The Grey Horse

Ballyvadlea, County Tipperary, 1895. The people of the valley will say afterward that they always knew there was something not right about Bridget Cleary, and they will mean it as an accusation, and they will be telling, without understanding it, the plain truth.

She is a woman who earns her own money, keeps her own hens, wears her own hat, and walks up toward the rath on Kylenagranagh when she should not. She is a little too much herself for the place she lives in, and the place has a word ready for a woman like that, and the word is not witch. It is taken.

When the fever comes, her husband goes looking for a reason, and the lore of that valley gives him one: that the woman lying in the bed is not his wife at all, but a thing of the other country wearing a borrowed shape, and that a changeling can be made to give the stolen place back. The way of the doing of it is hard on the changeling, for it is held, it is known, that a changeling feels no true pain.

For six days a houseful of neighbours, a cousin, a herb doctor and a priest will each do a little of it, and none of them will think himself a murderer. And on the fourth night after, Michael Cleary will go up to the fort on Kylenagranagh with a black-handled knife, to wait for his wife to come riding out on a grey horse.

A standalone novel of the Falcon's Binding, in which the magic runs just beneath the documented history.