Mairéad Ní Dhálaigh (Human, Celtic Union, keeper of the holding)

"Were they there?" the child said, over the bowl, in the plain way she asked where the dog was.

Her mother had been asked that, and Mairéad gave the answer she had been given. "The moon was."

Úna considered it. "I saw the ceiling," she said.

"So did I, once."

That was the whole of it between them, and it would do for a year, and then it would do again.

The ewes went back up to the top field at the hour they went up any morning. Mairéad walked the top wall after them, counting, the way the wall was walked every day of the year, and did not go in among the trees, the way the trees were not gone into on any day of the year, and it was the same wall and the same trees. There was nothing on the ground at the tree line. She was not looking for anything on the ground. Nothing had been brought and nothing had been asked for, which was what her mother had said about the Good People on the one occasion she said anything, and Mairéad had taken it then for a small thing to say about anybody.

A Survey form had come round the holdings once, under the Union's arrangement with the Rangers, with a line for the dates. She had given it the almanac's page, which anyone in the town could have given it, and nothing of her own, and the man had thanked her and gone on to the next holding and nobody had come back to ask twice, which was the Union for you, and also the Rangers, and she had thought no worse of either.

The almanac said the next one was in a year and some days, and did not agree with itself about the days.

She had kept the gate. They had kept the minutes. In three hands' time the margin on the autumn page had nothing written in it, and she had understood that as a child for a thing nobody had got round to.