“We wouldn’t mind Feargal living in the Big House,” Naomi said, refreshing Morag’s cup of tea, “if he would only keep to himself. But he killed one of Rhiannon’s sheep, and he pulled a knife on young Christine.”

“Not a bad thing to stop that girl playing round the Big House, though,” Morag spoke more lightly than she felt, trying to play down her own worries. Naomi ran the village post office and read a lot of books, and so was the person people went to when they needed a representative or spokesperson. Morag, five years her senior, was the person people went to when they needed something fixed, in both the real and the more metaphorical sense. And she wasn’t sure if this could be easily resolved. “It’s dangerous there, even without Feargal.”

She couldn’t resist a glance at Seamus, who was sitting in front of the hearth of Morag’s farmhouse in power-saving mode, its six digitigrade legs folded under its blocky body. She’d found Seamus up on the spoil heap, the old mound of slate, rubbish and old tech from back when people had thrown things away without thinking about it. But Seamus had once been a defense robot at the Big House, and nobody could deny it could handle itself in a fight, for all its delicate, tottery appearance.

“I thought you and the other salvagers had stripped the place of tech.”

“Not all of it, and there’s more dangers in there than just tech. Falling walls, rotten floorboards. Foxes and wolves.”

“Anyway, we’re worried he’ll escalate. That he’ll hurt or kill somebody. Or, on the other side of it, get himself hurt or killed. Christine’s Dad’s muttering about retribution—I talked him out of it for now, but next time it could be a nomad child, or one of their sacred animals, and you know the nomads don’t always abide by our rules.”

“I’m worried too,” Morag said. “Given what Feargal tried at midwinter.” She didn’t have to elaborate. Four months previously, Feargal had been the leader of a band of thugs who’d come west from Shrewsbury, trying to set up a feudal state in the hillsides: farmers paying him and his men for protection, or paying another sort of price if they didn’t. They’d managed to put a stop to it, in the end, and the village had gone back to its usual vaguely anarchic state.

But things like that left scars. Morag didn’t like having a possibly-homicidal man in the Big House, and she especially didn’t like the way this was poisoning people’s minds, making them think about vengeance and murder. How did you deal with someone like that in a place with no laws, no justice system?

“Why’s he still here, anyway?” Naomi complained, passing the scones.

“Good question,” Morag said. “I’d expected him to vanish off somewhere after his followers deserted him. I mean, most of them joined the nomads, or took up work as farmhands, or went back East licking their wounds. I thought he’d do the same.”

“Maybe he can’t cope with failure. Or being beaten by a lot of nomads.”

“And farmers,” Morag pointed out. “And some of those archivists from Portmeirion turned out to be pretty handy with those big sticks they use to smooth paper.” Something occurred to her. “It could be he’s still here because this is . . . home, for him,” she said slowly. “He came over here from Ireland to work for Call Me Steve—sorry, I mean, for the billionaire in the Big House.” Call Me Steve had been what the staff all called the billionaire, behind his back, but they generally hadn’t used the nickname around outsiders, so she wasn’t sure Naomi knew about it. “Twenty, thirty years ago. Wherever he’s lived and whatever he’s done since . . . it could be this place has left a mark.”

“I think I remember him from then.”

“What, Feargal? Really?”

“Yes. Ginger kid, wasn’t he? Some of the mercenaries from the Big House used to come over to the practice field on rugby night, kick the ball around with the locals.” Naomi was the coach of the local rugby eleven, and had been a pretty good winger back when she’d been young.

“I never knew.”

Morag had been one of the abovementioned mercenaries, technically. The billionaire who’d bought the Big House, or Gwydion Manor as it was officially known, had hired local young people to supplement the largely Irish and Eastern European security force he’d brought in as part of his plan to use the place as a bolt-hole when civilization collapsed. Morag and Feargal had worked together, sometimes, patrolling the house or fixing the security robots, but they hadn’t been friends enough to talk about each other’s hobbies. He’d regarded her as creepy, and she’d regarded him as a bully, and that was the end of it.

And, as the billionaire himself had been fond of saying, no plan survives contact with the enemy. After a couple of years, the food began to run out and the billionaire began to talk about sending his mercenaries out to exact tribute from the local people. Morag had quietly removed the restraint programming from the security robots. Stood back and watched the billionaire, his wife, and his captains all die in a hail of bullets. Not her, though. Not the billionaire’s kids, because she’d got them to safety. And not Feargal, he wasn’t important enough.

Morag had been too busy after the disaster, looking after the billionaire’s kids and coming up with a narrative for the villagers about what had happened, to care about what happened to Feargal. He’d disappeared off into the countryside, somewhere. But now a lot was falling into place. The village, the Big House, were home; the billionaire his mentor. So of course he’d developed a fixation. Had to become a feudal lord, like the billionaire wanted to. And especially, had to become a feudal lord here, to show everyone who’d laughed at him.

And now he was defeated, he still couldn’t walk away.

Morag filed the train of thought. “You’d think playing rugby would help, I mean, isn’t learning how to cope with failure part of becoming an athlete?”

“Yes, well,” Naomi said. “If you wouldn’t mind having a word with him, it would be helpful.”

“But why me? You know he’s a violent man.” He’d been a bully as a kid, an obsessive as an adult, and, if he was killing animals and threatening children, he was getting worse. “Why not Owen, or Ross, or one of the other big fellows?”

Naomi shrugged. “You’ve got Seamus.”

“That I do.”

“And he might be more reasonable with someone he doesn’t see as a threat.”

“Don’t know that he doesn’t see me as a threat. I’ll do what I can, but no guarantees that I can do any better than anyone else.”

---

“I know you’re in there, Feargal.” Morag decided to be direct. “So do the rest of the villagers, and we’re none of us too happy about it.”

Silence, behind the thick door. It was made out of some material supposed to be blast-resistant, though there’d never been occasion to test that.

Morag reflected that, if Feargal was going to hole up somewhere, he’d picked the best spot in town to do it. The Big House had been built as a manor in the eighteenth century, and, even if the floors were falling in, the walls were still standing. From the looks of it, the west wing was uninhabitable, gutted by fire and with buddleia growing from the windows. But part of the east wing, on the ground floor at least, was solid, and had easy access to the cellars.

“All right then,” she said loudly. “Coming in another way.” She turned, walked along the side of the house towards what had once been the kitchen. Sure enough, she found the trap door to the cellar partway along. With a bit of help from Seamus, she was able to pry it open and climb carefully down the stairs.

“Feargal?” she called again once she reached solid ground. The cellar wasn’t well lit, but enough daylight came in through the high slit windows that she felt safe enough, particularly with Seamus at her back.

A scuffling sound, like rats, further down the cellar. Then a harsh, feeble voice called out, “you’d better be armed, witch.”

“I’m not,” Morag said. Seamus was, arguably, and, back in the courtyard, Naomi was waiting with a stick in one hand and a whistle in the other, ready to call for help and come in swinging if she heard sounds of trouble, because Morag wasn’t stupid enough to come without backup, killer robot or no killer robot.

The room was full of storage shelves, most of them bare, and the only reason the shelves themselves hadn’t been removed was because they were made of aluminum, and no one in the village needed that enough to take the trouble. Down at the other end, she could see that he’d set up some kind of defensible encampment, building barricades out of trestle tables and storage boxes. Beyond that, she could see into the next room, which looked to be more residential; the shelves had been cleared out of that one, and she could make out a camp bed, storage boxes, lanterns. Some bloody lumps that she assumed were what was left of Rhiannon’s sheep.

And other things.

Stacks of tech. It couldn’t have all been from the house; he must have been foraging out on the hillsides and spoil heap. Monitors, keyboards, pads, phones. Drone parts. A couple of cute dog-shaped robots Morag thought might have belonged to the billionaire’s kids. All static, unmoving.

“And I’m sure you aren’t, either,” Morag went on. “I’ve been over this place for years, and none of the weaponry’s usable. Gunpowder’s got a limited shelf-life, and Call Me Steve believed in technology over durability. All those flashy laser-sights and automated target locks don’t last long in the damp. They’re not even useful to salvage for microchips.”

Before her conscious mind could register the sound of movement or the shift in the air, she ducked. The gun butt missed her by inches. Seconds later, the body of Feargal also missed her by inches as it slammed into the floor, pinioned spread-eagled by four of Seamus’ limbs, while it braced itself on the other two.

“I thought it was a good idea to teach Seamus a few non-violent defensive routines,” Morag said, very calmly. “I’ve been a farmer long enough to know that even sheep can turn into fighting machines when they’ve got their heads trapped in a fence.” She waited a few minutes, then crouched down by him. He looked stunned; he’d probably hit his head on the stone floor.

Good, Morag thought.

“I haven’t come to force you out,” she said, slowly and clearly. “That’s not the way it works around here. But how it does work is, if you do want to stay here, and you don’t want to do anything useful, you’ve got to at least be harmless. So no scaring the children or killing animals that aren’t yours, understand?”

She ignored the text of Feargal’s reply, as she had the general idea.

“Let him up, Seamus,” she said, deliberately turning her back to show she wasn’t afraid. “We’re going.”

Once she was outside the cellar door she sagged against the kitchen wall, getting damp blackish slime all over her coat but not really caring. She hadn’t been sure how well Seamus’ defense routines would work against an actual hostile human, as opposed to her nieces and nephews trying pretend attacks on her and each other. And seeing Feargal again brought back too many bad associations, too many feelings of anger, and of injustice. It wasn’t fair that he was still up there, demanding everyone’s attention and not letting the village move on. It wasn’t fair.

Fair’s for kids, Morag reminded herself. Grown-ups just have to accept that things are what they are, and work with them. If he feels like this place is home, then it’s home. She looked over at where Seamus was standing, the energy in its limbs giving it the sense of something poised on tiptoes. Reminded herself that Naomi was outside, that beyond her in the valley were her neighbors, her friends, her family. A village of maybe twenty houses, plus a pub and a post office, but it was alive.

She was okay. She had her people, her community. Feargal had nothing.

---

“I have to give him credit,” Morag said, perusing the hacked-together array of technology topping the Big House’s walls, “he hasn’t done too badly.”

“He’s electrified the main gate,” Naomi said. “And got the cameras working.”

“Not the cameras,” Morag said. “The proximity sensors. That’s what got the milk-cow the other day. It triggered a deadfall.” The animal had broken its leg and had to be put down; chalk up another victim of Feargal’s crime spree. “Give him credit, he listened when I said the guns wouldn’t work. Problem is, he’s been rigging traps that don’t involve them.”

“Either way, what do we do about it?”

“We wait,” Morag said. “I give it five to ten minutes.”

They waited in silence.

A few minutes later, the cherry-red lasers stopped sweeping the area in front of the gate, and the gate itself audibly powered down. Seamus came trotting back through the gate, almost nonchalantly.

“That’s the thing with those robots,” Morag said, raising her voice a little in case Feargal was nearby. “The Big House’s security systems automatically recognize them as friendly. I didn’t even have to teach Seamus a new routine: turns out ‘disable security systems’ is in there already.”

“How much more of this do we have to put up with?” Naomi asked as they walked back down the hill.

“I don’t know,” Morag said. “We’ll have to work something out, though, before he tries again. He’s gone from threatening people to actually trying to hurt them, and that’s not good.”

---

“What I wonder is, why he doesn’t go back to Ireland if he doesn’t like it here,” Dai the brewer said. He, Morag, and Morag’s brother Zeb were sitting at an ancient picnic table out back of the brewery, field testing Dai’s latest experiment in dark ale and watching Seamus play football with six of Zeb and Dai’s orphans. Morag had a cat on her lap and a dog of indeterminate parentage sleeping on her feet, and a cockatoo that had somehow found its way into Zeb and Dai’s household was pacing up and down the table pushing a walnut about.

“Send ‘em back where they came from?” Zeb raised an eyebrow at his husband.

“You know that’s not what I mean.” Dai smiled, conciliating. “But the people who come here and stay, stay because they want to or because they had no other choice. He could always go to Caernarfon or Porthmadog and hire a boat to take him to Ireland.”

“The fishing fleet don’t go out that far.”

“Glyn does, if you pay him.”

Morag half-listened, thinking. Zeb wasn’t her brother by blood; he was one of the billionaire’s children. Both of whom had grown up here, become so much a part of the community that nobody thought of them as anything else. Zeb’s sibling had even joined the local nomad tribe, the Children of Flame. And, for all he’d done wrong, the option to stay was open to Feargal. Most people in the village had done something unspeakable when things started breaking down in the cities; often several somethings.

Home, she thought. For some people it’s a thing to rebel against, to fight. Maybe that was why he was up there like a cargo-cult Call Me Steve. Maybe he had the same feelings about the place he came from; maybe he couldn’t go back till, in his mind, he’d proved himself.

“Rabbie’s doing well,” she said as one of the broader teenagers managed to stop a kick from Seamus.

Zeb beamed with pride. “Rabbie just made the rugby eleven,” he said.

“Really? That’s fantastic,” Morag said. “I remember you were so worried about him.”

“After that incident with Tom the Pole and the watering can, I thought we’d have to send him away. But Tom wasn’t angry. Next time he came by on his rounds, he brought a rugby ball and taught Rabbie some drills.”

“And that worked?”

“He’s channeling all that negative psychic energy into beating the other kids. And most of the adults, too.”

“Shame we can’t do that with Feargal,” Morag said. Then she frowned. “Maybe we can. Let me have a word with Naomi.”

---

Morag generally didn’t take much of an interest in sport, and only turned out to watch when she knew it would make family or friends happy if she did. Nonetheless, she showed up to watch the rugby eleven practice on the field behind the spoil heap, with Seamus and an ancient folding chair.

Sure enough, by the time the team were warmed up and doing kicking drills, a scruffy figure emerged from the quarry road and came to join them. A couple of the players pulled back, muttering, but Naomi said something to them, and they let him join in.

At the end of the practice, Feargal disappeared just as quickly, and Morag went over to talk to Naomi.

“Well,” Naomi said. “I didn’t think he would, but you were right.”

“Is he any good?”

“No.” Naomi winced. “He was okay back in the day, but now? Hasn’t got the reflexes, hasn’t got the knees.”

“I’m sorry,” Morag said. She’d left a bottle of Dai’s dark ale by the door of the squat at the Big House, with a note affixed. The note contained two pieces of information: one, the times of the local rugby practices, and two, details of how to get in touch with Glyn (a note at the hotel bar in Porthmadog, or else at the Black Buoy Inn near Caernarfon’s wharf, usually did the trick) and arrange travel to Ireland.

Now, though, she felt disappointed.

“So he’s no good, then?”

“Didn’t say that.” And Naomi suddenly smiled. “He’s got knowledge.”

“How do you mean?”

“I couldn’t really see it at the time, but now, well. My guess is, he probably played rugby at a decent level when he was younger, maybe when he was a kid, a teenager. Then dropped out later on. It happened a lot, back then, with professional sports. People didn’t make the cut, or they got injured, and got advised to find a career elsewhere.”

“That makes sense,” Morag said. “He never really talked about his past, but none of them did. I could see him starting out in sports, getting rejected, joining the army instead.”

Naomi’s smile turned sarcastic. “Not being able to handle the discipline, quitting and taking a job at the Big House.”

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Morag couldn’t resist a glance at Seamus. Non-violent routines, she thought. A killer robot can become a guardian. Or, thinking of how it had been playing with her nieces and nephews the other day, a footballer. “How is it Feargal knows things you don’t? You’ve been playing rugby for years.”

“As an amateur. In a local team. But Feargal, he knows how they used to train back before things fell apart. When there was an international rugby league, top level education. Sports science. He can’t play, but let me tell you—he could teach.”

“That might be what it takes,” Morag said. “To bring him in, if he won’t move on. If all of this behavior is down to some anxious need to be in charge—then give him a title, call him the coach, get him teaching the team what he knows.”

“And maybe we’ll actually make the finals this year.”

“Wouldn’t that be grand.”

---

Weeks went by with no further incidents from the Big House. The spring rainstorms came and went. The rugby team practiced. The villagers and Feargal began to get used to each other. A few of the rugby players took to giving him food and clothes. Making sure he was okay. Morag began to relax. The wound in the village was closing, beginning to scar.

Then, one day on the border between late spring and early summer, Morag was helping Tom the Pole—who was tall and skinny, and Polish, and carried a staff like a nomad, so no one was sure how he got the nickname—load boxes of preserves and cheeses from her farm onto his wagon to sell to the grocer in Porthmadog. Abruptly, Seamus leaped up from where it was exposing its dorsal solar cells to the cloudy sky. It stood in the doorway, braced, the melted lump on its front side that might have once held a camera, or a claw, or a gun, tilting wildly about. Morag never quite knew how it could sense trouble so accurately, but she’d seen it react to things happening too far away for her to hear or see, and it had never been wrong about them.

Seamus raced out the gate, and by the time Morag, closely followed by Tom (who had taken a moment to grab the staff from inside his wagon), had made it up the hill to the sports field, it had Feargal pinioned in its nonviolent restraining posture.

Rabbie was breathing heavily, leaning on Naomi for support, and nursing a swelling face.

“You’re off the team,” Naomi said to Feargal, with menace.

From the ground, Feargal sneered. “You said, you need what I know.”

“I don’t need it that much,” Naomi said. “Be nice to have an edge in the spring championship, but not if you’re going to go feral. Pack up,” she said to the rest of the players. “Practice is over, and we’ll use the field by the school next time.” She gave Morag a significant look.

Rabbie hesitated. “Is it okay, just leaving him on his own like this? What if he does something?”

“If he does,” Naomi said, “then you have my permission to hit back.” But she turned to Feargal. “Leave us alone, you hear? You just exhausted your welcome in these parts. I don’t care where you go or where you live, but I don’t want to see you again.”

Seamus maintained his position until the team had gone, at which point it cautiously released Feargal and trotted over to Morag and Tom the Pole.

Feargal just lay there.

Tom the Pole dropped out of his defensive stance, shouldered his pole and started to walk back to his wagon.

“You’re just going to leave me here with him?” Morag demanded. “Why do people think he’s my problem?”

“You don’t have to stay here with him.” Tom the Pole stopped, turned back to her. “You’ve done what you can, as have we all. He’s only your problem if you want to make him your problem.”

“True,” Morag said, realizing it. Then, “I feel responsible, though. Go on, I’ll meet you back at the farm.”

She’d been the one who tried to give him a second chance, to bring him in the community. That was a mistake, and now it was on her to try and fix it.

As Tom left, Morag walked over to Feargal. Squatted down. Then sat, because it was easier on the knees.

“What happened to you?” she asked. “This isn’t acting like a soldier. Or a sportsman. This is just lashing out.”

“I want to go home,” Feargal said.

“Here can be home,” Morag said, “if you want it to be.”

Feargal said nothing.

“If you mean you want to go back to Ireland, I told you how.”

Feargal didn’t answer that one. Then he said, “is this all there is? Of all that was?” Before Morag could parse the sentence, he was going on. “Nothing’s left of it. The tech’s decaying, the data’s gone. Those footballers . . . back in the day we had drugs, and doctors, and algorithmic training routines, and practice robots. These kids got nothing like that. Just their bodies and their minds.”

“Isn’t that all any of us have?”

“People in the future will think we couldn’t write. Or draw. Nobody can read digital files anymore.” That wasn’t strictly true—there were a few devices still around—but Morag wasn’t going to correct him on a technicality. “In twenty years there’ll be no trace. There’s more left from the Victorians than from us.”

Morag shrugged. “Is that a bad thing?”

Feargal smiled. “Aw, but it was beautiful, wasn’t it?”

“I lived out here all my life, except the first few years,” Morag said. Her family had come south from Scotland when the flooding got too bad. “And I don’t feel I missed much.”

“You fix tech,” Feargal sneered. “Aren’t you being a hypocrite?”

“I fix tech, yes,” Morag said. “But none of it works like it was originally intended. I wire solar cells into drones so they don’t need batteries. I turn grass-cutters into mowing machines for the farmers. I teach Seamus nonviolent restraint techniques, and the kids teach it football moves. And yes. In forty, fifty years’ time it’ll all be gone. Maybe even Seamus will be gone.” She had troubling dreams, sometimes, of Seamus in the archive at Portmeirion, motionless on a shelf in the room where they kept the taxidermy. Or staggering around the hills, alone, like when she’d found it, slowly wearing out and falling to pieces. “But there’ll be new things to replace them.”

She looked at the spoil heap, at Seamus standing at a convenient distance from her and Feargal. Its claws were deployed, a warning of what it could do if it wanted. But also a reminder that it wouldn’t use them, unless she or someone else Seamus wanted to protect was threatened.

“Knowledge,” she said. “Knowledge lasts. So long as people remember how to make a thing, or do a thing, it’s out there. Even if you’re not, anymore.”

Feargal scoffed.

“Which is to say that, if you’re worried about nothing you’ve done ever lasting, then remember, you taught the rugby team. And they’ll teach younger players. And younger ones.”

“What happens when we’re all nomads?”

“Nomads still play ball.” She saw the Children of Flame sometimes, whirling around the practice field with an old ball or an inflated animal bladder. Ritual or game, she wasn’t sure: with the Children it could be either or both. “You’ve seen kids playing that game, King of the Castle? One kid gets on top of the heap and the others have to knock them off, and then the one who succeeds becomes king? Well, the world’s not actually like that. You’re standing on the heap, daring someone to knock you off. But there’s no one. No one else wants to play the game anymore. You need to think about that.”

Seamus shifted its claws in and out, warning.

Feargal sneered. “Better get back to your protector.”

Morag didn’t bother dignifying that with a reply. She left him on the field.

“We could try using force?” Tom the Pole suggested as Morag rejoined him. “Get up a mob, chase him out of the Big House?”

“I don’t think he’ll be any more trouble today,” Morag said. “Let him alone. I think he’ll move on when the message finally sinks in.”

But somewhere in the back of her mind was a worry, about what he might do before that happened.

---

Back when Morag was small, rugby teams would play against each other at pre-arranged times, over a number of weeks and months, culminating in a championship. Which, given the erratic state of communications in a world where you were dependent on drones, nomads, and Tom the Pole for the delivery of messages, wasn’t really something they could do any more. So, by general agreement, the local rugby teams all gathered at the playing-field at Caernarfon at midsummer, since everyone could agree when that was, and camped out there for several days, playing each other until finally, one team was the victor.

Most of the village would go along for all or part of the session, some to support the team and some just for the excitement of the trip. Morag would go herself sometimes, if she could find someone to mind the farm for the duration, to meet friends from more distant towns.

This year, especially, she thought it might be worth the effort. Time to renew acquaintances, strengthen ties. Feargal hadn’t been seen since he’d been kicked off the team, and the events of midwinter were starting to fade into memory, but all the same, Morag had a feeling.

So she called in a favor with Owen, joined Zeb, Dai, Rabbie, and some of the other orphans, in their brewers’ cart, and went up to town.

“I really don’t understand it.” Morag’s sort-of-apprentice, Cliff, said to her as they ate goat-meat kebabs on a hill by the stadium. Cliff was a nomad who made the rounds of the local villages, where he sold plans for useful machines, and sold his own services building and repairing those machines. “This man tried to take over your town? Threatened you? Tried to kidnap you, personally, at least once? Pulled a knife on a kid? And you tried to make him your sports coach? Wouldn’t it be better to just drop him down a sinkhole?”

“Believe me, I wanted to,” Morag said. “But that’s not how we do things round here. And we’ve all done things that would make our neighbors want to drop us down a sinkhole.”

“All the same. He seems like a risky person to put that kind of trust in.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Morag said. “Oh, to see you, and Maya and Saoirse from Portmeirion, and to cheer on Rabbie, and all that. But I’m worried, too. Worried he might do something.”

“You said he wasn’t up at the Big House anymore?”

Morag nodded. “No one’s seen him there for weeks. Ross had a look in the cellar and said he couldn’t find any evidence the man was still around. But I don’t think he’s got what he wanted. And I’m worried he might come here and cause trouble.”

“How could we find him in a crowd like this?”

“Good question.”

“Hm. Do you think Seamus might . . . ”

“Good thought.” Remembering Seamus’ uncanny senses, Morag turned to the robot and, feeling a little silly, crouched down by its front end as if she were speaking to a dog or a small child. “Seamus, can you find Feargal?”

“Does it know his name?” Cliff asked.

“It’s not stupid. It can put together words and context.”

The little robot stood for a moment, raising and lowering its scarred front end. Then it trotted off purposefully.

Towards the part of the stadium that had once been the spectator stands.

With a sinking feeling, Morag stood up to follow.

“Stay here,” she told Cliff, who was doing likewise. Then, “No, actually. Come to the door of the stands, and wait there. He might be spooked if there’s more than one of us, but, if things go wrong, backup is a good idea.”

---

“Put the gun down and come away from there,” Morag ordered.

The little robot had led her through a maze of back corridors until finally stopping in front of a small maintenance room in the eaves. Morag had spent the journey thinking of what someone like Feargal might do with a high perch in the stands, so she was not unprepared for what she saw once she opened the door.

She could see Seamus sidling, waiting for the command. Which made her feel less afraid, though she didn’t doubt Feargal could get off at least one round before Seamus could get him down. But she held off. Knocking him down might stop him beating up Rabbie or hitting Morag, but it clearly didn’t do much to solve the wider problem.

Feargal at least looked away from the small, arrow-slit window and the old rifle. He must have found some historic ordinance in the Big House, Morag thought, hidden away so the salvagers had missed it. The kind that the Victorians made. To last. And got his hands on some cartridges for it somehow. Maybe trading with one of the farmers who made their own, or stealing . . .

Later, she’d have to go up to the Big House and make sure there wasn’t anything the local kids could use to hurt themselves. But for now, there were more urgent matters.

“Make me,” Feargal said.

“You know I can,” Morag said. “And I’m not doing it. Think. Is this really what you want people to remember you for? A massacre on Rugby Weekend?”

Feargal smiled nastily. “But they’ll remember me.”

“For heaven’s sake, man, before you do that, look at the field.” Morag, without thinking—without letting herself think—stepped forward. “Look what they’re doing.”

Feargal did lower the gun, though keeping it ready in his hands. Looked out at the field. Frowned. Said nothing for a while, as the multicolored dots down below whirled around the field and the chorus of happy singing from the lower part of the stands broke into a mix of cheers and groans.

“They’re doing what I taught them.”

“More than that,” Morag said. “Look at the shirts.” Uniforms were a thing of an earlier era when cloth was cheaper and easier to get, so teams usually distinguished themselves with colored shirts that they could also wear to work in.

“What am I missing?”

“That’s not the village team,” Morag said. “That’s Ffestiniog.”

Another pause. “I don’t believe it.”

“The village team colors are blue and white. You’ve seen it. Ffestiniog are green and gold.”

“How?”

“You want to be remembered? You will be. The techniques you taught the village team are being learned and copied by the other teams. They’ll spread to the whole island. Maybe out to the continent, eventually.”

“You think?”

Feargal turned, slumped against the wall. The tension gone out of him.

He put the gun cautiously down on the floor. Rested his arms on his knees, like he was thinking.

Once Morag was reasonably sure he wasn’t going to do anything stupid, she reached out and, matter-of-factly, took the gun. Opened it, removed the cartridges.

“I can’t go back to Ireland,” Feargal said.

“Yes, you can. You’re ready.”

“I don’t have any money.”

Morag resisted the impulse to scoff at the obvious excuse. “Glyn will take work, or trade.” She put the gun back down, pocketing the ammunition. There was the risk that he might still have some on him, but somehow she doubted it. “Give him that gun. He won’t have any use for it himself, but he can sell it to a farmer or to the archive.”

She left him in the room, though, once she was out of earshot, she asked Seamus to do a quick sweep of the corridor for anything containing black powder or shot. Just in case.

---

“How’d we do, in the end?” Morag asked Naomi, as they wandered in search of a ride back towards the village, and prepared themselves for the long walk if they couldn’t find one. After the confrontation with Feargal, she’d walked a long way from the stadium, took an even more roundabout way back, and wound up drinking with Cliff and Glyn in the wharfside district, finding her way back to the campsite after the others had gone to bed.

“We made the semifinals,” Naomi said. Morag had guessed they’d done pretty well given that Naomi didn’t appear to have slept, but not how well. “We got beaten by Criccieth, but then, the big town teams have the advantage of more leisure time and better organization.” After a bit, she said, “Do you know what’s happened with Feargal? I know he left the Big House, but nothing more.”

“I checked at the Black Buoy,” Morag said, her face neutral. She’d sworn Cliff to secrecy about the previous day’s events. “Word is, he made a deal with Glyn, and they’ll have been off across the sea at last sailing.” Which had been at about five that morning.

Naomi sighed with relief. “At least that’s one problem sorted. Did he catch the rugby final?”

“Apparently,” Morag said, still keeping a straight face.

“I wonder why he stayed? He could have gone off to Ireland any time.”

Morag shrugged. “He probably had to move on in his mind before he could move on with the rest of him. Maybe the rugby final was part of that.”

“It’s a shame it didn’t work out. He could have had a good career as a coach—”

“Don’t think it,” Morag said. “He knew things from before, yes. But he had a temper, and always had to be in charge. You can’t do that and be okay around here.”

“You’re right,” Naomi said. “I shouldn’t make the past better than it was.”

“And the team have learned what they need to, and they’ll put that to use. The best part of him stays here, the rest goes on.” She didn’t know if going back to Ireland would help him, but it was a good thing that, if he couldn’t make the village his home, he was now out there trying to find some place he could.

“Oh look,” Naomi said, pointing, “there’s Dai and Zeb and the kids.”

“We’d better hurry,” Morag said, “if we want to get a lift back with them.”