Deed of Murder by Cora Harrison

Mara. ‘It depends . . .’ Purposely she did not finish the sentence.
    Fiona nodded. ‘It depends on whether he fell or was pushed.’
    ‘Who did you think was the secret follower of you both?’ asked Mara, wondering whether this was just a piece of imagination, or even a tale told to cloak the real killer. In fact, for a moment she thought she saw a hint of puzzlement in Fiona’s eyes – almost as though the girl did not know what she was talking about.
    ‘Who was the rider who had followed you both from the Great Hall of Ballinalacken Castle? Who followed you both through the lands of the Burren, the lands of Corcomroe through Thomond, and right across the mighty width of the river Shannon itself, that’s what you told me . . . Isn’t that right?’ added Mara as Fiona said nothing, just looked straight ahead of her.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Fiona slowly, but her eyes told a different story.
    Something had just occurred to her.

Six
    Bretha Déin Chécht
    (The laws of Déin Chécht)
    There are twelve doors of the soul, twelve places where a blow may kill a man:
Top of the head ,
Occipital fossa, (back of the skull)
Temporal fossa, (above the ear)
Thyroid cartilage, (base of the neck)
Suprasternal notch ,
Axilla, (armpit)
Sternum, (breastbone)
Umbilicus, (navel)
Anticubital fossa, (cavity near elbow)
Popliteal fossa, (cavity between legs)
Femoral triangle, (inside of thigh)
Sole of the foot.
    T he houses at Cahermacnaghten law school were built within the immensely thick walls of an ancient enclosure. Up to recently there had been just four small, oblong, lime-washed and stone-built cottages: a kitchen house, a scholars’ house, a schoolhouse and a farm manager’s house. To these buildings, Mara had recently added a roundhouse for female scholars and hoped that soon she would have another girl to join Fiona. At the present time she herself was the only woman Brehon in Ireland, but there was no reason why there should not be more. In fact, Mara secretly thought that a woman, more than a man, possessed the skills necessary for administering a law which was not enforced by imprisonment or by savage punishments such as whipping, branding and hanging, but by the consensus of the people of the kingdom. The law needed qualities of tact, understanding and a willingness to listen – very much women’s qualities, thought Mara, and she dreamed that her school would produce a line of women Brehons, all as successful at maintaining law and order in the kingdom as she had been.
    Throughout almost twenty years as Brehon of the Burren, she thought proudly, she had experienced only two cases where the culprit refused to pay the fine and had escaped into an alien territory. Neither of these men could be permitted ever to show their faces in the kingdom of the Burren until justice was done and the penalty paid. All other cases had been settled, the fine paid and the culprit restored to a life of usefulness to the family and to the community. A Brehon was a valuable profession, and she hoped that this latest case could be solved quickly and the peace be once more restored.
    Cumhal came forward when Mara’s horse turned in at the gate and stood beside her, holding the reins while she dismounted. ‘Nuala is in there with him, and Brigid, too, in the roundhouse,’ he said indicating the new cottage.
    The roundhouse had been built in the style of the monastic huts on the smallest of the Aran Islands. It had a large room facing the door, with four small bedchambers, screened by leather curtains, beyond it. A big iron brazier, filled with logs, stood against the wall near to the doorway and in the centre of this room was a sturdy wooden table and some stools. Even on a winter’s night this was a cosy place to sit and study and the walls were so thick that the heat was retained even when the fire went out.
    Today, there was no fire and on the table there were no books or writing materials – just the body of the young man