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The next part never makes it out.

Her mouth forms it—clear as day—but the sound is simply… gone. Not muffled. Not swallowed. Removed. Róisín tries again—jaw flexing, throat working—eyes blazing with the effort.

Mannie lifts one hand, palm angled slightly upward, not in warning so much as command.

“Careful,” he says, and there’s something omnipresent in the way he says it. “It would be wise not to speak my given name aloud.”

Maeve nods once, as though this is not the first time she’s heard such a caution.

“We must mind our tongues when he is near,” she says evenly. “Names hold much power, and calling upon them this close to a—” she gestures to Mannie, “—wellspring of power can have lasting consequences.”

Mannie nods as his hands lower.

Sound returns as abruptly as it was taken.

Róisín draws a breath like she’s been held under and drags her glare to Mannie. “You—” she begins, voice sharp with indignation, “—are lucky I possess manners.”

Mannie answers with a look that is almost—almost—sheepish. He spreads both hands, palms up, in a silent, exaggerated plea for forgiveness.

Róisín’s mouth tightens. “Any other day, I’d’ve called ya every bastard name I know and meant every one of ‘em.”

His shoulders rise in the faintest shrug—apology without promise.

Alex makes an amused sound.

He leans forward, elbows on the table, staring between Mannie and Róisín like he’s watching a conjurer at a fair. “How’d you shut her up like that?” he asks, grinning. “Can you show me?”

Róisín’s boot connects with his shin under the table with surgical precision.

Alex jerks, sucking in a breath through his teeth. “Son of a cock sucking⁠—”

“Language,” Maeve scolds.

Róisín doesn’t look at him once, but the satisfied smirk on her face says more than words.

Alex hunches, rubbing his shin with his good arm like he can knead the pain out of it. His grin fades into a wince. “Right,” he manages, breathy, “can someone—” he gestures vaguely at Mannie, then at Róisín, then at the air itself—“can someone explain what that was?”

Róisín’s eyes cut to him then, quick and unsparing. The colour has gone poor in his face, and there’s a shine at his temples that has nothing to do with the fire in the hearth. She takes it in without a word, but I know she’s marked it.

Then she leans back slowly in her chair, focus set on Mannie.

“I believe,” she says, each word measured, “he means to tell us he is…”

She pauses as if she’s testing where the invisible boundary lies.

“… the Son of the Sea,” she finishes, voice flat with disbelief. Then, carefully, like stepping around a snare: “Guardian of the Otherworld.”

Mannie neither confirms nor denies it.

But in my mind, the name rises anyway.

Manannán mac Lir.

The thought barely completes itself before Mannie’s eyes settle on me.

And the look is so precise, so quietly present, that I’m certain I’ve said it aloud. That the room has heard it.

“This is insanity,” Róisín mutters under her breath. “I’d swear we’d all drunk something laced if he hadn’t just shown us what he did. If I hadn’t seen the threads. The light. The bloody sound leavin’ me like it was plucked clean out of the air.”