On the third day of the sickness Rory stopped screaming. Uncle Colby was the only one well enough to notice. He stood in the small garden out back, eyes closed, gripping a shovel, and savored the quiet.

The sickness had left his ears overly sensitive, and long after Rory had screamed himself hoarse Colby could hear the choking, gargling noises the boy made. Now there was only the breeze and the bees. Colby wiped the sweat from his brow, tucked a dark curl behind his ear, and returned to burying his wife. What was left of her.

When the job was done he leaned on the shovel and stared at the churned earth for a long time. It was a fine spring day, and with the wind carrying all the smells of the farm he could almost pretend it was a day like any other.

But he heard a faint rustling from the house, one of the miserable invalids shifting in their bedding, and knew he would have to bury Rory next.

Colby spat, threw down the shovel, and trudged back to the house. His little boy Henry slept restlessly in the armchair in the parlor. Despite the pile of blankets he was cold as ice. But the lad clung to life.

Upstairs, in the room he'd shared these ten years with Catherine, his mother dozed on their bed. She cradled baby Elizabeth in her arms. Before the sickness, Grandmother Aileen was the vigorous matriach who had cared for two generations of Corkills. Now she was a wisp who cared only for her youngest grandchild.

"Only the babban matters," she had crooned all yesterday, her face contorted with pain.

Colby left the room swiftly. His eyes played games in that room. It seemed like his mother was getting smaller and his daughter was getting bigger. A strange fancy, but not the maddest thing in this mad sickhouse.

A rank sweetness filled Joney's room. The red vines that crowded the room had produced strange pinky growths like flowers. They swayed slightly. Colby shuddered and closed the door.

And so to the room that Fynn shared with his boy Rory. It was a mercy that Alice, the boy's mother, had been taken from them last winter. She didn't have to see her husband's swollen body, gleaming with blood and sweat where the skin had sloughed off.

The room seemed to twist and Colby was facing the other bed, where pale Rory stared at him with an unearthly look on his face. His hair had turned white.

"I'm very sorry, Uncle Colby," Rory said hoarsely. "But it's more than I can carry." He spoke with unexpected gravity and maturity, like a barrister giving bad news. Colby felt he'd lived a year in the last three days. Rory seemed to have lived fifty.

"I'll put it in you now," Rory croaked.

Invisible tides moved through the air. The room folded like paper. Colby saw the inside and outside of the house at once. The whole island was in the room with them. The sky creaked as it bore down on them.

"Stop it!" Colby yelled. He slapped the boy again and again, lashing out like a trapped animal, until the room returned to normal.

"What the devil was that?" Colby screamed, shook from his stupor.

"No words," Rory whimpered. "Sterrym Traa." Tears coursed down his face and his body shook with wracking sobs. "It's been in my head since I touched the starstone."

"The devil's in you," Colby whispered. He staggered out the door. "The devil's in this house!" he moaned. He half fell down the stairs and lay where he landed, sobbing. He slipped into sleep without even knowing it and twitched through strange, strange dreams.

He woke with a start. That feeling was seeping down the stairs, that awful thing that Rory had shown him that made the world slippery and the stars vibrate in his head. Sterrym Traa? It didn't make sense. The boy's Gaelic was terrible, he thought distantly.

"Oh God," he gasped. He lurched up the stairs. "Mary, Mother of God, no!" he cried.

Rory stood in the first bedroom. He was doing this thing, giving this thing, to his grandmother and little cousin.

Colby tried to get to the baby, but the floor stretched and writhed before him. The room was filling up with light. The fancy came on him again, stronger than ever before, that Aileen was dwindling and the baby getting larger before his eyes. The light made his eyes water and the three figures seemed to blur into one shining form.

For one mad moment Colby thought it was one of the fairy folk he saw, come to save them all.

"Is it over now?" he pleaded.

"No, father," a strange voice piped. "This is our beginning."