Chapter 1

What if Dillon wasn't really dead? That was the question Caitlin Donovan asked herself as she hurried along the riverbank. What if he was merely lost, wandering in a strange land on the far side of the world, frantic to get home to her?

She hadn't seen her blue-eyed boy buried. No one had called in the parish priest, Father Brennan, to administer The Last Rites. No carpenter had been given a piece of silver to hammer a coffin together. There'd been no wake, no Mass for the Dead. The gravediggers spades had lain idle. Nowhere stood a stone bearing the name Dillon Banion, Beloved Son of Oona and Dermot Banion, Born 1874, Died 1894, God Rest his Soul.

She needed to know because a man who wasn't Dillon had asked her to marry him, a man ready to commit treason to see justice for her brother. He was good man and she was fond of him, but if she married him, she couldn't be thinking, what if Dillon wasn't really dead?

The Tulla River eyed her coldly as she passed, its dark surface glinting in the morning light. A rising sun splashed gold across the treetops. The light touched new-leafed branches, brown, knobby tree trunks, and skimmed bright fingertips over the water. A lark from a distant field poured out his ecstatic welcome to the new day. A pair of rooks, high in an oak tree, cawed their complaint at her intrusion into their morning.

Caitlin recalled the last time she and Dillon had come this way. They'd argued over some foolishness to do with Home Rule before the willow tree's magic took hold of them and made them forget everything but each other.

The tree towards which she now hurried was said to have the power to create recklessness in those who came into his space, an unholy power Father Brennan warned from the pulpit. Look what happened to Seamus and Nell O’Grady? Childless after three years of marriage, they'd crawled under the tree’s branches, to emerge an hour later with faces shining like full moons and Nell carrying twin, silver-eyed boys who, when they grew, terrorized the district with their fey ways, their wild night rides, and their skill at getting under a skirt--young or old, married or single, willing or not.

Caitlin reached the curve of the path and slowed her stride. Was she prepared to round that corner? For two years she'd stayed away, fearful of returning to the place where a moment of good intent had turned into disaster, but onlythe willow knew the truth of what had happened to Dillon. Only he could tell her, but would he? Or would he use the opportunity to heap further reproach on her head? She was supposed to call on God for answers but she was not on speaking terms with Heaven.

So, there it was: she must either turn the corner and face the tree or go back the way she came and live out the rest of her life like a coward, never knowing. Was she not a Donovan, a true descendant of warriors and noblemen? Had her ancestors not fought the English in the fields, the ditches and the mountains of Wicklow? Were they still not doing so?

Wretched Irish history. It lay over the land like the blight. It infected everyone equally: English, Irish, Protestant, Catholic, the rich and the poor. She never wanted anything to do with Irish politics. It turned the sanest into raving lunatics. Love was what mattered, her dream to marry and raise a family with Dillon. She must face the willow andask her question. Chin tilted, she stepped around the corner--and faltered.

The willow rose into the sky like a mighty dragon ashimmer in his blazing cloak of new spring growth, his great crown afire in the dawning sun, his thousands of branches cascading around him to shape a circular fortress.

He looked nothing like the young nobleman he was supposed to be cursed into leaf and trunk by the Faerie King a hundred years before for daring to love one of the Tuatha de Danaan, the faerie girl herself cast into the great glittering rock that jutted up from the river just beyond the tree's reach. Around her base, the river swirled deep and dark, powerful enough, it was said, to drag a full-grown man under and hold him there until he drowned.

The tree leaned, as always, towards the rock, his long, trailing branches reaching for her but falling short. The space between the two crackled like summer lightning. River creatures stayed away; no bee hummed, no butterfly flitted, no mouse rummaged, no bright-eyed deer peeked out. Nothing grew in that space except a few tufts of river grass and a necklace of bright forget-me-nots encircling the rock, as if flung there by a yearning hand.

For just a moment, as the brightening sun struck the rock's face, Caitlin saw the profile of a lovely girl, her long hair streaming behind her. She heard the echoes of herself and her brother Michael, Dillon and his brother Hugh, so young and unafraid as they'd wandered the riverbanks, splashed in the bright water, plucked frockens and hazelnuts, and argued fiercely over whether or not you had to confess every little sinto Father Brennan and who would be the next King of Ireland now that Parnell was dead.

Beyond the tree came more echoes from the warm kitchen of what had once been her family cottage at a time when the turning of the seasons governed their lives, and the struggle to put enough food on the table and rent into the land agent's ever-present hand.

Caitlin gazed up at the great tree. “You're very fierce standing there trying to frighten me as if you don't know why I've come. You used your enchantment so Dillon would be the only one for me and I the only one for him, then you took him away, but where is he? What have you done with him?"

The tree quivered and thrust a memory at her--of Dillon's strong, young arms about her, the weight of his body on hers, his blue Irish eyes, dark and glowing, as he whispered my alannah--my beautiful darling--a memory so vivid the tree could only have conjured it up to remind her of all she’d lost since that splendid Irish autumn day two years earlier in the year of Our Lord, 1892, a day that started out innocently enough with a crock of egg custard.