Finn stood still. The silence was thick, as if the castle’s walls ate up every sound, even the sound of thought.

He couldn’t stand the silence. He knew he shouldn’t, but he put his lips to the buffalo-horn whistle and blew, and blew again, and again.

Then he slid down with his back against the wall and sat.

After a while a man was there, the handsomest-looking man Finn had ever seen. He was simply dressed, in a pair of felted tweed trousers and an open-necked linen shirt, and he had red-blond hair, a silky beard softening the chiselled jaw, and blue eyes the colour of the sea in the dark.

“Well, there you are,” he said to Finn.

Or maybe, “Well, there you are, Finn.” Afterwards, Finn could never decide which it was.

Finn got up to his feet again and greeted him.

The man turned away and said, “You’ll be hungry, then?” and walked away through the big rooms.

A meal was laid on a table, with wine, a haunch of boar, vegetables and fresh water. The man sat and spoke earnestly to Finn as he ate.

Finn stopped, then, with a knife bearing meat halfway to his mouth, and said, “I shouldn’t be eating here,” and the man leaned and put his hand on Finn’s forearm and said, “You’re as welcome as the flowers in the spring. Sure, isn’t this your place?” So he kept on eating and drinking till he was full and slightly drunk.

The man was looking sharply at him. “You’ll have forgotten where the stores are kept.”

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It was at this stage that Finn realised they were speaking Irish.

The man got up, and Finn followed him woozily through the castle, up the steps, automatically skipping at the seventh that was cut deeper to fox invaders. The man turned and smiled back at him with a Didn’t I tell you so look, and went across the great hall, down another flight of steps, through a door and down another flight again. They were under the river now, Finn could hear it above them, and the room was sweating with water that drained away through cut grooves around the edge of the floor.

The man thumped his fist twice at head height beside a door, then once lower down, and the door swung open, and he went through to a low, kitchen or scullery-looking place. There weren’t any utensils hanging around, though, or any of the food you would expect in a pantry like this. “The beekeepers keep their honey here,” he said, looking back over his shoulder.

The man took Finn’s hand and used it to press-and-turn a hidden switch to a cupboard door at the end of the room – a floor-to-ceiling door that was invisible when closed. Inside, the back of the cupboard was painted wood, with two golden eyes looking out from a forest. “Look here now,” he said, and he caught Finn by the wrist, and pressed his hand down. The stone shifted and Finn cried out—

—and came to himself, by himself, in a part of the castle he had never entered before. He had thought he knew every part of it – it was not a huge place, just a Norman keep built over an older Gaelic dún – but this place was new to him.

He looked around. The cupboard was open, and there was a faint trace of paint at a corner in the back, but none of the richness he had seen. He put his hand flat where the man had held it, and pushed. Nothing. Odd, the whole thing was.

He heard the river flowing above, and turned to look over his shoulder, unconsciously leaning on the hand he had been pressing down with, and with a grating shift, the stone moved.

What? He snatched his hand back and then, hesitantly, pushed again, cautious for fear it would trap him. The slab of stone shifted again, and he saw something below. Then it had shifted right over and he saw.

The gold torcs and brooches were of little interest now. But there were also a series of crocks, caked with age. He uncapped one and out came the unmistakeable scent of honey. He pulled it up and scooped out the honey by handfuls, filling his mouth, his eyes closed. It filled him with goodness.