Sorcha Nic Dhiarmada

The warden's job on Drithane is the oldest in the valley and the least necessary, which is, if you ask Sorcha Nic Dhiarmada, the correct order for those two qualities in any custom worth keeping. Nobody in Gleann na gCaorach needs reminding to put their lights out on a crossing night. The warden walks the dark-down anyway, because a thing kept by everyone should still be seen to be kept by someone.

Between crossings she is what the valley mostly needs her to be: a shepherd, a keeper of the billet ledger under the Union's guests-under-roofs hospitality arrangements, and the person a delegation's careful questions get walked to. She hosted the Survey Corps follow-up team that came for the crossing — see The Dark-Down (S02E03C01) — and gave their clerk her mother's answer on why the light custom has no law behind it: a law is what you write when you expect to need one, and the valley has never yet produced the person the law would be for.

Character Notes

Sorcha reads animals professionally, on the working principle that a shepherd who can't is a shepherd briefly. The skill does not switch off for guests: she is the one observer on Drithane accurate enough to notice what kind of attention a visiting "courtesy animal" is actually paying to a room, and courteous enough to mention it to nobody. On Drithane you do not embarrass a guest by noticing them too accurately, and she has never treated that rule as limited to people.

The same accuracy runs the other way. What she cannot read, she does not feed — a house rule older than her tenure, applied without ceremony and without needing to know what the unreadable thing is. Her refusals take about four seconds and are delivered in the tone of a weather report.

Her collies work the hills on the question working dogs have always asked, which is not whether a thing is charming but where it should be.

A note on naming, for anyone cross-referencing the roster: two other women in this record are called Sorcha, and the second of them is worth stating plainly, because the coincidence runs a layer deeper than a shared given name. Sorcha Shepherd is a land-registry surveyor on Tír na nÓg whose family name is Shepherd and whose croft is six generations of flockholders — so there is a Sorcha who keeps flocks for a living, and a Sorcha whose surname says so, and they are not the same woman or connected to each other in any way the record holds. Nothing joins the Gleann na gCaorach wardenship to the Boirinn Uplands. Sorcha is an ordinary given name across Celtic Union worlds, sheep are ordinary on the ones with hills, and that is the whole of it. Sorcha Lichata, the itinerant healer, is a third and equally unrelated.

See also: Drithane, The Celtic Union of Planets, Bubochka, Sorcha Shepherd, Sorcha Lichata.