Witch's bane? she wondered grimly. It's potent, but how could he have acquired such an immense supply and delivered it?

"Oh, dear God," Brenna moaned, making a sudden connection between the cask of wine, the bottles she'd glimpsed in Lailoken's "peddlar's" pack, and the most toxic poison in the world—easily grown inside sealed bottles of rotten food. In the time he'd been here already, Cedric Banning could have grown more than enough to poison a whole town, and then some. "He's grown botulism!"

"What is this word, botulism?" Riona demanded in a hard, cold voice.

Morgana had pressed hands to her cheeks, which felt clammy and cold, even to her own fingers. Brenna had to answer, as Morgana knew nothing of it, either. "If one allows food to rot inside a sealed container, a potent poison grows in it. He must have mixed dirt in with it, to ensure the botulism would grow and produce the toxins." Morgana, grasping desperately at some explanation that would prevent further disaster to Brythonic-Irish relations, added in a shaking voice, "If Lailoken is a Saxon agent, dear God, he must be a Saxon agent, they've already shown themselves capable of the worst kinds of slaughter. A man who could order infants hacked into pieces could order anything. And I was a fool and trusted Lailoken, sent him to the very people I wanted to make peace with."

She lifted ravaged eyes to meet Riona's gaze. "We must sail after Dallan mac Dalriada at once. I have to stop him or anyone else who might drink from that wine cask. Pray God he has not already tasted it. And riders must be sent after Lailoken. I want him found and brought back to me, alive and in chains." She turned to the fisherman and his family, who watched silently, eyes wide in naked horror. "Can you take us out tonight? Is your boat fast enough to catch the Irish king?"

"God will lend us wings," he choked out, "for catch him we must." He hurried away, shouting orders and sending runners to rouse his crew for immediate departure.

Morgana turned to the Irish Druidess, dreading what must be said next. Riona Damhnait held her gaze for a long, ugly moment, gauging Morgana's words and the genuineness of the emotion behind them. After a long and dangerous moment beneath a shuttered, thoroughly reptilian stare, something softened behind the other woman's eyes. Tears came, for the first time.

"I do believe you know nothing of this."

Morgana could only shake her head. "Would I be willing to sail after Dallan mac Dalriada myself, otherwise?"

"The Saxons truly are such barbarians, they would slaughter a whole town of innocents?"

Morgana wiped wetness from her cheeks. "To sow dissention between our people, to ensure we are busy fighting in the north, so they have free rein in the south? Oh, yes, I believe they would stoop to anything to destroy us. All of us."

"Then they must be stopped," she said, with such utter coldness, Morgana shivered.

Brenna recognized that sound. It was the sound of an Irish soul roused to vengeance. God help them, it was something bred into the Irish, bred into their Irish bones and blood, centuries of cold-hearted rage at wrongs committed, determination to strike back at an enemy, whatever the cost. Had Brenna inadvertently tried to prevent the birth of one set of Irish hatreds only to help spawn another? Would the mass murder of an entire Irish colony, which should have been destined to hold power in the Scottish Lowlands for centuries to come, change history sufficiently to destroy everything Brenna had known, everyone Brenna had loved? Had Banning already succeeded in carrying out his mission?

The worst of it was, Brenna realized she might never know.

Even if the Irish didn't kill her in retribution—and she held no illusions about Dallan mac Dalriada's reaction, regardless of what his Druidess might now believe—even if she survived the Irish, who could say whether time had fractured sufficiently to trap her in Morgana's mind forever? It occurred to Brenna McEgan that she might never reach home again. And in the same moment, she realized she was no longer sure what—or where—home might be.

Belfast and Londonderry?

The shot-up, bombed-out ghettoes that she herself had fled from years previously, trying to forget the killing and her own, monstrous part in it? She had tried to start over once, already, in a place that was, although just as virulently Irish, at least not involved in a perpetual self-massacre of the type which had gripped Northern Ireland for centuries. Dublin was the home she'd known for more than ten years now, but what sort of home was it, for a Londonderry girl? She'd been living in exile for more than a decade, trying to run away from the troubles of her own countrymen. And just look at where that had landed her.

Running away from a society gone mad was no answer to the madness.

It only left the madmen that much freer to spill their insanity into more innocent lives.

The lesson had come late. Perhaps too late. Once learned, there was only one way in which to answer it. Immediate, drastic action was needed to prevent the lesson being taught to other wide-eyed fools like herself. There was no answer for the Northern Ireland she had fled, not short of separating the children born to both sides from their parents, from their uncles and cousins, and from one another, putting them into public creches to be raised for the next three or four generations, in some last-ditch effort to give the hatred and the blood feuds a chance to die out and let something healthier grow in its place. Either that, or they'd all wake up one fine morning to discover each side had slaughtered the other in its sleep and they'd all arrived at hell's gates together, to spend eternity snarling and blaming one another for the hell they'd all built. The devil must laugh each time another Irish fool with a bomb blew up some poor baby in his pram.

Northern Ireland wasn't dying, it was already dead, soul-deep and rotted out. And the only people who hadn't figured it out, yet, were the Northern Irish.

A small knot of people came running up the strand, even as fishermen appeared from cottages up and down the little stretch of Lochmaben coast. Medraut, his face grey as dirty ice in the moonlight, skidded to a stop in front of his aunt. Her spirits lifted, however briefly, at the way young Keelin clutched his hand, holding onto what little security she had left. It touched Morgana deeply that the child could still trust them. Would to God it remained so.

"You've heard the news from Father Auliffe?" Morgana asked quietly. "We depart the moment the fishermen hoist sail, to try and catch Dallan mac Dalriada's ship. My poor child," she turned to Keelin, whose eyes were reddened from weeping. "Would to God I could undo what the Saxons have done, and me the gullible idiot who let them in to do it."

Keelin struggled for a moment to keep up a brave front, then spotted Riona Damhnait and collapsed into her kinswoman's arms, sobbing. Medraut hovered helplessly, wanting to comfort her, afraid she would reject the offer, wanting to strike at something, anything, to undo this monstrous damage. He turned finally to Morgana, anger seething through him like storm-slashed lightning. "Send me after that bastard Lailoken, Aunt! I'll rip out his heart with these hands" he held up curved claws, fingers rigid with rage, "and feed it as he deserves to my grieving bride!"

"Nay, Medraut. He will be brought to us alive and unharmed."

"But—"

"The Irish, lad, will want him."

Unholy glee shone abruptly in the boy's eyes, reminding her sickeningly of his mother, Marguase, the late and unlamented, she who had almost been queen of Ynys Manaw, had the darkness not taken her soul. Morgana determined to do all that was possible to keep that darkness from consuming Medraut, as well. "Lailoken will be found, Medraut. Found and returned to stand trial under Brythonic law and then handed over for trial by Irish law. He will pay for what he has unleashed. Never doubt that. But your task, nephew, and mine is another matter altogether."