would hear them, and judge.”
“And for serious issues? For rape or murder?”
“We’re a peaceful people.” He looked out across the fields and saw a young boy and his dog herding sheep. “Such offenses are rare. So rare I have never held a hearing or made a judgment on them. And I thank the gods for it, for the punishment is banishment. If my judgment is guilty, they’re sent to the world of dark. Some say death is kinder. They may be right.”
“Did my father ever banish anyone?”
Impatience eked through. “Why don’t you know this?”
“Because no one tells me.” She kept her eyes on his. “Will you?”
Keegan gestured to the wall, then sat himself. He watched the boy and the dog and the sheep. The breeze carried the boy’s song, sweet and clear.
“This is who we are.” He nodded toward the boy. “Tending the land, the animals, each other. Honoring our gifts and embracing the light. But there are some who harbor darkness within. After you were taken, after you were brought home again, we learned Odran had help. Yseult and three others. Two tried to hide in plain sight—you know this meaning?”
“Yes.”
“When their complicity was discovered, they were held while your father and those he chose pursued the others. Yseult and the third fled. She escaped, but the third Eian hunted down.”
“He—he killed him?”
Keegan looked at her, cocked his head as he heard the horror in her voice clear as bells.
“I have no doubt the temptation for that was great. But he was taoiseach, and he held the law. It’s said the man—Ultan was his name, and you’ll find no one who carries that name since—surrendered. It may be—it surely is—that no one would have faulted the taoiseach if he’d ended Ultan’s life, but Eian O’Ceallaigh held the law.”
How odd and wonderful, Breen realized, to sit here on a stone wall in sunlight and summer breezes with a man who carried a sword as others did a briefcase. To hear his voice, often so abrupt, slide into the music of storytelling.
And the story he told was hers. Hers and her father’s.
“What did he do—my father?”
“He brought Ultan back, and to the Capital, where they held the trial for the three captured. Because my father was killed, and these three were complicit, my mother took us to the trial, to show how justice and the laws worked.”
Widowed, Breen thought, with three young children. Grieving, surely grieving. “It must’ve been hard for her. Painfully hard for her.”
“She’s strong, my mother. And wise with it. It helped to see the taoiseach in the Chair of Justice, to hear the words, to watch the laws work.
“Two begged,” he continued, “and wept, and claimed they’d been bespelled. But there are ways to find the truth of that, and these were lies. Ultan, a believer in the radical wing of the Pious, remained defiant. Odran was a god, and as a god, was the true ruler, the true law. And the child—you—his to do with as he wished. You were an aberration, the mix of many, neither pure nor natural.”
“Is that how they think? The Pious?”
“It’s how many of them came to think.” He looked back at the ruin. “And those who didn’t believe as they believed they killed, tortured, enslaved, all in the name of the gods—whichever god suited them. It’s a bloody and shameful mark on our history, and most are gone, have been gone for hundreds of years. A story for another day.”
“All right. Did my mother go to the trial?”
“Eian brought her, and you, to the Capital for safety, but she remained secluded with you in her chambers.”
“Not like your mother,” Breen murmured.
“I know no one like my mother but herself.” He smiled a little as he said it, and Breen saw love.
“And so the trial lasted a full week, for the crimes and the punishment were dire. We had rooms there in the castle as well. One day your father brought you to where we stayed. I think to get you out a bit, but also to show us what our father had died for.”
“How old were you?”
“Old enough to note how you clung to Eian. But you went to my mother when she held out her arms. You went to her, and you stroked her hair as if to comfort. And I remember that well, for you did give her comfort.”
“I don’t remember. Some things come back to me in flashes and blurs. But I don’t remember any of this.”
“We