“My father was furious with her,” Neve said. “I remember it so well. He practically forbade us from helping her.” “Not ‘practically,’” Phelan said. “He forbade us from helping Brighíd in any way. We just decided that she was right, he was playing the fool in this, and we helped her in any way we could without getting caught.” His eyes half lidded. “We should have done more, honestly.”
“We should have,” Neve agreed. Her gaze flicked toward Carolyn and Leinth. “Ciar had been possessed by a powerful spirit, one that terrified even us. He sowed havoc across Ireland and the whole of the surrounding islands before he made it to the continent, leaving chaos in his wake. Where he came, death and destruction often followed. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the phrase “like a man possessed” came about because of him, because of what he did.” She hugged her knee as tight against herself as she could, no mean feat at that stage. “Villages burned. People died. Crops failed. Animals that had been perfectly tame, perfectly docile—they turned on their human neighbors with vicious abandon.” Her voice shrank. “He didn’t know his friends when they saw him. Everyone was in danger from him.
“And then the Southrons got their claws into him and things went from bad to worse.”
“Worse?” Carolyn blurted. “After what you just said, it got worse?”
“They used him as a weapon,” Phelan said, his voice dull. “They used him as a weapon against everyone they could, one they could barely control. They just whipped him into more of a frenzy, pointed him in a direction, and let him run.” He glanced at me, swallowing hard, then looked back at Carolyn. “And he ran. And he killed. And he destroyed. He did exactly what they wanted to do and it nearly started a war then.
“That’s what they wanted, after all. They wanted a war so they could destroy us all.”
