He wended on to his little house of stout wood and roof of wattle and thatch with its dangling, dripping tie-stones, and when his wife Faencha did chiding on him for his tardiness, he was sharp with her. In a morose silence he ate his porkish supper and drank ale that was little more than barleywater whilst she overbusied her good self with her embroidery.

The man in the druidic robe meanwhile approached the wall that had been raised about the splendid house of the High-king; of oak was the wall, and over half a foot in thickness.

There he came upon two men in bronze-decorated helmets and close-pulled cloaks of scarlet wool. Their bare, fog-wet hands were fisted about the hafts of long spears, each banded twice with bronze. Nor said they aught, but only stared. The newcomer’s flowing sleeve whispered with the extending of his arm. They gazed on his fist, and at the signet there, and they nodded. The gate was opened respectfully for the faceless man, who passed through without the speaking of a word.

“Good it is to see a druid abroad and wearing a ring of the High-king himself, Cairthide,” one of the sentries muttered, whilst they closed the gate, “and his wife and so many others believers in the New God.”

“Good it is to be knowing a druid’s about at all, on such a night as this!” Cairthide said. His sigh emerged tremulously for he shivered. “A good night for hearth and ale-and locked door!”

His companion coughed and sniffed.

Through the grounds of the High-king strode the hooded man who seemed to have no legs. Outbuildings for storage and creaming and smithing and the housing of animals had been scattered randomly, so that it was no straight course he took. The fog was both thinner and lower to the wet wet earth as he approached the rising rig-thig, as though the high son of Laegaire was immune, respected even by the powers of earth and water and the sky that had come down this night to blanket the earth.