21
Liadan
Dawn came slowly the morning after.
Not the hard winter dawn of the past weeks — not the cold clarity that made the cliffs look carved and the sea look like hammered iron. A soft dawn, the sky lightening in gradients of grey and rose above the western sea, the colour of something that had been dark for a long time and was finding its way back to warmth by degrees. She stood at the courtyard's edge and watched it arrive and felt, for the first time in a long time, that the watching required nothing of her. No tracking, no assessment, no Faidh running at any register at all. Simply her eyes and the sky and the particular quality of a morning that was the first of something she had not had a word for until last night.
The Cloch Ban was behind her.
She had not turned to look at
