Holly Rhiannon

Truth be told, Bridget longed for a few moments alone before the holiday descended upon their household. She had been thinking about Malachy Quinn for quite a while now and wanted to find some way to eject him from her mind and go about being a dutiful wife. She had longed for the holidays, had she not? In all her months of waiting for Michael to come to Ballyvadlea, Christmas was something she had wanted desperately to share with him.

JB never told his mother what he had seen on his own side of that threshold. Pan looked at him, he says, with a knowing smile, and JB fell into the god's endlessly spiralling ram's horns, woven from the fabric of the cosmos itself.

Yet, even with the joy surrounding her, Bridget couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d seen. Her nights were spent staring longingly up at the sky, hoping for anything; any kind of sign of what she’d seen before. Her eyes would play tricks on her. She’d think a star had a purple aura, then blink and it would glow white once again. At the market she spent more time staring out at the crowd then chatting with shoppers asking about her chickens; her mending prices.