3
Liadan
Gormlaith came to her door before the morning fire had been lit.
Liadan had been awake already — the grey particular dark that preceded dawn in a stone fortress had reached her through the slit-window and pulled her out of an uneasy sleep, the kind that came when her Fáidh was working overtime and had forgotten to let her body rest while it worked. She had been lying on her back in the dark cataloguing what she knew, which was a habit she had developed in training and never entirely set aside: the list of established facts on one side, the list of questions on the other, and the space between them where the verse lived.
The knock was two sounds. Not tentative — nothing about this woman suggested tentativeness — but brief, considered, the knock of someone who did not need to an
