Four years ago they believed their daughter to be doomed, and were so afraid of the suffering to come they even considered poison.

Yet here she is, beautiful and strong. She has found love. She is a hero of the Nation, whose Testimony will forever change the way people think of the Sídhe. But all she wants now are her mam and dad, as she did when she was an infant.

They feel her arms, strong as anchors, when she hugs them. Her skin against theirs is strangely smooth, like porcelain baked in a kiln.

“I can’t stay long,” Nessa says. “The doctors want to look at me.”

“Where’s Anto?” Agnes asks. “Don’t we get to meet him?”

They’ve had a letter from her already, that she sent before she came home, so they know a little of what’s gone on, but no details. And, to be honest, the details don’t matter. She has returned to them, while around the country other parents are not so lucky, for even after all that has happened in Boyle, children are still being snatched away by the Call.

Nessa spends all of Christmas with them, staying in her old room, insisting on the presence of the worn-out teddies of her childhood.

But she has changed. Fergal gasps to see her rearrange the embers in the hearth with her bare hands. And he gasps again as she shows him how she can spit the fire out of her fingers after, or even her lips.

Early in the new year, she tells her parents that she has to leave again.

“The Nation must survive,” she says. “I can help with that.”

She sits alone on the bus, her suitcase propped up on the seat beside her so she can pretend it’s Megan sitting there instead. And off she goes through the snowy roads, Agnes and Ferg waving her away, hugging each other, their pride so fierce it burns.