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moment when I stopped being Griogair’s unwanted mistake and became one of them.
    Now, when he rode into the dun with Griogair, from a hunt or a patrol or a diplomatic visit to Kate, Conal would say sharply ~
Athair! Father!
That would be enough to make Griogair start, and look at me, and almost smile. It was all I ever got but it was more than I’d grown to expect. Conal would reach down a hand and pull me up onto his ferocious black horse—and sometimes Sionnach too—right in front of the whole clann. Then I’d just about burst with pride. I wasn’t Griogair’s son, not in any true sense, but look at me! Look at me, you dogs that used to sneer at me and kick me and ignore me: I’m Conal MacGregor’s
brother!
    It was all I’d ever be, but by then, it was more than enough. So one night I went to bed still believing I hated him, because I’d planned always to hate him. And in the morning I woke up knowing that I loved him. If Griogair wouldn’t be my father, Conal would, and I would love him till the day I died. And he hadn’t even had to twist my mind.

3
THREE
    By the time I was eleven, I was in love in a different way. Gradually I’d made other friends, though not many: there was Feorag, a year younger than me and my partner in crimes that Sionnach refused even to contemplate; there was Orach, a quiet golden-haired girl who shot like a dream, and who tended to follow me around though she rarely spoke. I liked her company, and I enjoyed her devotion, and a year or two later, in the cool darkness of the sea-caves beyond the bay, we stripped each other of virginity.
    I’ve loved a few women: loved them honestly and intensely and with all my heart. Many more I’ve loved with my body but only half my heart. Sithe life is too long for whole-hearted love. A heart can only break so many times. I’m not saying it fails entirely: just that it mends the wrong way. It warps. It’s stitched together loose and askew and it doesn’t work as it should.
    If I’d known that earlier, I’d have been more careful with it.
    Orach was my first love, my always-occasional love, the love and comfort of half my life. She was there when other loves left, when other loves died. She was there till another came along, as unexpected and stunning as a freshwater spring in frozen tundra.
    But that was my last love, and far too many centuries in my future. Back in my stupid youth, and Orachnotwithstanding, my angry young heart belonged to Eili MacNeil.
    She was Sionnach’s twin, an imperious beautiful girl who treated me with cool kindness. She had brown eyes to drown in, and dark red hair that she cut roughly short with a dagger, and she was more of a tomboy even than the other young girls of the clann: all she lived for was swordplay, and archery, and horse races on the machair.
    And Conal.
    Eili followed my brother around like a puppy, and this was the degree of her obsession: the only reason she cut her hair short was to be like him. I didn’t take her crush seriously, though. In a way it made me happy, because being Conal’s brother, but the same age as Eili, seemed to me an irrefutable advantage. The more I saw of Eili the more I loved her, and it didn’t matter to me that she was devoted to Conal. After all, so was I: we had that in common. And I looked like Conal, despite my black hair; I even fought like him, because he was teaching me swordplay whenever he could. I knew that one day she would simply stop loving him and start loving me instead, and after all, we were pure-blooded Sithe. If we didn’t have all the time in the world, we had as much of it as anyone could want.
    How did it never occur to me that in long, long lives, age comes to mean nothing?
    But in childhood, Sionnach and Eili and I were the best of friends. Whatever other children came into our orbit, it always came down to the three of us. We fought and rode and played and hunted together, anddogged Conal’s footsteps when he was around the dun, and