"No, I heard them. The hooves were right outside my door, but when I looked, they'd gone away. Didn't take them long," she added. Aunt Annie looked at her again as she came over and put Nita's teacup down. Her expression was rather different this time. "Oh," she said. 'You mean the ghosts." Nita stared. "Welcome to Ireland," said her aunt. 2. cill cumhaid kilquade Contents – Prev/ Nita sat back and blinked a little. Her aunt stirred her tea and said, "Do ghosts bother you?" "Not particularly," Nita said, wondering just how to deal with this line of enquiry. Wizards knew that very few ghosts had anything to do with people's souls hanging around somewhere. Most apparitions, especially ones that repeated, tended to be caused by a kind of 'tape recording' that violent emotion could make on matter under certain circumstances, impressing its energy into the molecular structure of physical things. Over long periods of time the 'recording' would fade away, but in the meantime it would replay every now and then, for good reasons or no reason, and upset the people who happened to see it. And if they happened to believe that such a thing was caused by human souls, the effects would get steadily worse, fed by the emotions of the living. Nita knew all this, certainly. But how much of it could she safely tell her aunt? And how to get it across without sounding like she knew more than a fourteen-year-old should? "Good," her aunt was saying. She drank her tea and looked at Nita across the table with those cool blue-grey eyes. "Did you hear the church bells, earlier?" "Uh, no. I must have been asleep." "We have a little church down the road," Aunt Annie said. "About three hundred years ago, after the English killed their King – Charles the First, it was – his "replacement", an English general named Oliver Cromwell, came through here." Her aunt took another long drink of tea.


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