Page 89

A fine, ancient collection of poetry and tales of folk and fiction that belong in books told at bedtime and bard halls.

One word keeps repeating over and over in my mind.

Marked.

It continues to echo in a way I don’t much like.

I’m acutely aware of my body, of the urge to move, to research something, and the maddening lack of any useful direction.

The weight of it in the chair, the shallow drag of breath against bruised flesh from the fight, the dull ache where the wound on my arm tightens under these linen wraps. Every sensation feels sharpened, as though I’ve been peeled open and left raw.

You are marked.

A strange urge climbs my throat—not humour, not quite hysteria, but something perilously close to both. Something akin to a laugh that belongs to a man who must have cracked his skull on a stone, because surely that’s the only explanation for any of this. Surely I hit my head in that scuffle last night and left my senses somewhere in the fog.

The thought tempts me. It would be easier to dismiss this as madness.

And yet⁠—

There’s no denying I saw what Mannie showed us.

No amount of wishing can unsee it. Not even my unmatched stubbornness can argue it away. The threads were there, luminous as ever, pulling and knotting and converging as if the world itself is composed of stitched patches and, for one impossible moment, Mannie turned the seams inside out.

If that part is true, then what else might be?

From the head of the table, Mannie regards me in silence, his expression unreadable. There’s an age in that stillness that pricks at my skin, and I hate how quickly it threatens to unmake me.

I press my thumb into the tender edge of my bandage until the sharp sting cuts clean through the spiral in my thoughts.

Pain is real.

Pain is simple.

I inhale slowly, counting it out in fours the way my father once taught me to do when panic tried to make a fool of me.

“Alright,” I say, and I scarcely recognise the sound of my voice. “You’ve our attention.”

Mannie seems to consider where to begin.

“Last night, a summons went out to the Walker Between Tides to report to the Western Iberian coast.”

“Spain?” I murmur.

“Portugal, actually,” he corrects gently. “The old texts speak of Ireland’s first peoples sailing from Hispania, from the lands men now call Spain and Portugal. The Emerald Isle has never been as isolated as some like to pretend. Old bloodlines crossed those waters freely, long before kingdoms drew borders around themselves.”

Mannie’s fingers worry at the rim of his cup, rotating in small, measured circles.

I shift. “Who is the Walker Between Tides?”

Mannie’s fingers pause on the rim of his cup.

“I am.”

James goes still beside Ellen as recognition hits him alongside mine. Ellen’s fingers find his hand at once, a grounding pressure at his knuckles.

Róisín’s sudden inhale of breath breaks the silence in the room. Her head snaps toward him.

“Man—”