The package had come up from the baggage train, wrapped in sacking and tied with butcher's twine. Dougal knew the knots. Old Rory himself had taught Dougal them as a boy, trussing chickens in the kitchen.

Inside, folded in oilcloth, was a fidchell set.

He turned the board over in his hands. The wood was dark with age and the oil of other hands, and the squares had been cut by someone with more patience than true skill. The pieces came in a small leather bag, black and white, smooth as river stones. He counted them once to be sure the road had not swallowed any, then set the board on an empty bench beside the fire with the pieces either side. The last time he had seen this very set was back home in Killarney, as Old Rory, half in his cups, had shuffled the pieces around and played himself till his head hit the board and his snores shook the rafters.

It had been years. His hands remembered the opening moves before his head did, which seemed to be the way things were going as the years started to creep up on him.

He drew the jug of ale closer, took a mouthful, and sat back to study the board as though an opponent sat across from him in the dark. In a way one did. He would play both sides tonight. There was no one else for it, and besides, he had always found that a man learns more about himself playing against himself than he ever does against a friend.

The first moves were stiff. He placed a piece on the board and thought better of it, then placed another. After that the shape of the thing came back to him, the way a song comes back, all at once and from somewhere below thinking, and his hand began to move without asking him first.

He thought of the Plane of Fate.

He had wanted to go. He would not pretend otherwise, not to himself, not over a board at midnight. The glory of it had been there for the taking and he had set it down and sent the two warriors best suited to the work in his place, because that was the right of it, and the right of it did not care what he wanted. Then word had come back that Alan O'Alan had fallen on that plane, and for a long cold while the rightness of the choice had turned to ash in his mouth, and he had stood with the taste of it and waited to learn whether he had sent a good man to his death for the sake of doing the right thing.

He lifted a white piece, placed it a space away from its kin, and took the black one between them from the board.

The Taniaste had given the order, and the Unicorn of Caledonia had stood behind it, and so the two Atlanteans had died with nothing in their hands to defend themselves. Dougal had done it. He turned the captured black piece over between finger and thumb and made himself sit with the truth of it, that if the two McBaines had pushed the issue, he would have struck them down just the same and with as little care, and called it duty, and slept.

He took a long while over the next move. The ale went warm at his side while he thought. In the end he set a white piece down with care and lifted another black one away.

The geas sat on him heavier than the killing did.

He had sworn it to the Druids of the Raven Song with his own voice and his own breath. That he would do everything in his power to be a voice of counsel, and of wisdom, and the voice of those back home, for the days when the war host forgot whose fields they were bleeding for and whose hearths they claimed to defend. It was a good oath. It was the right thing to do and the only comfort he could give those who were suffering. As he heard her laugh from the tent they had taken to sharing, he wondered if it would be Rook, apprentice druid of the Morrigan, who took his eyes from his head if he failed to live up to the task he had set himself.

He reached across to the far side of the board, into the place where his opponent would have sat, and moved a black piece, and took a white one for it.

Then there was Big Finn.

He had set Finn a hard task and told him to sell his life dearly, which is the kind of thing you only say to a man you trust to understand what you are really asking of him. And then they had gone and pulled him out of it alive, which Dougal was still glad of in a way he had not yet put into words. Finn had brought back word that the western walls of Tara stood in complete disarray, a fact that was at odds with the letters he had received from the seat of the High King before it had fallen. Dougal moved a black piece forward into open ground and took nothing with it, and sat looking at where it stood, and prayed quietly that what Finn had given them was the truth and not a trap dressed up as one by the Atlanteans who held Tara.

Thinking of Finn led him, the way one good thing leads on to another, to the feast.

He had laid it on for the whole war host, and it had been a fine night, one of the finest he could call to mind out of the last few days. He could still hear it if he listened for it. He found he was smiling at the board. He had heard the story of Babé Tan, one he was fast starting to think of as a friend, drinking from the vinegar bottle instead of the oil bottle. He took a black piece, then saw the jump waiting past it and took a second one with the same hand in the same breath, the way the night had handed him one good thing after another and charged him nothing for any of it.

And the fighting. He loved a good scrap. He would not insult himself by pretending otherwise. But when he turned the weekend over in his head, he found he had been worth the most in the moments he had stopped, and stood still in the middle of it all, and looked, and seen where the line was thin, and sent men to go and mend it. That had been proved when he had found himself on the field with no clue as to why he was there and nothing save his knife and a bottle of port till he had been handed a sword, and yet he had had the presence of mind to organise protection around the tomb and aided the young McKinley to choose the right skull to recover.

He took another black piece for that one.

"Dougal." It was Wen, with Piran a step behind her at the mouth of the tent. "Supper. Come in out of it before it goes cold."

He looked at the board a moment longer, then got up, his knees telling him what they thought of his treatment of them over the last few days and left the pieces standing where they were. There would be time. There was always more game than there was night.

He settled at the table with his clansfolk and reached for the bread and ale.

Behind him, out in the dark, a piece clacked down onto the board. In the low red light of the dying fire there was no telling whether it had been black or white.