That magnificent flight, Breen thought, that majestic spread of wings as the hawk flew from high on a tree branch to the arm of a little boy.

Then tolerated, stoically, the boy’s happy squeals.

“Sure and it’s fine falconers you’ll both make one day. We’ll have another lesson next I come, but now Amish is after hunting.”

“Da says if I learn well I could have a hawk for my next birthday.”

Morena smiled at Finian. “If that’s the way of it, I’ll be pleased to help you train one. Go on now, Kavan, let him fly.”

“Bye! Bye! Bye.” Kavan lifted his arm as taught.

“Well done, well done indeed, the pair of you.” She helped them remove the child-sized gloves she’d made for them. “Now put your gloves away, right and proper.”

They ran toward the house. Finian’s face still shone as they reached Breen. And Kavan, as always, lifted his arms. As Breen picked him up, she realized she’d miss them beyond imagining.

“Morena made us gloves of our own,” Finian told her. “We flew the hawk. We took turns. I’m going to get a hawk for my birthday.”

“When’s your birthday?”

“On Samhain. Ma says I chose that day so my soul and my grandda’s could meet when the veil thinned. Come on, Kavan, we have to put the gloves away.”

“Bye!” He shouted it as Breen set him down. “Bye. Bye.”

“Fine boys they are,” Morena commented. “I know Aisling pines for a girl, but she and Mahon make fine sons.”

“They really do. You’re so good with them.”

“Ah, that’s easy enough. And good practice as well for when I decide to let Harken plant one in me.”

“Oh.”

“I’m more about the babies, I’m thinking, than the whole handfasting business right now. And he’ll be wanting both, of course. So, well, there’s time yet to see how the wind blows me. And are you ready for today’s training?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not in Keegan’s mind, no. Still, you’ve been working at it like a mad thing the last few days, so either you’ve come to like it or you just want to bruise his fine arse.”

“Well, I haven’t come to like it—not the sword or the fist anyway. I’ve been . . . can you walk over with me? I need to talk to you.”

“Sure and I planned to watch a bit—and throw insults at the man, in any case. What do you need to talk of?”

“We’re friends. You were my first friend, and even if a lot of that’s still blurry, I feel it.”

“You’re troubled, and I can feel that without Harken’s gift.”

“I have friends on the other side. I have one who’s like a mother to me, who’s given me kindness and understanding and support when my own didn’t, or couldn’t. I have Marco.”

“The one my mother met. Handsome, she said, and with a good heart and charm.”

“He’s all that. He’s been a constant in my life. A friend, a brother, a wailing wall, a cheerleader as long as I can remember. It’s been hard not to share all this with him, not to tell him the truth. To know I can’t tell him the truth.”

“I know that.” Sympathizing, Morena draped an arm over Breen’s shoulders as they walked. “It was hard over the years when I visited the other side not to go to you. But real friendship doesn’t always take the easy way, does it?”

“No, and I’m not taking the easy way now. Morena, I have to go back.”

“Go back? Go back to . . . But you’re needed here, and you’re happy here. You awakened.”

“Yes, yes, yes. But I have to go, there are so many reasons why I must. There are things I have to do and say and resolve. I can’t just turn away from the people I care about and who care about me.”

Her face blank, Morena lifted her arm away. “But you can with those here?”

“No. That’s why I’ll return. I need time first. I need to work out things I haven’t. I need to see all of it again knowing Talamh exists, knowing everything I’ve learned.”

“You spent most of your life there before coming here. You should know where you belong.”

“I need time,” she repeated. “I’ll come back. For friendship, for all that calls to me here, for my grandmother, and for duty.”

“When? When do you go?”

“I have three days. Two more,” she corrected, “after today.”

“And when will you return?”

“I don’t know, not exactly. But I will.”

“The last time you said this, more than twenty years went before you came.”

“It won’t this time. This time I make the choice, this time I’m not a child.”

Morena looked out over the farm, then turned to face Breen. “You may not know as yet, but I do. This is your true home. So you will come back. Have a care, Breen, you don’t take too long at it. You told Marg?”

“Yes. And Aisling, then Harken, as he came in while I was.”

She nodded. “So you save Keegan for the last of us. Since you’re my friend I’ll wish you luck with that and mean it. But it’s best I leave you alone to do it.”

“All right.”

“I’ll see you before you go.”

Breen started to speak again, but Morena turned and walked back toward Aisling’s cottage.

So when Bollocks romped back to her, she continued to the training field, where Keegan sat methodically polishing one of the swords.

“You’re late yet again, and sure took your bloody time of it. I’ve known women in more than one world who like to think a man has nothing better to do than wait for them. They’re all in the way of being wrong.”

“I don’t think that and never have, but I had things to deal with today. I still do.”

She sat on one of the mounting blocks he’d set down for brief rests—or as part of a brutal obstacle course he’d fashioned and whipped her through more than once.

“I had to talk to Nan, and . . . others. I guess I still have others I should talk to. I have to talk to you.”

He looked up, into her face. She could see the shutter come down over his eyes as if he snapped them shut over a window.

“You’re going back then.”

“Yes, but—”

“In a matter of days now, two more after this, so that’s mere hours.”

“Yes,” she said again, surprised he knew.

“Do you think I wouldn’t know when the time you’d laid out before was up? Yet you’ve said nothing. Easier for you, I’m thinking, to let me—all of us—believe you meant to stay and see this through.”

“No, not easier. Maybe easier for a while not to think about it at all, so I didn’t. I just didn’t. And when I did, I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t sure how.”

“Now you’ve said it.” He got to his feet. “So there’s no point in it for me wasting my time on the training of you when you choose to go back across.”

“Not fair.” She sprang to her feet. “Not fair. Why did I think you’d be fair or listen to what I have to say?”

“You’re leaving, so it’s said. All in my world look to me now to hold the line against Odran, to keep that vision of death and destruction we shared from becoming. I lifted the sword from the lake as you told me I must.”

“I—what? I never—I wasn’t even here.”

“You came, after I saw it through the water, when I thought no, not for me, no, I don’t want it. I don’t want to lead. But you came, and in the water spoke to me. So I lifted it, and all the burdens it holds. And you, who were born with the power to guard worlds, throw the burden aside.”

“I’m not. I won’t. I’ll come back. You don’t know who I was before I came here.” Dragging her hands through her hair, she turned away. “You wouldn’t like who I was. I don’t like who I was. I have to go back as I am now.”

“For what purpose?”

“To prove I can be who I am now. To prove I am what I want to be. To make the choice knowing what I know. Goddamn it, Keegan, you and everyone in Talamh travel outside, are encouraged to go, to spend time, to see and feel. Then make your choice. But I’m not allowed to do the same?”

“You lived there.”

“Not me.” She turned back, rapping a hand on her heart. “A woman who did everything she could not to be noticed. Who followed rules someone else set for her. A woman who believed her own father couldn’t love her enough to stay. But that’s not who’s going back. I haven’t spoken to my mother in months, and not once has she tried to contact me. But the woman who’s going back is going to have one hell of a conversation with her.”

“So you go back to show your mother you’re strong?”

“That’s part of it, yes. And what’s wrong with that? Haven’t you been training me to be strong? All these weeks, isn’t that what you’ve done?”

Whirling around, she grabbed a sword. “She trained me to be weak.” And slashed the air with it. Hot light sizzled and snapped from the blade. “I damn well will show her I’m not. I have people who love me, and I need to see them, I need to somehow tell them I’m not staying, that I’m coming back to Ireland. Since I can’t tell them I’m coming back here. I can tell them I’m coming back to Ireland to finish my book, that’ll work and isn’t a complete lie.”

She sighed, and put the sword down. “But it’s enough of one it bothers me. And it’s going to hurt them. Marco, my friend, and I were going to get a house. He found one, and it’s exactly what I wanted before . . . before everything changed. I have to disappoint him because I can’t do that until—I don’t know when now.”