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a patron of all skills and craftsmanship. He would appreciate its worth.
    Of course the chief druid was not about to concern himself with cookery lessons. It was a wonder to me that he concerned himselfwith my welfare at all. But he did allow me to come to the lessons held every morning for the sons of the noble families in Emain. Girls could be taught too, if their parents wished it, but we were generally given private lessons within the family grouping. Boys in their first stirrings of manhood are considered difficult enough to teach, I suppose, without the distraction of young females at their side!
    In any case, I was too young to excite any attention at all from the bigger boys, and there was certainly room for me. Each class was a painful reminder of the death of the boy troop, for although Follaman, Conchobor’s son who led the boys, had made the youngest ones stay back, there were none past the age of thirteen left to teach. We made a small group, rarely more than ten.
    I went every morning. I believe I was the only one who did, for these were warriors’ sons, destined for the sword and the spear, and most would take any excuse to miss their lessons. But I sat on the fringes of the restless, often reluctant, boys and listened as I never had before. The vastness of all there was to know was overwhelming: not only our histories, but calculation, star reading, navigation, herb lore and healing, natural and human law. Cathbad’s druids shared teaching duties, and as one or another would take the class, I came to see that each had his own deep pool of knowledge. It’s little enough I understood of what they said, but I ate up their words like a greedy nestling.

C HAPTER 8
T HE W OMAN OF THE S IDHE
    My father lay in the Speckled House, and the seasons turned. When the golden leaves of the orchards began to drift down, and the first night frost left the grass stiff and white at dawn, harvest took on an urgency that made the autumn air hum with purpose. Apples, grain, turnips—anything that would keep was gathered and stored, and anything that wouldn’t was eaten. The peat cutters stacked their dried bricks into huge mounds, and when the herdsmen began bringing the cattle and sheep in from summer pasture and the air grew sharp with the tang of slaughter and smoke, I realized with a start that Samhain was only days away.
    I was frightened of Samhain. I expect all children are, at that moment when every fire and lamp is put out, and we stand so alone in the dark, so close to the Otherworld we feel its very breath on our necks. When the druids finally finished their chants and prayers and offerings and lit the Winter Fire, it was not only children who felt a surge of relief.
    Samhain in Emain Macha was a huge event. Besides the rush to have all in readiness for the dark season, besides the ceremony itself, there was a great gathering of all the chieftains and lesser kings of Ulster. It was the greatest feast of the year, when Conchobor exchanged pledges with his sworn men and rewarded his champions. And then, in the days that followed, the Wise Ones would sit in judgment, to hear peoples’ claims and disputes.
    But I saw neither feast nor fire, for my mother would not leave the Speckled House from the moment the sun began its long afternoon descent down the slope of the sky. Samhain would not begin until sundown, but Emer was taking no chances. With the veil between worlds becoming so thin, she said, the spirits of the dead and people of the Sidhe could intermingle freely with ourselves, and she feared my father’s spirit might forsake us and slip away.
    “He is not altogether in this world as it is, Luaine,” she explained. “Even Cathbad cannot say what holds him to life. But if he were to leave us this night, and I not there to plead and fight for him to stay, the blame and grief would be with me to the end of my days.”
    I remembered what she had said—how we needed each other— and resolved to sit vigil too.