Before the world turned cruel and men learned what they were capable of losing, there was a summer day on the lower slopes of Slieve Gallion when the Doyle brothers played as though the world belonged only to them. Johnny was eleven, Henry ten, and the valley rolled beneath them like a kingdom of grass and stone, broken only by hedgerows and the steady shimmer of the river that ran through the pasture like a vein.

It was a warm day, the sort that held no hint of what winters could do to men or how memory could haunt the strongest of hearts. They had chased hares through the long grass, climbed trees where crows nested, and now stood at the edge of the river, breathless and muddy.

The water was running fast, fat from spring melt, and the stepping stones that spanned the current looked slick and uncertain.

Young Johnny Doyle was walking up Slieve Gallion, the wind pressing against him, the mountain wet and supple beneath his boots. The sky was low, a bruised purple at the edges, and his breath rose in little gasps, lost to the air before it could turn back to him. He walked the same as his father had done, and his father’s father too, with shoulders bent into the breeze and a purposeful, measured stride.

He stopped near the crest, where the world unfolded below him, a great quilt of green and brown, stitched with stone walls and curling hedgerows. A view of five counties – Derry, Tyrone, Antrim, Donegal, Fermanagh – all names he had learned as a boy, names that held the weight of old rebellions, hunger and exile but secrets too, of love.

He thought of those who had gone before him, the uncles and cousins, the ones who had crossed the water to America, and the ones who had not crossed anywhere at all, their bones lying quiet in the earth. He looked out over Maghera, Desertmartin, Tobermore and Magherafelt and, rolling their names in his head like lucky pebbles in a pocket, he felt at ease