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It didn’t matter that neither Feidhlim nor his neighbors could remember the details of his great-grandfather’s transgression. Memory was ephemeral. Hatred was a rock.
“See the stone set in your eyes, see the thorn twist in your side…”
That is the purpose of Na Daoine Maithe. The awful and arbitrary cruelty of life, reduced to something that can be bargained with, reasoned, or outwitted. A face, put upon that which cannot be faced.”
“A changeling story where the changeling is never discovered would be like a version of Cinderella where she never goes to the ball,” the professor explained. “The revelation of the infant’s true nature is the entire purpose of the story.”
Ah, there was the word. “Family.” It was an old Irish word. It meant: “Do nothing. Challenge nothing. Change nothing.” Ireland was a rocky garden, dig a few inches deep and you found stone; solid and impassable. And carved into its face, as like as not; the word FAMILY.
