“You are.” The words tumbled through my brain for a long time before I understood the significance.
“I am?” I repeated as the kindly faces smiled at me.
“You are,” the central woman repeated.
“How can I be?” I asked. “I am an orphan; I am a nobody; the orphanage gave me my name. They could not make out all my surname, so they called me Luath, after Robert Burn’s dog – the orphanage named me after a dog, for God’s sake.”
“Luath was Ossian’s dog before he belonged to Robert Burns,” the old woman said. “A most famous dog with a noble past.”
I fought through the fog of words. “I am not the queen of the Sidh.”
“You are the queen of the Sidh,” the old woman said. “Your mother was a human; your father was a Sidh prince, born of human and Sidh stock.”
I struggled with this new concept in a
