The Good People

We still have need of the old ways and knowledge.’

One who has been chosen to walk the boundaries. One who somehow has an understanding of the mysteries of the world and who sees in the clawing briars God’s own handwriting.

Time no longer seemed to tread past in measured steps, but flung forward and back.

But the child exhausted her in a different way. He tortured her with constant, shrill needfulness.

She needed someone who might quiet the shrieking wean, who might help her resurface after she was hit with the waves of her grief.

She could crouch on the wind-whipped grass and dig the stones from the ground and fling them down at the suspicious cottiers and their fear of any woman who was not tethered to man or hearth. There, upon the mountain, her difference – no matter its great weight, its sharp and restless ache upon her heart – was, in the face of such unyielding beauty

‘For all the death in the world, each woman’s grief is her own. It takes a different shape with all of us. But the sad truth is that people will not want your grief a year after you bury your husband. ’Tis the way of it. They’ll go back to thinking of themselves. They’ll go back to their own lives. So let us mourn Martin now, while they will listen

’Tis by the cures and keening or my heart would break in hunger, but ’tis more than that. I have the knowledge given to me by the Good People and I must use it for the people here or ’twould leave me.’

Nóra held her tongue still and let her grief sit in her like a stone.