“And yours,mo stór, is there anything you’d want to change? It can be done easy enough.”
“I love it, Nan. From the first moment I saw it, I loved it. I didn’t know then it was my homeplace, but it was, and it is.”
“Aye, but…” She took Breen’s hand, strolled back through the archway. “I wonder if you might want a true writing place, or a room tucked up for the books and the reading.”
She led the way in, left the door open in welcome as Marg did. She’d make tea, she thought, and plate some of Marco’s cookies. They could enjoy it on the patio in the warm air with the buzz of activity through the hedgerow.
“Well, if you do, it’s easy enough. It might be you’ll find the need for another bedroom or two.”
“I’ll have Marco’s when he and Brian are settled in their own place.”
“That’s true enough, but it might be you’d want more than one. If children come along. I don’t think I’m wrong that you’d want children.”
“You’re not.” And she hoped, oh she hoped, children and a life raising them, loving them, would be part of her destiny. “But I can’t even think about that, Nan, as long as Odran exists. Until he’s gone, any child of mine would be at risk.
“If I survive this—”
“Ah, Breen.”
“That’s part of it, so if I survive and he doesn’t, I’d like to think of a future with children.”
“Now, you’ll forgive a nan for poking in her nose. Have you and Keegan talked of that future?”
“No.” Breen got out a tray, began to arrange things on it. “I don’t know what he wants, after.”
The young, Marg thought with an inner sigh, so often moved slow. “So you don’t ask or tell what you want?”
“I need to know I’ve got a future, then I guess I might ask, or tell. I’m happy as things are, and that counts for a lot.”
“It does, of course. Ah, but he looks at you, my darling girl. How he looks at you.”
“He does?”
She laughed at that and tapped a finger to Breen’s cheek.
“I know a man besotted when I see one, whether or not he knows it himself. So I’ll please myself, thinking of bedrooms for children, and that true writing space for my lovely scribe of a granddaughter.” She wandered into the dining room. “Oh, and a little glass solarium sort of thing, so she can putter about with plants in the warm during the winter chills.”
“Oh, that sounds—” Catching herself, Breen lifted the tray. “Seductive, as you meant it to. We’ll just wait. We’ve got a multiday festival to plan.”
“That we do, and look here, there’s Finola and Morena come along early to help do just that.”
Breen set the tray back down. “I’ll get more cups.”
Bollocks dashed through the arbor, visibly beside himself with excitement over yet more company. He got his greeting, and since Finola offered him something out of the basket she carried, a treat to go with it.
“What a lovely day! Oh, and look at the gardens!” Nearly as thrilled as Bollocks, Finola beamed everywhere. “Breen, sure you’ve a Sidhe’s hand with the planting,” she said as Breen brought out the tray.
Finola looked like a flower herself in leggings of rosy pink with a long white shirt covered with rosebuds over them.
“Seamus is a patient and wonderful teacher. Is it too noisy out here with all the work going on? We can take this inside.”
“Not on such a day. Now, in here I’ve got some very nice cheese from the farm and some bread baked this morning.” Out of the basket they came. “And some of the agenda, we’ll say, for the festival. We’ll fuss that out among the four of us, won’t we, before we pass it along to the rest.”
“Having it mostly settled, Nan says, will save time and, more than time, the trouble of arguing.” Morena snagged a biscuit. “Mostly she just doesn’t want Jack and his sister Nelly wading in until the whole business is sunk in more plans than doing.”
“That’s the truth of it. So we’ll spend this part of a lovely day working it all out, then Marg will take what we’ve laid out to them, Michael Maguire, and Dek of the Trolls.”
“Oh now, Fi, you, my friend all these years, would set me to such a task!”