Éire.”

“To her land and her waters. To her memory and her grief. To her people, the living and the lost alike.”

“I shall not turn from her in fear.”

The light above the basalt pulses emerald, and one of the thin strands bends toward my hand.

Light spills across my skin, sudden and bright over the back of my hand, forming a quaternary pattern. Every part of me wants to yank away, but I grit my teeth and keep my hand where it is.

“I shall not abandon her to ruin while strength remains in me.”

My voice roughens.

“I shall not leave unanswered the wrong done to her people where answer may yet be made.”

Mannie goes on, ignoring the green glowing symbol on my hand. I continue repeating after him.