Was that when Nance first began to learn about the strange hinges of the world, the thresholds between what was known and all that lay beyond?

Just as day is joined to night, so does the year have its seams.’

we all have faith in the things of the invisible world.

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

‘Some folk are forced to the edges by their difference.’ Maggie brought an unthinking hand up to her scar. ‘But ’tis at the edges that they find their power.’

That is why she has the bothán by the woods. He had it built for her, and she selected the site herself, for ’tis close to the Good People and those who gave her the knowledge. Close to the woods and the herbs that grow in them. Close to the boundary water. Sure, ’tis a place for a wise woman, and ’tis wisdom Nance Roche has.’

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

Sometimes, in the company of suffering, Nance felt things. Maggie had called it an inward seeing. The knowledge.

During the wake, the women had told her that the grief would subside. Nóra hated them for it. There was a void there, she understood now. How had she lived her whole life and not noticed it! A sea of loneliness that sang a siren song to the bereaved. What a gentle thing it would be to give into it and drown. What an easy keel into the abyss. How