She Moved Through the Fair

Why One Song Appears Seven Times in The Morrígan’s Game

5 July 2026 ~ 3 min read

There are dozens of songs in The Morrígan’s Game—Irish traditional, U2, death metal, muzak in Hell. But one song appears more than any other. “She Moved Through the Fair” shows up seven times across the novel, threading through chapters 7, 8, 15, 26, 28, 35, and 40. No other piece of music comes close. And it isn’t an accident.

If you haven’t heard it, find a version before you read any further. Sinead O’Connor’s is devastating. So is Loreena McKennitt’s. The melody is modal—it hovers between major and minor, never quite settling, never resolving the way your ear expects. That ambiguity is the song’s power. It sounds like a love song and a ghost story at the same time, because it is both. A young man watches his beloved move through a fair. She promises she won’t be long. And then she comes to him in a dream, and you realize she’s dead.

As a composer, I can tell you exactly why this melody works the way it does. The modal scale—dorian or mixolydian depending on the arrangement—avoids the leading tone that would pull it toward resolution. There’s no harmonic gravity telling you where the music is going. It floats. It drifts. It moves through the song the way the woman moves through the fair—present but already vanishing. Most Western music wants to arrive somewhere. This melody is content to haunt.

That’s why it became the emotional spine of The Morrígan’s Game. Seán and Niamh’s love story is a story about presence and absence—a woman who was once a sentient nebula learning to be human, a man who might lose her to forces older than both of them. Every time “She Moved Through the Fair” appears in the novel, it carries a different weight. Early on, it’s tender—the melody plays as connection, as warmth, as the sound of two people finding each other. By the middle chapters, it carries an edge of warning. By the end, it’s become something closer to prayer.

Seven appearances. The same melody every time, but the meaning transforms with each return—the way Berlioz’s idée fixe transforms across the five movements of the Symphonie Fantastique. That’s not a coincidence. The technique of taking a single musical idea and letting its context reshape its meaning is something I learned from Berlioz and carried into the Trilogy. A melody doesn’t have a fixed emotion. It has a shape, and the story around it determines what you feel when you hear it. “She Moved Through the Fair” begins as a love song and ends as an elegy, not because the notes change but because the listener has.

The song also carries something I couldn’t have invented: centuries of voices. Every Irish singer has a version. Every version is slightly different. The melody has been passed from voice to voice for so long that it belongs to no one and everyone—which is exactly what happens to a story when it becomes tradition. The Morrígan’s Game is full of ancient patterns retold in modern Cork, and “She Moved Through the Fair” is the oldest pattern of all: love, loss, and the hope that the dead are not entirely gone.

If you read the Trilogy, listen for it. Seven times, she moves through the fair. Each time, she means something new.

~ Liam