Son

One

The slate gray sea roiled, scraping the narrow strip of sand rhythmically, tugging at beach grass, digging and sucking loose the rocks at the shore’s edge. Spray stung the men’s eyes when they went to tighten the ropes holding their boats secure. Salt coated their beards and eyebrows. They pulled their woven hat brims low.

Old Benedikt cupped his hand above his eyes and peered upward, assessing the sky through the pelting rain.

“It won’t break for a while,” he called. “Not till night.” But his words were carried off by the stiff wind, and the others, tugging and twisting at the coarse ropes, didn’t hear him, didn’t reply.

The women remained in their cottages. Fighting the weather was men’s work. The women listened to the wind as it roared in the chimneys, to the ripping sounds of torn thatch, and to the whimpering of frightened children. They tended the fires, stirred the soups, rocked the babies, and waited. This storm would pass. The sea would calm. It always had.

In the time that came after, the story of Water Claire took different forms. It was told and retold; things were forgotten, or shaped and changed. Always, though, there was this truth: that she came from the sea, flung in by that fearsome December storm years before.

Some said she was found, later, when the scudding clouds pulled aside and showed low sun in early evening: that she was there on the strip of beach, her clothes half torn from her, and they thought she was dead till she stirred and her eyes opened to show the deep amber-flecked green that later all remembered the same.

Others said no, it was Tall Andras who saw her in the waves, who threw himself in and grabbed her by her long hair as she clung to a thick wood beam, that he swam with her till he could stand, and when they looked he was there in the churning broth of sea with her in his thick arms, her head against his beard, and that he said but one word: “Mine.”

Children said she was carried in by dolphins and they made games of it, and rhymes, but all of that was just tale-spinning and fun, and no one took it to be true.

Others murmured “selkie” from time to time when she was remembered, but only as a fanciful tale. The selkie stories of seal creatures were well known, oft told, and in all of them there was a shed skin. Water Claire had come in clothing, though it had been shredded by the gritty winter sea. She was human. There was no seal to her.

Or mermaid, either.

She was a human girl sent to them by the sea, who stayed among them for a time, became a woman, and went away again.

It was actually Old Benedikt himself who carried her in, once she was seen. Several, including Tall Andras, swam out, but it was Old Benedikt who reached her first, slicing his way through waves with his burly, muscled arms. He pried her loose from the wood spar, for her fingers were locked there. He knew how to wrap her lifeless arms around his neck and to hold her pale chin high above the foam and spray. He had brought wounded sheep in from the field this way many times, holding them against his chest.

He stood, finally, in the shallow surge and suck of water, walked forward, his feet heavy in the drenched, icy sand, and laid her there. He could see that she still lived, and he covered her with the thick woven coat that he had thown aside as he entered the sea. Then he turned her wet, pale face to the side. He pressed upon her through the coat until she spewed frothy brine onto the sand, and coughed.

Tall Andras was there, it is true, and he thought, gazing down, that he wanted the girl for his own, but did not give voice to it.

Old Benedikt looked up at the surrounding men. “Run ahead,” he directed Gavin, who was fastest. “Tell Alys. We’ll carry her there.”

Hastily the men gathered poles and coats and made a carrying litter, knowing how to do it for they had done it many times before. Their children fell from boats and cliffs. Their sons and brothers were wounded by hooks and rope. Their women died giving birth, and the newborns died too. They used such a litter for the slow journey to graveside.

But this girl was alive, though her eyes stayed closed and her fingers clenched as if she still felt the splintery mast in them. When they rolled her onto the litter, she coughed again, and when they lifted it to carry her up the hill, a cold breeze picked up a strand of her long wet hair, drawing it across her cheek. Her eyelashes fluttered then, and she began to tremble and whimper.

Carefully, in the increasing darkness, for twilight was brief here in winter, they moved with her up the ridge and felt with their feet for the worn path that would take them to the village and to Alys’s hut at its edge. Four men carried the girl. The others walked behind. Now and then one stopped, turned, and looked out toward the sea and the horizon with its darkening sky as if searching for the silhouette of a vessel that might have thrown this astonishing gift their way. But there was nothing there but what had always been there: empty ocean the color of pewter, tarnishing to black now as night fell.

The village nestled at the foot of a forbidding cliff in the curved elbow of an arm of land. The peninsula jutted out from the main coast in an isolated place where time didn’t matter, for nothing changed. No newcomers had ever appeared, not in anyone’s memory, and only an occasional discontented man climbed out (for that was what they called the leaving) or tried to. An overgrown, root-tangled path meandered upward at the foot of the cliff but then disappeared at the base of a sheer rock wall, and after that there was no way to go farther but to climb. Several had fallen to their death. One, Fierce Einar, had climbed out successfully but returned, embittered by what he had encountered at the top.

He had quarreled with his father and climbed out on a winter night with a sack of his own belongings, and some he had stolen, tied to his back. When he returned, climbing back in, it almost killed him, for he was maimed by then, bloody and in terrible pain. He dropped from the final rocks onto the snowy path at the base, howling in agony and with a knowledge of failure. Then he fell silent. He crawled to a place where he could pull down a narrow tree. He stripped it of branches, broke the trunk into two pieces, and used them to haul himself upright. Then he leaned on the sticks and dragged himself home to face his father. He lost the title Fierce, and was renamed Lame Einar. Still only eighteen, still silent, he tended sheep now, and nursed a deep despair.

The best route away from the village was by sea. But the ocean was turbulent and unpredictable, with dangerous currents and constant wind. Each fisherman had found himself in peril more than once, and all had lost friends or brothers.

Alys, toothless and wrinkled though with piercing eyes and a sharp tongue, told the men roughly: “Leave us be!” when they carried the trembling creature in to her. She tended the girl through the night. Alys was childless herself but had been midwife to many and was no stranger to damaged young. She stripped the girl of the drenched, ripped clothing, setting it aside, then rubbed her dry with rough cloth, and wrapped her in soft wool. She did all this in flickering light from a smoky oil lamp. When the girl stopped shaking, Alys stirred the herb-flavored broth that had been simmering on the fire in an iron pot. She poured some into a bowl, and fed the girl from a spoon held carefully lest she thrust it away in her fear.

But the girl sipped, wary at first, then opened her mouth for more.

“Go slow or you’ll puke,” Alys told her.

“What brung you?” she asked when the soup bowl was emptied. The girl’s head turned and she half rose, listening to the murmur of the sea, but she did not answer and the old woman did not urge her. Instead, Alys found a comb carved of bone on the shelf nearby, and began to unsnarl and smooth the wet, salt-stiffened hair.

The wind howled through the thatch on the roof. It was deepest night now. The girl dozed, half sitting. Finally, Alys lowered her to the bed and pulled the length of wool cloth up around her bare shoulders. She watched for a few moments as the girl slept, her hair fanned about her head. Alys had always yearned for a daughter and felt that the sea had sent this one to her. After a bit she lowered the flame in the lamp so that the hut was dim, with dark shadows on its walls. She wrapped her own self in a woven blanket, sank into a nearby chair, and slept too.

In the morning the girl woke and wept softly. When she saw her clothing, all rags now encrusted with drying salt, she clutched the tatters, feeling the ruined cloth with her fingers, and then relinquished it all, turning her face to the wall. After a bit, with a resigned sigh, she took the coarse woven shift that Alys offered her, slipped it over her head, and stood. Her bare legs and arms were bruised and scraped; one ankle was badly swollen and she favored it, limping to the table where Alys had set a bowl of porridge.

Her hair was red-gold, burnished copper in the early light of winter that came through the small window and fell over her as she ate. The day was fair, as it was often after storms.

“What brung you to this place?” Alys asked her again. “What carried you and threw you to the storm?”

But again the girl did not answer, though she stared at Alys with her gold-flecked eyes. She had a puzzled look.

“Do you not understand our tongue?” Alys asked, knowing that the question was foolish, for if the answer were to be no, then the girl could not understand in order to give it.

“I am Alys.” The old woman pointed to herself. “Alys,” she said again, and patted her own chest in explanation. “I have no child, none ever, but I have birthed many among our women and few died in the birthing; they say I have the firm hands and the feel for it, and I also lay out the dead and sometimes can heal if the sickness is not beyond healing.

“That’s why they brung you to me, for they felt you needed healing, or if not healing, then I would clean and wrap you for the grave.”

The girl was watching her. Her bowl was empty, and she raised the cup of milk beside it and drank deeply.

From outside they could hear, suddenly, the giggles of children. Alys pushed a window open, peered out, and called to them. “She’s alive! She eats and is whole, with no parts broken. Go and tell. And stay off now till she’s rested good! She don’t need the likes of you laughing and shouting about!”

“What be her name?” a child’s voice called.

“Go now! We’ll know her name soon enough, or give her one!” the woman called, and then there was the sound of the little ones scampering away.

With her gnarled hand she smoothed the girl’s hair. “It’s just the curiosity comes on them. Them three little ones are always together—best friends, they are. Delwyth, Bethan, and Eira be their names—I midwifed each one, same year. Six, they are, and full of the mischief, but they have good hearts and mean no harm.”

Then the girl spoke. “My name is Claire,” she said.

Two

They called her Water Claire.

People came to Alys’s hut during the weeks that passed and brought gifts to Claire, knowing she had nothing of her own. They were a generous people, as a rule. Gareth, his bald head and round cheeks pink with shyness, made shoes for her, leather sandals with straps that she fastened around her ankles over thick knitted socks when the swelling lessened and she could walk without pain. Bryn, the mother of little Bethan, stitched a linen petticoat and took the time to embroider flowers on its edge, a fanciful touch beyond the ordinary clothing of the people, but no one scorned Bryn for it, for the girl seemed worthy of such a gift. Old Benedikt carved her a comb, which she carried in her pocket, and to the surprise of everyone, since he was fierce in his anger and solitude, Lame Einar came in from the sheep meadow, hobbling on his two sticks, and gave her a hat he had woven her from straw.

As spring came, children brought her early wildflowers in small wilting bouquets and they helped her weave the stems into the straw of the hat’s brim.

She wore the brimmed hat to keep the sun from her eyes but even so needed to hold her hand there when she looked to sea because the light reflecting off the gray-white waves was blinding. She stood often on the shore with the wind blowing her hair and molding her skirt against her legs. She watched the horizon as if she waited. But she had no knowledge of what she waited for. The sea had drunk her memories away, leaving only her name.

“How old do you be, Water Claire?” asked a half-grown freckle-faced boy named Sindri. He measured himself beside her and she was the taller. But she shook her head, not knowing how to answer him. Alys was there; they were gathering herbs.

“Sixteen year or so,” Alys said, telling Claire more than the boy. And they knew Alys to be true in her guess, for it was she who tended the bodies of them all, and knew the signs that each year brings.

“Sixteen,” Water Claire repeated in her soft voice, and though she said no more, they knew that she was mourning the knowledge of the years that the sea had gulped away. She watched the little girls at play, laughing as they ran through the meadow, quick and colorful as butterflies, but there was sadness in the watching, for Claire’s meadow days had been taken from her. They did not come back, even in dreams.

“Sixteen?” Tall Andras repeated when he heard of it. The boy, Sindri, had told everyone, and most had shrugged. But Tall Andras rubbed his hand across his thick blond beard, looked across the marketplace to where Water Claire stood fingering ribbons at a stall, and said to his mates, “She could be wed.”

It was true that in this place there were often girls given as brides at that age. Even now the village was preparing for a wedding; Glenys, shy and sparkle-eyed, would soon wed horse tender Martyn, she not yet seventeen and he barely twenty. But Old Benedikt and Alys both said no. Not this girl. Not Water Claire. She must not wed, they said firmly, until the sea gave her back what it had stolen, until she knew what her life had once been.

Tall Andras, frowning with disappointment, asked brusquely, “What if it never do?”

“It will,” Old Benedikt replied.

“Bits and pieces, they’ll come,” Alys said, “over time.”

Tall Andras glowered. He had a fierce want for the girl. “The sea pukes up dead fish,” he said. “It won’t give her back anything. What the sea coughs up smells of rot.”

“You smell of sweat yourself, Andras,” Alys told him, laughing at his misery, “and should bathe if you want the girl to come close. Wash your hair and chew some mint. Maybe then she’ll give you a smile some morning.”

Tall Andras stalked away, but she could see that he was headed to the freshwater pond beyond the thick trees at the edge of the village. Old Benedikt, watching, shook his head and smiled. “I told him she’ll come back to herself, but truly I don’t know,” he told Alys. “It’s as if the sea sucked away her past and left her empty. What does she say to you?”

“She remembers only waking in my hut. Nothing before. Not even being in the sea.”

They walked together along the rocky path bordering a wide meadow, each of them with a stick to lean on. Old Benedikt was strong still, but bent. Alys, too, walked with her back hunched. They had been friends for more than sixty years.

Alys carried the basket she used for gathering herbs; she was in need of raspberry leaf on this morning, to steep for tea to give Bryn. Since birthing Bethan six years before, Bryn had lost three babies and had fallen into despair. Now she was again with child, and Alys would prepare the raspberry leaf infusion for her to drink three times a day. Sometimes it tightened and held a pregnancy.

“Is there no herb for memory?” Old Benedikt asked her as she leaned to strip the raspberry leaves from the thick thorned bushes where they grew.

Alys chuckled. “Aye,” she told him. “Try this.” She reached to a nearby tree, peeled a tiny shred of bark, and placed it in his hand. “Chew, and think back.”

Frowning, puzzled, Old Benedikt placed the shred on his own tongue. “Think back on what?”

“On a time you choose. Far back.” She watched him.

He closed his eyes and chewed. “Bitter,” he said, making a face.

She laughed.

After a moment he opened his eyes and spat the chewed bark from his tongue. “I thought back to the day we danced,” he told her with a wry smile.

“I was thirteen,” she said. “You were the same. A long way back. Was the memory clear?”

He nodded. “You had pink flowers in your hair,” he said.

She nodded. “Beach roses. It was midsummer.”

“And bare feet.”

“Yours were bare too. It was a warm day.”

“Aye. The grass was warm and damp.”

“Dew,” he said. “It was early morning.” He looked at her for a moment. “Why were we dancing?” he asked, his brow furrowed.

“Mayhap you need to chew the bark again.” She chuckled. “To remember why.”

“You tell me,” he said.

Alys added the last of the raspberry leaves to her basket, straightened, took up her stick, and turned on the path. “Back to the hut,” she said. “My kettle’s aboil, and I must steep the leaves.” She began to walk away from him.

“Shall you take some of the bark for the girl? For Water Claire?” he asked.

She turned back to him and crinkled a smile at him. “The bark does naught,” she said. “It’s only the turning your mind to it. Making your mind go back.

“She’ll do that when she’s ready,” she added. “I must go now. Bryn is in need of the tea.”

He called after her as she walked away on the path. “Alys? Why were we dancing?”

“Take your mind there again,” she called back. “You’ll remember!”

To herself, she murmured, shaking her head with amusement as her eyes twinkled at her own memory. “Only thirteen. But we was barefoot and flower-strewn and foolish with first love.”

Three

Claire was there, at the hut. With her coppery hair tied back by a ribbon, and a cloth tied around her waist to protect her simple homemade skirt, she was chopping the long pale green stems of early onions fresh from the garden. Newly picked greens lay heaped on the table with a thick mutton bone near them, ready to add to the pot of water that was already simmering over the fire. When Alys entered, she smiled.

“I’m starting soup,” the girl said.

“Aye. I see that.” Alys emptied her basket of raspberry leaves into a bowl. “I’ll just take some of the water first, for my brew.” With a ladle she slowly poured hot water from the pot over the leaves. Steam rose as the leaves began to steep and tint the liquid.

“For Bryn?” The girl looked at the darkening tea.

“Aye. To lose another will surely make her heartsick.”

Claire leaned toward the bowl. As Alys watched, she closed her eyes and breathed the steam. At her forehead, tendrils of hair curled from the moisture, framing her pale face. For a moment she stood there, motionless, breathing. Then she gasped, drew her head back, opened her eyes, and looked around with a puzzled gaze.

“I cannot—” she began, then fell silent.

Alys went to her and smoothed the damp hair. “What is it, child?” she asked.

“I thought—” But the girl couldn’t continue. Moving tentatively, she sat down in the nearby rocker and stared into the fire.

Alys watched her for a moment. Then she went to the trunk against the wall. Unopened for years, it bore an iron clasp that was rusty and worn. But Alys’s strong fingers pried it loose, and she raised the heavy, carved lid. Her father had made this trunk for her mother almost a century before, a bride-gift when they were wed. It had come to Alys when her mother died. Her mother had stored things in it: linens and baby dresses, sprinkled with dried lavender blossoms. None of those things remained, though the scent of the lavender lingered. Alice used the trunk only for treasures, and there were few enough of those in her life.

Now she reached through the things within and took from near the bottom a fragile bit of folded cloth. Holding it, she went to the rocker and said to the girl: “Watch now.”

Gently she unfolded the cloth and showed her bits of torn brown shreds. “Smell,” Alys told her, and held it to the girl’s nose.

“Old,” Claire said. “Sweet.” She leaned back in the chair and sighed. “What is it?”

“Beach roses from sixty years ago.”

“Why—”

“To hold memories. Scents do that. When you smelled the tea—”

“Yes. For a moment something came back,” the girl acknowledged. “Like a bit of breeze. It drifted past. I couldn’t keep it with me. I wanted—” But she couldn’t say what she wanted. She sighed and shook her head. “It went away.”

“It’s waiting,” Alys said. Carefully she refolded the cloth around the dried petals and leaves and replaced the little packet in the carved trunk. Then, while Claire watched, she strained the dark tea and poured it carefully into small bottles, which she corked tightly. “I’ll take this now to Bryn,” she said.

“Add a raspberry leaf or two to the soup. And some of that sorrel from the garden. It’ll give flavor,” she added. “Those greens you have give bulk, but their taste is ordinary.”

Claire nodded. Alys watched as the girl pushed the chopped onions into a neat pile with the side of her hand.

“Did you cook once, mayhap?” Alys asked.

The girl looked up. She frowned and furrowed her brow. “I don’t think so,” she said, finally.

“But something come back to you a minute ago,” Alys said, “when you breathed the tea.”

Claire stood thinking. She closed her eyes. Then, finally, she looked up and shrugged. “It wasn’t the tea,” she said. “It came from something else, I think.”

“You talk elegant,” Alys said with a chuckle. “Probably somebody done your cooking for you, once.”

Claire took a deep breath, still thinking. Then she picked up the stirring spoon and turned toward the pot of simmering soup. “Well,” she said, “those days are gone.”

The three little girls, Bethan, Delwyth, and Eira, barefoot and grass-stained, smoothed and tidied the little corner of meadow that they called their Tea Place. A flat rock there became their table; they decorated it with blossoms from the clumps of wildflowers nearby. With a leafy branch acting as a broom, Eira swept the ground around the rock. “Sit down, dear ladies,” she said. “Now that it’s tidy here, we’ll have tea.”

It was a game they often played, serving imaginary tea to one another, pretending to be grown women.

“Your hair’s a wee bit straggled, Miss Bethan,” Eira said haughtily as she set the broom aside. “Was you rushed? I’d expect you’d be more primped up, and maybe brush some, when you’ve got a tea invite.”

Bethan giggled and pulled at her unruly curls. “So sorry, Miss Eira,” she said. “This baby in my belly makes me forgetful.” Dramatically she pulled her frock away from her own thin middle.

“Can I have a belly baby too?” whispered solemn-eyed Delwyth.

“Yes. Let’s all.” Eira tugged at her own skirt. “Oh, I do hope mine is born soon, because I’m so weary of being fat.”

“Yes, fat is hard,” Delwyth agreed in a serious voice. “It makes you breathe all puffy.

“When do you expect yours?” she asked the others. “Mine’s coming tomorrow. I do hope for a boy. I’m going to name him . . .” She pondered briefly. “Dylan,” she decided. “Tea?” Delicately she sipped from her own imaginary cup.

“Oops!” Bethan announced. “Mine just be born. A little girl.” She cradled an invisible baby in her arms.

“Mine too!” The other two little girls announced. Rhythmically they rocked their invisible infants.

“My mum be cross with me if she knowed we did this,” Bethan confided. “She says it be bad luck to pretend about a baby.”

Delwyth stopped her rocking motion. “Bad luck?”

Bethan nodded.

“Better we don’t do it, then. We can pretend tea, though.” Delwyth smoothed her skirt. “Want a teacake?” She offered the other girls each a twig.

Eira pretended to chew. “You be a fine cook, Miss Delwyth,” she said.

Delwyth nodded solemnly. “I learnt it from the queen,” she said, “when I be’d a helper in her kitchen.”

Claire, listening from where she stood in a small grove of trees nearby, smiled at the sweetness of the children. But their conversation troubled her, as well, because it reminded her of what she had lost. It was more than the loss of memories. She had no knowledge. She wondered what a queen might be. Had she known that once? Had she played this way, once?

This baby in my belly makes me forgetful, one little girl had said. Claire, working now with Alys, preparing the herbs for Bethan’s mother, understood what the child was pretending. Why did it make Claire feel so unbearably sad?

She straightened her straw hat and walked slowly back to the hut with the herbs she had been sent to find and gather. She resolved that she would learn. She would learn everything—about queens, whatever they were; and herbs, and birds, and how the men farmed and what they thought, and the women, too, how they spent their hours, and what they talked about, what they dreamed, what they yearned for.

It would be a start, Claire thought. Perhaps somehow she would learn her own lost life.

From a field higher up, where he was prying weeds from the rocky soil with his hoe, Tall Andras stopped his work, wiped sweat from his glistening forehead, and watched the mysterious girl walk along the path. She had favored one leg for some weeks, until the bruise and swelling disappeared. He had worried for her, that she might become hunched and lame, as people did when their wounds went unhealed. Andras’s own father, flung years before against rocks when a boat swung around and tipped, still held one arm locked into a curved and crooked shape.

But he could see that Water Claire strode easily now along the path, her legs strong and equal, her feet sure in the soft leather sandals she wore. He watched her make her way easily to the turning; then she disappeared into the woods, heading back to the hut she shared with Alys.

A shadow crossed the ground in front of him, and Tall Andras looked up and waved his arm at the crows that circled the field. His weeding was turning up bugs and worms, morsels that the crows wanted, he knew, and it put his seedlings at risk. He couldn’t afford to lose the crops. Winter was long here, and in the good weather seasons they prepared for it: growing, catching, storing things away. His father was getting old and his mother had been unwell for months, with fever that came and went. Tall Andras was young, just seventeen, but the family depended on him. He would make a bird-scarer, a mommet, he decided. Last summer that had helped. And he had a large gourd in the shed that he could use for a head, with a face carved on it: a fierce face. He twisted his own face, practicing, pushing his lips up against his nose, and then flapped his arms, the way the cloth of his mommet might flap in the wind to frighten away the crows.

Then he stopped, feeling childish and foolish, and glad that the girl had not seen. For her, he wanted to seem a wise and hard-working man, worthy soon of a wife.

Four

They noticed that creatures frightened her. A chipmunk, tamed by the little girls, sat on Eira’s hand nibbling at the seeds they gave to it. But Claire backed away with a startled look.

“You never seen one before, then, Water Claire?” Bethan asked her. “They not be harmful.”

“You can touch him,” Delwyth suggested. “He don’t mind.”

But Claire shook her head no. She was fearful of the smallest of creatures—a mouse, scurrying across the floor of Alys’s hut, almost caused her to faint—and fascinated in a worried sort of way with birds. She found frogs amusing but strange. And she was completely, utterly terrified of cows. Claire held her breath and looked away when she had to pass the place where a scrawny milk cow, its wrinkled mouth moving as it placidly chewed on the rough grass, was fenced beside the cottage where Tall Andras lived with his parents.

“I must try to learn creatures,” she said to Alys apologetically. “It’s not right to be so fearful. Even the smallest of the children feel at home with the creatures.”

“Mayhap you had a run-in with a creature once.” Alys was in the rocker, knitting with gray wool in the dim, flickering light.

Claire sighed. “I don’t know. But it’s not a feeling of a bad memory. It’s as if I have never seen them before.”

“Fish neither?”

“Fish are familiar,” Claire said slowly. “I think I have known of fish somehow. They don’t frighten me. I like how silvery they look.”

“Nary birds?”

Claire shook her head and shuddered. “Their wings seem so unnatural. I can’t get used to them. Even the littlest ones are strange to me.”

Alys thought, and rocked. Her wooden needles clicked in her gnarled hands. Finally she said, “Lame Einar has a way with birds. I’ll have him catch us one, for a pet.”

“Pet?”

“A plaything. A pretty. He’ll make a cage for it, from twigs.”

Claire cringed at the thought, but agreed. It would be a start to the learning.

One afternoon she stood barefoot on the beach, watching the trio of little girls. Using sticks, they had outlined a house and were furnishing it with debris they found in the sand.

“Here’s my bed!” Bethan announced, and patted an armful of seaweed into a shape.

“And cups in the kitchen!” Eira set five scoop-shaped shells in a row. She lifted one daintily and pretended to drink from it.

Delwyth ran to fetch a branch she saw beside some rocks, and dragged it back. Torn from a nearby tree by the constant wind, it was crowned with a thicket of leaves. “Broom! I found us a broom!” the little girl announced happily, and scraped the sand with it. “Wait. It needs fixing.” Carefully she tugged at a thin side branch, broke it loose, and tossed it aside. “There. Now it’s a proper broom.”

Claire, watching, leaned down and picked up the slender branch that Delwyth had discarded. The sand was damp and she saw her own footprints in it. With the tip of the branch, she poked a round hole in each of her own toeprints, then laughed and scribbled the footprints away with the stick. A gentle surge of seawater moved in silently, smoothed the roughened sand, and receded.

She leaned forward and wrote the first letter of her name.

C.

Then L. And A.

But a foamy inrush of seawater erased the letters.

Claire moved back slightly, farther from the sea’s edge, and began again. CLAIRE, she wrote.

“What be that?” A shadow fell across her letters. It was Bethan, looking down.

“My name.”

The little girl stared at it.

“Would you like to do your name beside it?” Claire offered her the stick.

“How?” she asked.

“Just make the letters.”

“What be letters?”

Claire was startled at first. Then she thought: Oh. They haven’t learned yet. She had a sudden image of herself, learning. Of a teacher, explaining the sounds of letters. There was a place she had gone, a place called school. All children did. But she looked around now, at the cliff and hills and huts, at the sea—she could see the boats bobbing in the distance, and the men leaning in with their nets—and she was uncertain.

“Will you go to school soon?” she asked Bethan.

“What be school?”

She didn’t know how to answer the child. And maybe, she realized, it wasn’t important. Six letters; they made a name. What did it matter? She looked again at the word she had written, then erased it with her own toes, stamped the sand firm, and tossed the stick into a pile of glistening kelp nearby.

Alys had sent Old Benedikt to ask the favor of Lame Einar. Not long after, slow on his ruined feet, the young man made his way laboriously down from his hut on the hillside, carrying the twig cage on his back, with the bird inside.

“Here it be,” he told Alys.

Einar was not one for talking. His failures had made him a recluse, but people remembered the vulnerable boy he had once been. Though he had stolen from his father, they forgave him that; his father had been a harsh and unjust man. That he had climbed out, many admired, for the cliff was steep and jagged and the world beyond unknown; few had the courage that Einar had had. They regretted his failure, but they welcomed his damaged return. Einar, though, had never forgiven himself; he lived in self-imposed shame and stayed mostly silent.

“It sings,” he said. He leaned his two sturdy sticks against Alys’s hut and hung the cage on a tree branch near the entrance. He watched for a moment until the carefully crafted perch inside stopped swaying and the little finch stilled the nervous flutter of its bright-colored wings. Then Lame Einar took up his sticks again; he righted himself between them, for balance, and went slowly away.

The bird was chirping when Claire returned from the beach, carrying her sandals. She stopped in surprise, looking at the cage and the bird within. “It can’t get out, can it?” she asked nervously.

Alys laughed. “Were you to take it in your hand, child, it would tremble in fear. Have you never been near to a wee bird before?”

Claire shook her head no.

“You’ll feed it each day. Seeds, mostly, and some of the bugs from the field.”

“I don’t like the bugs,” Claire whispered.

“It will help when you learn them. Fear dims when you learn things.”

The bird chirped loudly, and Claire jumped. Alys laughed at her again.

Claire took a breath and calmed herself. She went closer and peered into the cage. The bird tilted its head and looked back at her. “It should have a name,” Claire said.

“Name it, then. It be yours.”

“I’ve never named a single thing.”

Alys frowned, and she looked at Claire with her squinted eyes. “Do you know that, then?” she asked.

Claire sighed. “I feel it, that’s all.”

“Naming is hard. Someone named you once.”

Claire looked away. “I suppose,” she said slowly, and then turned her attention again to the cage. “Look! It cleans itself!” She pointed. The bird had raised one wing and pecked fastidiously at its feathers beneath. “Isn’t that a lovely patch of color on his wing?” She hesitated, then asked, “What is it called? I know red. You taught me red from the berries. It’s a pretty red there around his eyes, but what is that bright color on his wing? I can’t think of its name.”

Alys was troubled by this, for she knew by now that the girl was clever, and filled with knowledge of many things. But she seemed lacking in so many ways, and the realm of colors was one. The names of the various hues were one of the first things small children learned. Yet when Alys had sent Claire on a simple errand some days ago, asking her to fetch some jewelweed, which Alys needed to treat a painful poison ivy rash on one of Old Benedikt’s grandsons, Claire had not known how to find the flower that grew in such profusion by the stream. “The bright orange blossoms,” Alys reminded her. “We gathered some the other day.”

“I forget orange,” Claire had said, embarrassed. “We gathered several things that day. What does orange look like?”

And now she could not name the color that decorated the wing of the little singing finch.

“Yellow,” Alys told her. “The same as evening primrose, remember?”

“Yellow,” Claire repeated, learning it. Yellow-wing became the bird’s name.

On a cool foggy morning, she climbed the hill to find Lame Einar and thank him. It had taken a while to accustom herself to the bird, to end her fearfulness around it. But now it hopped to the side of the cage when she brought seeds to it in a little shell dish and waited, head cocked, while she set the dish down. It would have hopped onto her finger, she knew, if she had held it still and waited. But she wasn’t ready for that, or for the feeding of live insects. The little girls took on that task, happy to find beetles and hoppers in the grass and bring them to Yellow-wing.

She found Einar near his hut. He was seated on a flat rock, cleaning a wooden bowl, scrubbing the cracks in the rounded poplar with a rag dipped in fire ash. Nearby, through the fog, she could hear the sheep move in the grass, and an occasional bleat. She approached the young man. She was nervous, not to be with Einar, who was always silent and unknowable, but because of the sounds of the animals.

He was startled to see her, and lowered his eyes to the bowl. Had he heard her coming, he would have fled into the fog and disappeared. But Claire had been silent, appearing without warning from the swirling gray mist, and his maimed feet made it impossible for him to jump and run.

“Good morning,” she said, and he nodded in reply.

“I came to thank you for the bird,” she told him.

“It’s nought but a bird,” he muttered.

Claire stared at him for a moment. A word came to her from nowhere. He’s lonely, she thought. People say he’s angry, and hermitlike, but it’s loneliness that afflicts him.

She looked around, and saw a log nearby. “May I sit down?” she asked politely. He grunted an assent and scraped some more at the spotless bowl in his hands.

“I know it’s just a bird,” she told him, “but you see, I have been afraid of birds. They’re strange to me; I don’t know why. And so the little bird you brought me—I call him Yellow-wing . . .”

She saw his puzzled look and laughed. “I know. It’s just his color. But I’m only learning colors. They’re as strange to me as birds. And so it’s a help, to call him Yellow-wing. I say his name when I put his dish of seeds in the cage. And you know what? He’s singing now. He was afraid at first, but now he sings!”

Einar looked at her. Then he arranged his mouth, gave a small sound as a trial, and then reproduced the sound of the small bright-colored bird, with its trill and fluttering whistle.

Claire listened in delight. “Could you do the songs of other birds?” she asked him. But he ducked his head in embarrassment and didn’t reply. He set the bowl aside and reached for his sticks.

“Sheep need me,” he said brusquely. He rose and moved with his awkward gait into the edge of the foggy meadow. He was no more than a blurred outline when she heard him call back to her. “Greens!” he called. “Not the color. But he needs greens. Willow buds be good, and dandelion!”

Then he was gone, but as she gathered herself to leave, she heard him whistle the song of the bird once again.

Alys and Old Benedikt stood watching the preparations for the marriage of Glenys and Martyn. Friends of the couple had built a kind of bower from supple willow branches and now they were decorating it with blossoms and ferns. Beyond, on tables made of board and set outside for the occasion, the women were arranging food and drink.

“It’s a fine day,” Alys commented, squinting at the cloudless sky.

“I was wed in rain,” Old Benedikt said with a chuckle, “and never noticed a drop of it.”

She smiled at him. “I remember your wedding day,” she said. “And Ailish, all smiles. You must miss her, Ben.”

He nodded. His wife of many years had died from a sudden fever the winter before, with their children and grandchildren watching in sorrow. She was buried now in the village graveyard with a small stone marker marking her place, and room beside her for Old Benedikt when his time came.

“Look there, at Tall Andras, watching the girl,” Old Benedikt said with a chuckle, and pointed. “He’s bent near double with longing for her, isn’t it so?”

They both watched with amusement as the young man’s lovesick gaze followed Claire, who was helping with the flowers. She hardly noticed him.

“She puzzles me, Benedikt.”

“Aye. She’s a mystery. But a splendid one!” While they watched, Claire lifted one of the little girls and helped her weave daisies into the twigs of the bower. The other little ones waited eagerly for their turns. “They follow her like kittens after the mother cat, don’t they?”

“Do you know she fears cats? Even kittens? As if she never see’d such before,” Alys told him.

“And birds, I hear.”

“Lame Einar caught a bird for her, and wove a cage for it. She’s learning to like it now, for it sings nicely. But, Ben—?”

“Aye?”

“I had to tell her the colors of it. She don’t know the names! Yellow, and red: it’s as if they are new to her. And yet she’s clever! Clever as can be! She creates games for the little girls, and helps me with the herbs, but—”

“I never knowed one who couldn’t say the colors. Not even one who is weak in the mind, like Ailish’s nephew, who’s like a young boy though he’s thirty! Even he cries for his blue shirt instead of the green,” Old Benedikt said.

“Not Water Claire. She may long for the blue but don’t know its name. She’s learning now. But she’s like a babe about it.”

“So you’ve got you a wee babe to tend, after all these years without,” he teased her.

He patted her hip through her thick skirt, and she pushed his hand away. “Let me be, you old fool,” she told him fondly.

Five

Tell me about weddings,” Claire asked as she and Alys carried the nutcake they had made to the feast table, where it would be placed with the festive puddings and sweets. “Does everyone have one? Did you?”

Alys laughed. “Not me,” she said. “But most do, when they reach an age, as Martyn and Glenys. When they choose each other, and the parents say aye, then we have the Handfasting. Always in summer, usually at new moon.”

Summer. Claire had learned, already, from Alys that summer is a time of year, the time of sunshine and crops and the birth of young animals. It had been one more thing she had not known.

She waited while Alys rearranged some of the other foods in order to make room. Then she set down their cake and together they decorated its edge with yellow daisies.

The village people were gathering. No one, not even the fishermen, was at work today. Babies perched atop their fathers’ shoulders. Claire saw Tall Andras with his parents, the three of them scrubbed and dressed in their best clothing. She could see that his mother was not well; she leaned on her son, and was flushed with fever, though she smiled and greeted the others.

Bryn waved to Claire. She was holding Bethan’s hand. For once the three little girls were separate, each with their families. Claire could see that beneath her lace-trimmed apron, Bryn’s body had thickened with the coming child. Alys thought the time of danger was past and that this one would survive.

“Oh! What’s that?” Claire asked, startled at a sound. From the path, several young village men approached and the crowd opened to make way for them. One was blowing into a carved flute. Another kept time on a small drum made from an animal skin stretched across a hollowed gourd. The third plucked at strings stretched across a long-necked instrument made of wood. Moving in time with the melody, they entered the circle that had opened to admit them as Claire watched from where she and Alys stood at the edge.

“It’s so lovely! Listen! How they make the sounds go together! I’ve never heard anything like that before!”

Alys frowned. “It’s music, child. Have you never heard music? Have you forgotten it?”

“No, never,” Claire whispered. “I’m quite sure.”

The Handfasting ceremony ended as Martyn and Glenys kissed each other, and the red ribbon that had been wound around them unfurled, loosened, and freed them. The musicians began again, with a louder, rollicking tune, and the villagers cheered and turned to the waiting feast.

Claire stood silent, awed by the music, puzzled by the concept of love, and moved by both the solemnity and the celebration of the occasion. When she turned to look through the noisy, laughing throng for Alys, she suddenly noticed Lame Einar standing alone on a small rise at the edge of the meadow. While she watched, he adjusted the two sticks that supported him, turned, and hobbled slowly away. For a moment she thought of running over to invite him back, to entice him to join in. But her attention was drawn by the music. Never had she heard such an enticing thing as music, she was sure of it! And now the villagers were choosing partners, forming lines, and moving in time to the cheerful melody. Surely Einar would enjoy watching, even if he couldn’t do the quick hopping steps that they all seemed to know. They could watch together. But when she looked back for him, it was too late. He had disappeared into the woods.

Back to daily tasks after the excitement and holiday of the Handfasting, Tall Andras knelt in the field and meticulously tied together the thick branches that would form the body of the mommet. Then, after he had decided on a spot, in the center of the young, sprouting crops, he pushed the main branch into the earth and patted the dirt firmly around its base so that it stood upright without tilting. He dressed it, carefully fitting the wide sleeves of a ragged coat over the two stick arms. He tied a sash around the middle to hold the coat closed, but loosely, so that the breeze would lift and sway the fabric. He stood back and watched with satisfaction as the cloth moved. The ends of the arm branches, extending from the sleeves, looked like beckoning, skeletal hands.

Claire, approaching on her way to the stream, watched with a smile. She understood what he was doing, though she had never seen a mommet before. She stopped, watched, then called to Andras: “Do you have a ribbon? If you added a long ribbon, it would wave in the wind.”

He shook his head.

“I’ll bring you one, if you like,” she suggested, coming closer.

He stood back and looked at his creation. “A ribbon would be good,” he acknowledged, “around the neck.”

Claire laughed. “The neck?” she asked. There was only the gnarled branch end protruding upward from the patched coat.

Andras laughed as well. “I’ll make the head now,” he told her, and showed her the large gourd waiting on the ground. He knelt beside it and with his knife carved a hole at one end. He dug out several inches of the pulpy flesh within, then placed the gourd atop the neck, fitting it down so that it sat firm. Claire could see that it looked, indeed, like a head, and that from a distance the entire mommet would seem a frightening, flapping creature. The crows would surely avoid it and the crops would be protected.

He lifted the yellow gourd off the neck and set it on the ground again. “It needs a face,” he told her.

She sat on the soft earth and watched him begin to carve. First he gouged two circles near each other in the center of the gourd, then scraped at the rind between and below the eyes, to create the impression of a nose.

Impulsively Claire tore some handfuls of grass from the earth and handed them to him. “Hair,” she said.

He laughed and draped the hair over the gourd. It slid away and he looked around. “Wait,” he told her. “I can make it stay.” He left her with the gourd lying on the ground and went over to the edge of the woods. As she watched, he found the pine tree he had in mind, and pulled a length of one supple branch loose. “Oh, aye,” he murmured. “This is good.” He brought it back to where she was sitting and showed her the wetness from the torn end, where the bark glistened. He held it for her to sniff the woodsy pine scent.

“Alys makes a pillow filled with the needles,” she told him.

He nodded. He was smearing the oozing resin on the gourd. “Aye, it soothes the sleep,” he said. “Look now!” He picked up the torn grass and pasted it on the gourd’s head, where it settled in tufty clumps, held tight by the sticky sap. They both laughed as he held it up. “Some mommet!” Andras said with pride.

“Needs a mouth,” Claire reminded him. She pictured a grin on the odd creature.

“Aye, it does.” He bent over it, carving meticulously. She watched as he worked. Now and then he drew back, examined his own efforts, and then leaned forward to correct the shape, to trim the curves. She saw him smooth the mouth edges with his finger. He flicked away some tiny shreds of gourd.

“May I see?” she asked him.

“Wait.” He moved his blade to the expanse of yellow rind above the gouged eyes, and she could see him make three deep rippled cuts across the broad forehead. He looked at it and laughed in delight. “There!” he said. He stood, holding it, and placed it carefully over the wooden neck, easing it down into place.

“There!” he said again proudly, and turned with a grin to see her reaction.

Claire stared. The grotesque face stared back at her. Its forehead was wrinkled by the wide cuts, which made it looked puzzled, and the eyes squinted above the twisted nose. The mouth was a tortured smile, a leer. She caught her breath and felt her heart pound. Andras was laughing. She turned to him, horrified, not knowing why, and cheerfully he twisted his own face into a mimicry of the mommet. He thrust his tongue into his cheek, wrinkled his nose and creased his forehead. He made a chortling sound.

The skewed face, the laughter with it, made something flood into Claire’s memory, surging upward in her like a wave about to break. She had made that face once, and thought it funny. Someone had made it back to her. But why? Who? She pulled herself upward from the place where she had been sitting in the grass so cheerfully a moment before. She felt sick, suddenly, and began to cry.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry—”

Then she turned and ran, sobbing and breathless, down the hillside as Tall Andras stood uncomprehending beside the wretched, ragged stick figure with its bulbous head. High above him, two crows wheeled in the sky and cried out.

Alys had been busy sorting and separating her dried plants when Claire burst through the door, her face wet with tears, and threw herself onto the bed. It was clear that this was not a thwarted romance or a quarrel with a friend, the usual cause for the weeping of young girls. This was raw and deep. The old woman poured steaming water from the kettle over a few pinches of blue vervain and chamomile, then put the mug of herbal tea into Claire’s hands. She watched with concern as the girl sat huddled and shaking in the dim light of the hut.

“Something’s come back, then,” Alys said. “Something cruel.”

Claire nodded. She took a few shuddering breaths and sipped the soothing drink.

“It helps to say it,” Alys suggested.

Claire looked up at her. “I can’t,” she said. “It was so close! It was there, so close! And I can feel it, still, but I can’t grasp what it is.”

“What brung it? Where be you, when it come so close?”

“Over on the hillside, with Andras. I was helping him build a stick figure to frighten the crows away.”

“A mommet.”

“Yes. That’s what he called it.”

“Tall Andras is a good lad. Surely it was nothing he done?”

Claire hesitated. “I don’t think so. I can’t remember, exactly. We were laughing, and then—well, everything changed. I can’t think why.”

“Something brung it. Want I should ask Andras?”

Claire closed her hands around the mug and breathed the tea’s steam. “I don’t know.” She whispered, after a moment, “I feel so sad.”

Alys watched her, and knew that the herbs in the mug would soothe the panic that had afflicted her, that soon she would calm and likely sleep for a bit. But they would not heal her. It would be hard to heal a girl as desperately wounded as this one.

Six

The good-weather days continued. The sun turned the wave tips to sparkling jewels, and the fishermen filled their nets each day with their glistening catch. In Tall Andras’s field the mommet flapped its loose fabric arms and the crows, made timid by it, called out harshly and went to other fields, other crops. The gourd head began to rot in the sun and collapse upon itself, oozing and purple like a bruise. A bold starling swooped and grabbed some of the browning grass that had been its hair. One day it fell sideways into the field. When Claire walked past on her way to gather herbs, she saw only the toppled, ruined remains. The memory it had brought her was no longer there.

Andras’s mother, Eilwen, weakened and no longer left her bed. Alys tended her there, holding her head so that she could sip warm liquid made from chopped wild sunflower roots simmered in spring water. The medicine eased her cough. But it was a comfort, not a cure. “She’ll not live,” Alys told Claire.

Claire had learned about death already in her time here, for they had buried an old fisherman earlier, and she had helped Alys wash and wrap the gaunt body before his sons lifted it into the box they had built. The fisherman’s death had been sudden, though, in his sleep. Now Claire watched, day by day, as Eilwen drifted in her mind, woke less often, and seemed to shrink. Finally, early one evening, with Andras and his father there, her breath slowed and stopped.

The father and son touched her forehead gently as a goodbye and went away.

Alys squeezed cloths that she lifted from the pail of water, handed one to Claire, and together they began to wash the thin body. Clean wrappings were folded nearby, waiting.

“The day they brung you from the sea,” the old woman said, “I washed you like this.”

“Did you think I would die?”

Alys shook her head. “I could see you was strong. You fought me some.” She chuckled softly as she patted Eilwen’s arm dry and laid it back gently on the bed.

“I don’t remember.”

“No, you wasn’t yourself yet. It was your sleep self what fought me.”

“Here.” She handed Claire a dry cloth and together they dried and tidied the dead woman, folding her arms finally across her gaunt chest. Alys brushed her thin hair and they carefully wrapped her. They could hear the two men moving outside, readying the box.

“They’ll be needing a woman here,” Alys said, glancing around the crude hut. The cooking vessels were unwashed and a blanket thrown across a chair was stained and in need of mending.

“Yes,” Claire agreed. “Men don’t tend houses well, do they?”

“Tall Andras is of an age to wed,” Alys said pointedly.

Claire shrugged. “He should, then.”

“It’s you he wants.”

Claire knew it to be true. She blushed. “I’m not of a mind to wed,” she murmured.

Alys didn’t hear, or pretended not to. “He’ll want sons.”

“All men do, I expect.” It was something Claire had observed, in the village. Sons carried on the outside work; they took on the boats and the fields as their fathers grew old.

Alys busied herself with tying the cords that held the wrappings firmly in place around Eilwen’s remains. Claire, silent now, helped her. She thought how proud Eilwen must have once been, to have birthed a strong boy like Andras.

They sat back. Their work was finished. In a moment they would call the men, father and son, to lift the woman into her coffin. The village would gather in the morning to place it in the earth.

“On that day, the day I tended you,” Alys said to Claire, “I saw your wound.”

“Wound?”

“Your belly.”

Claire placed her hand there protectively. She looked at the ground. “I don’t—” she began, then faltered.

“It’s a grievous wound. Someone tended it, stitched it up. There are the marks.”

“I know,” Claire whispered.

“One day it will come back to your mind, like everything else.”

“Perhaps.”

“But I fear this: that you will not be able to give birth. I think it has been taken from you.”

Claire was silent.

Alys leaned forward and turned the flame higher in the oil lamp. It was darkening outside. “There are other ways a woman finds worth,” she said in a firm, knowing voice.

“Yes.”

“Come. We’ll bring the men inside to be with her now.”

They rose and went out into the evening where Tall Andras and his father waited in a light rain, their faces resigned.

In her mind, Claire made a list of what was new to her.

Colors, of course. She was grateful for knowing them now: the red of hollyberries, and the red ribbon of the Handfasting—she marveled at the vibrancy and vigor of it. And she had come to feel bathed in contentment when the sky was blue, as it was on these late-summer days. Sometimes the sea was quiet and blue as well, but most days it churned dark gray-green, with spumes of white blown and dissolved in the air. Claire liked that darkness as well, with its relentless motion and mystery, though she blamed the sea for hiding her past in its depths.

Yellow she loved for its playfulness. Yellow-wing, her little bird, came to her finger now when she poked it between the twigs that formed his cage. He hopped onto it and tilted his head at her with a questioning look. She wondered why she had ever been so frightened of birds.

They were added to her list of newly learned things: birds, and animals of all sorts. She still skirted the cow uneasily when she walked past, but she had become fond of Lame Einar’s sheep, especially the small ones, who frolicked in the tall meadow grass and showed their pink tongues when they bleated in excitement.

Einar told her of wolves, but she had not seen one and did not want to, ever.

She took joy in butterflies and scolded the little girls for catching them. “You’ve ruined it now,” she said, looking sadly at the crumpled spotted wings in Bethan’s outstretched hand. “It deserved to live, and to fly.” Together they buried the dead creature, but later she saw the child chasing another.

She feared bees, and most bugs.

“You’re like a wee child,” Alys said to her, laughing when Claire backed away nervously from a fat beetle on a bush where they were gathering large leaves of goldenseal. Infusion of goldenseal eased the sore throat that sometimes afflicted fishermen after long days in the boats.

“I’ve just never seen them before,” Claire explained, as she had often, of so many things.

Her list included lightning, which astonished her; thunder, which terrified her; and frogs, which made her laugh aloud. A rainbow one morning made her almost faint with delight and surprise.

Seven

Claire joined in the harvesting at the end of summer, and the rejoicing after. The crops were brought in and stored, and in the fields the birds picked at the strewn leavings. Apples were ripening still, but the early ones were picked and pressed into cider.

She could see that the days were shorter now. In summer the children had played barefoot into the evening, chasing one another until their shadows grew long. The men fished until there were stars, and still the sky did not darken until they brought their catch ashore. Now, though, the air turned brisk late in the afternoon. The sun seemed to topple down to the edge of the horizon and colored it crimson there until it was gulped by the sea and gone. The wind rose then, taking the brown leaves in a whirl from the trees, and smoke wafted from the chimneys of cottages as fires were fed. The smoke carried with it the scent of soups and stews: nourishment for chilly nights. Women unraveled the sweaters their children had outgrown. They rolled the yarn and started again with it, forming new patterns, bright stripes, in larger sizes. Nothing was wasted. Boys carved buttons from bone.

Tall Andras gave Claire a fringed shawl that had been his mother’s. Most days were still sunlit and warm, but in the evenings she wrapped the soft shawl around her. Lame Einar, seeing how she tied the ends to fasten it closed, created a clasp from willow twigs that he’d soaked to soften and then twisted into a curled design. Carefully he attached the two pieces to the green shawl and showed her how to fit them into each other and hold the thick fabric tight together.

She noticed one morning, early, that her breath was visible in the cold, clear air. “Like mist,” she said to Alys.

“Steam,” Alys replied.

They were on their way to the cottage at the edge of the woods where Bryn lived with her fisherman husband and their little girl. Bethan had burst into their hut just before daybreak, shivering with the cold because she had forgotten her sweater, and breathless with excitement.

“My mum’s pains have begun and my dad says come because he wants no part in it!”

“Run back, child, and tell her we’ll be there shortly.” Alys spoke in a calm voice while she rose, prodded the fire, and reached for her clothing.

“You’ll come too, won’t you, Water Claire?” Bethan begged. Claire had sat up and yawned.

“I will. Go tell your dad he’s a big baby himself.” Claire knew Bethan’s father, that he was gentle and loving. But men were not good at this.

The little girl giggled. Claire swung her bare feet to the floor and winced at the cold. She reached for the knitted socks that Alys had made for her. “Go now! Scat!” she said, and Bethan, gleeful, left the hut and scampered back along the lane.

Yellow-wing, whose cage had been brought inside at the end of summer, shifted on his perch and chirped. Alys rolled a leaf tightly and slipped it between the bars for him to nibble. Claire finished dressing. She fastened her leather sandals over the warm socks and watched as the old woman gathered things from the shelves in the corner. Suddenly, watching, she shuddered.

“Why do you need a knife?”

Alys placed the knife carefully beside the corked containers of herbal infusions. She rolled them all in a soft leather skin and placed the bundle inside her bag. She added a large stack of clean folded cloths to the bag and pulled its drawstring tight.

“Some say it eases pain to lay a knife beneath the bed.”

“Is it true?”

Alsy shrugged. “Likely not. But if the person thinks it, then the thinking eases the pain.” She wrapped her thick knitted shawl around her and hefted the bag over her shoulder. “And I need the knife for the cord.”

Claire pulled her own shawl tight and fastened it with the willow clasp.

“Bring the lamp,” Alys told her.

Together they hurried along the path. Claire held the lamp high and it made their way easier. But the sky itself was lightening now. The moon was a thin sliver against the gauzy gray of earliest morning. Bryn’s child would be a daylight baby.

They could see when they arrived that Bethan in her excitement had dashed about in the shadowy dawn and wakened her friends. Now all three little girls, still in their sleeping garments, were giggling nervously in the small room where Bryn groaned and twisted on the bed. Alys firmly shooed them back outdoors.

“Don’t come back till the sun is full up. And then you come with your arms filled with flowers from the meadow, to welcome the babe.”

“They’ll find some dried asters still,” she told Claire, “and late goldenrod. And it will keep them out from underfoot.”

The coming baby’s father was nowhere in sight. Alys had told Claire that men were frightened by birthing.

She had watched Lame Einar, though, help his ewes to bear young in early spring. He was both firm and gentle with them, and unafraid. Einar hadn’t minded that she stood watching when she came upon the scene. It was the first time she had ever seen him smile, when he unfolded the damp legs of a newborn and set it wobbling on its feet so that it could nudge its mother for milk.

“They don’t really need me,” he told her gruffly. “They can birth alone unless there’s trouble.”

“But it’s nice you’re there to help,” Claire said.

Einar had shrugged, patted the rump of the nursing ewe, and reached for his sticks to hobble away. Claire watched him for a moment after he turned his back. Then she too walked on.

But that had been months before. The spring lambs were tall now, playful, and thick with wool. Einar was no longer so shy with her. Once he startled her by making a harsh cackling sound, suddenly, and then a series of soft clucks. She looked at him in surprise.

“You asked me once could I do other birds. That’s a pheasant,” he explained.

Then he looked up at something very large, soaring above the sea. He gave a long, hoarse call. “Black-backed gull,” he said.

Now he let her help when he gathered the sheep in for the evening. Together they counted. He had never lost one to wolves, he told her, and was proud of that. He loved the new lambs.

“Wash the knife,” Alys directed her, and her thoughts returned to the cottage, where Bryn gasped and gathered herself now as the child emerged. Claire saw it was a girl. She heard it cry as she turned and dipped the knife into the water that simmered on the fire. The blade was hot when she wiped it carefully dry with a clean cloth.

“Don’t cut Bryn!” she implored suddenly.

Alys frowned at her. “No need to cut the mother,” she said brusquely.

She knotted a string around the pulsing cord. The baby waved a fist in the air and wailed. “Sun’s rising,” Alys said to Bryn. “And you’ve got you a fine girl.” She waited a moment, then reached for the knife that Claire held, took it, and separated the newborn from its mother with a careful cut.

Bryn was watching wearily, and smiling. Suddenly Claire stepped forward without thinking, toward the baby that Alys was wrapping now in a cloth, and cried out, “Don’t take it from her!”

Alys frowned. “Take what? What’s troubling you, girl?”

“Give Bryn her baby!”

Alys looked puzzled. She leaned forward and placed the swaddled infant in Bryn’s arms. “And what did you think I was to do, child? Put it out for the wolves? Of course it goes to its mum. Look there. Wee as she is, she knows what to do.”

Like the lamb wobbling forward to suckle, Bryn’s baby turned its head against its mother’s warm skin and its mouth opened, searching. Claire stared at it. Then she began to sob, and stumbled out of the cottage into the dawn. Behind her, Alys, her face folded into puzzlement and concern, began to replace her birthing tools into the woven bag. The new mother dozed while her tiny daughter nuzzled and sucked. Outside, in the distance, the little girls were moving about in the gradually lightening meadow, their arms filled with flowers. But for Claire, who stood on the path weeping, the sunrise, perhaps all sunrises to come, was ruined by memory and loss.

Eight

Haltingly, pausing to weep, Claire told her remembered story to Alys. Astonished, the old woman asked to examine her scar. Her gnarled hands touched the raised pink flesh and followed the map of it with one finger.

“Aye,” she said, “this is what I saw the day you came, and I knew you’d had a terrible wound. But never did I see until now that it’s the size to remove a child. Imagine: to cut a woman like that! Or a girl! You was just a girl! The pain would have been so fierce. It would have killed you.”

“No,” Claire explained. “I felt nothing when they cut. Before, there was pain—like what Bryn had, with the squeezing of the baby. But when they cut, I felt only pressure. The pushing of the knife. No pain.”

Alys shook her head as if in disbelief. “How could that be, then?”

“There were special medicines. Drugs. They took away pain.”

“White willow brings relief,” Alys murmured. “But not for cutting! We have no herbs for that.”

“I felt nothing.”

“And what of the blood?” Alys again touched the scar. Her finger, its knuckle bent and thickened by age, ran the length of the wound. “I’ve seen wounds like this. A fisherman caught and ripped apart by the gaff. A hunter clawed and torn open by an animal. I’ve been called to tend them. But I can do nought but to soothe and comfort. The blood pulses away and they die from it—from the blood and the pain. They scream from the pain and then weaken as the blood flows. Their eyes die first.” The old woman’s own eyes seemed to look into the distance, thinking of the terrible things she had seen and could not heal.

Claire looked down, herself, at the scar. “I couldn’t see. My eyes were covered.” She shuddered a bit, as the memory of the mask came to her. “But I felt them cut. And you’re right: of course there must have been blood. They had tools, I think, to deal with that. I remember a small sound—”

She thought, and then tried to reproduce it. “Zzzzt! And I smelled a burning smell. I think it . . .”

Alys, puzzled, waited for her to continue.

Claire sighed. “They had something that we don’t have here. Electricity. It’s hard to explain. I think they had an electric tool that burned and sealed the blood vessels. Zzzzt. Zzzzt.”

Alys nodded, as if it made sense to her. “I burn a wound, sometimes, or a snakebite. I use a firestick. To kill the poison. Not for bleeding, though. Not for a huge wound like this one.”

Claire drew her clothing across the scar, covering it, and the two of them sat together in silence, one with her new and troubling memories, the other puzzling over what had happened to the girl, and why.

“I must find him,” Claire whispered, finally.

“Aye. You must.”

“How?”

Alys stayed silent.

She told Bryn. Watching the woman hold and tend her infant one afternoon, Claire confided in her and described the return of the memories. Bryn listened with shock and sorrow. She clutched her own baby tighter as Claire answered her horrified questions. Neither of them was aware that just outside the cottage, beside the door that had been left partly open for fresh autumn air, the little girls, wide-eyed, were listening.

They scampered away to tell others. “A terrible secret,” Bethan called it, enjoying the attention she received as she retold the embellished story. Water Claire had had a baby! Yes, young as she was! No, no husband at all. And they took the baby from her—just stole it away, and she never saw it since!

The secret was murmured throughout the community. Older women lowered their eyes in sympathy; many of them had lost children in cruel ways and they knew what strong, lasting grief came with such a loss. Younger ones, jealous of the pretty stranger, tossed their heads in judgment. No husband! Wanton thing! We suspected something like that! So she was tossed out of where she lived!

Glenys, who had welcomed Claire’s attentions at the handfasting ceremony in early summer, now smoothed her skirt smugly over her newly rounded belly. “I’ll have Alys come to midwife me when my time comes,” she said with a toss of her head, “but I don’t want her.”

Tall Andras, his face set in hard lines, turned away when he saw her.

“Is something wrong?” Claire asked him, puzzled by his cold look. He had always been so friendly.

“Is it true, what they say?”

“Who? And what is it they’re saying?”

“Everyone. That you’ve had a child. And no husband.”

Claire stared at him. The knowledge was still so new to her that it seemed secret. She had yet to think it all through. It was still fragments, some of it, though from describing it to Alys she remembered the birth now, clearly and with horror. But child? She had no sense, yet, of a child. Only something small and newly birthed.

“It was different, where I lived. There weren’t weddings. And yes, I gave birth.” She found herself speaking tersely to him. She was angered. “You can’t understand. I was selected to give birth. It was an honor. I was called Birthmother.”

He raised his chin and looked at her with a kind of contempt. “You live here, now. And you’re stained.”

“Stained? What are you talking about?”

“Women who couple in the field, like animals. They have a stain to them. No one wants them, after.”

Oh. Now she understood what he meant. She had watched the sheep mating. Einar had had to explain it to her, how it created the lambs. He had laughed, finding it strange that she knew nothing of the process.

“That has nothing to do with me,” she told Andras defiantly.

“Or with me,” he said coldly. He turned his back and resumed his stacking of wood. Claire watched for a moment, then continued striding on, but her morning was tainted by the encounter. Later, troubled, she told Alys of it while they were having lunch.

“It’s the way here,” Alys explained. “Foolish, mayhap. But it has always been so. Girls must come to the Handfasting untouched, or pretend to be. Otherwise . . .”

“Otherwise no one wants them?”

Alys shrugged, and chuckled. “People learn to overlook. Sounds to me as if Andras was hopeful to have you. He’ll overlook, with time, if you don’t remind him.”

“Hmmppph.” Claire stood. She fed a piece of spinach to Yellow-wing, who hopped happily back and forth on his perch. Then she scraped the leavings from the plates into the bucket. “I don’t care about Andras. And I never wish to wed. You didn’t,” she pointed out.

Alys grinned. “I was a willful girl,” she said.

“Willful?”

“Some said wild.” Now Alys laughed aloud. “And wanton.”

Claire found that the laughter was making her own anger subside. Looking at Alys, wrinkled and bent, it was hard to imagine her as a willful, wild girl. But in the unrestrained laughter Claire could hear a hint of the carefree creature she must once have been.

The children, curious about what seemed a mystery (for people spoke of it in whispers) but too young to judge her, were open with their questions to Claire. They were on the beach, gathering driftwood to dry for the fireplace. The wind was sharp and snapped at Claire’s skirt.

“Did it grow in your belly, like my mum’s?” Bethan asked.

Claire nodded, resigned to their knowing. She added a bent stick to the pile.

“Were it a boy?” Delwyth’s eyes were wide.

Claire nodded again. “Yes,” she said. “A male.” She startled herself. Why had she called it that? Everyone knew a baby was either a girl, like Bethan’s new sister, or a wee boy. Why had she said that odd word, male, as if she had given birth to a creature of woods or fields?

“Where did it go, then, your male?” Solemn little Eira looked worried. “Who took it?”

Claire smiled to reassure the child. “Someone else needed it,” she explained. “Just as your mum needs these pieces of wood! Let’s drag that big one over here and see if we’re strong enough to break it, shall we?”

“I’m strong!”

“Look at me, how strong I am!”

“As strong as a boy! As a male!”

The children strutted and shouted as they ran about in the wet sand. Claire glanced toward the high bank that bordered the beach and saw Einar watching. He balanced a wooden yoke across his wide shoulders, and two buckets hung level from either side. He was coming from the spring where he got fresh water. With his shoulders bearing the weight, he was able still to use his walking sticks. Now, seeing her watching, he lifted one hand and waved to her.

Claire waved back, and smiled. So, she thought, there’s one young man who doesn’t think me stained. Or is it that I’m now ruined, as he is?

She watched him make his way along the path, his feet dragging, one after the other. Beside her, in the sand, the laughing children imitated Einar, dragging their feet and limping dramatically, and then watching the furrowed ruts they made fill with seawater and smooth over.

Nine

Winter descended suddenly, with bone-chilling cold. The damp, raw wind swept in from the ocean and entered through cracks in the walls of the hut. It made the fire flicker and hiss. Claire wore a thick furred vest that Alys has stitched for her from an animal hide, and warm boots from the same hide, laced with sinew.

She accompanied Alys one morning to Bryn’s cottage, where the baby girl, now named Elen, was swaddled in layers of woven cloth and warmed in her cradle by wrapped stones made hot in the fire. Alys chuckled after listening to the shrill cry of the infant. “Summer babies fare better,” she told Bryn. “But this one sounds to be strong.”

Bryn poured tea into thick mugs. Outside the wind blew, and on the floor near the fire little Bethan, humming tunelessly, sorted acorns into families. Claire excused herself and slipped away.

Outside, she wrapped her shawl tightly over the fur vest and pulled her thick knitted hat down to protect her ears. She started up the hill, following the deserted path as it wound among the wind-tossed trees. No one was about. The cold weather was keeping people indoors. But perhaps, she thought, Einar would be in the meadow, tending his creatures, and would welcome her company. Climbing, she held her mittened hands to her mouth and breathed into them for warmth. Her feet slipped now and then on mud frozen to ice.

It was hard for Claire to understand seasons. Her returning memory had told her nothing of the way the leaves in summer showed their undersides as a storm approached, then withered and dropped when the nights were chill. Now there was the cold, and she could not remember it. She had never had a coat before, or shawl, she was sure of that. And rain! It had been new to her in summer, and now, with the cold, it was mixed with spits of ice, and who was to guess what might follow! Each day came as a surprise, though Alys, realizing, tried to prepare her and explain.

Claire knocked at the door of the wood-slatted shed where Lame Einar lived, but there was no answer. She pushed the door open, peeked in, and saw that the ashes of his fire were still hot; wisps of smoke drifted from the chimney and disappeared with the wind into the gray sky. He would be up in the field, she knew. She closed the door tight, pulled her shawl closer around her, and climbed the path.

She found him rubbing salve into the leg of a sheep that had caught itself in a thorny bush.

“Here—help hold him still, would you? He keeps pulling away.”

Claire wrapped her arms around the neck of the impatient creature and tried to soothe him by murmuring meaningless sounds. “Shhhh, shhhh,” she said, as she had heard Bryn whisper to the baby when she cried. She leaned her head against the matted fleece of the sheep’s neck. It felt like a pillow, though its smell was strong.

“There.” Einar released the leg, and the sheep shook itself and pulled loose from Claire’s grasp. It bounded away through the high, dry grass, and she could hear the nasal bleats of greeting from its flock.

He looked at her and said, “You’re cold.” Claire laughed at him because he had said the obvious. She was shivering, and breathing again into her own cupped, mittened hands. “Come down to my shed,” he told her. He looked out over the flock, saw that they were huddled together, heads hunched low, out of the sleet. Then he went down the path and she followed.

She sat on the heap of skins that he used for sleeping while he poked the ashes into a red glow and then added a thick piece of oak branch. She could feel the warmth expand.

“Tell me why you’ve come out on a foul day like this,” he asked her.

She hesitated, uncertain how he would react. Finally she said carefully, “They tell me you climbed out, once.”

He glanced over, then turned back to the fire and rearranged it a bit, though it seemed to Claire unnecessary. She thought that perhaps he simply needed to look away.

“Aye. I did,” he acknowledged. “Do you want to know the why of it?”

“The how. I want to know the how. I look at the cliff and it looms there, unclimbable.”

Einar sighed. He rose with an effort from where he knelt on the ground, then moved over to sit beside her on the skins. They both stared at the fire.

“I best tell you the why, first, so you understand.”

Claire nodded, knowing she would need to tell him her own why when the time came.

Spatters of sleet tapped against the roof of the shed. But they were warm inside.

“I never knew my mum,” he began. “She died when she birthed me. Alys came, they said, and helped, but I was big and she labored too long, and bled, and she died. It happens sometimes.”

Claire nodded. Alys had told her that it did. She remembered how interested Alys had been, hearing her tell her own story, of the cutting. “It be different here,” Alys had said.

“My father was a fisherman, and he was out with the boats. It was this time of year, with the cold and the wind. He likely had a bad time of it too. But he was a hard man, my father. Strong. Used to the weather.”

He shrugged. “As I am,” he added.

“But you’re not hard, Einar.”

“Hardened to the weather, I am. I must be, for the creatures.”

She knew he meant his flock of sheep.

“I don’t feel the cold as you do,” he told her.

“You’ve always been here. You’ve learned to live with it.”

They sat silently for a moment. Then he began again to talk. “They say he came in from the sea that evening, and emptied his nets and tied his boat. All who saw him fell silent, for no one wanted to be the one to tell him that his son was birthed healthy but his wife was already stiffening and being readied for a coffin.”

He looked away. Then he said, “They say he had wanted a son. But not the one what took his wife.”

Outside, a branch broke in the wind, skittered across the dooryard of his shed, and slammed against the wall. Claire could picture the fisherman arriving home in weather just like this to find a squalling infant and a wife turned blue and lost.

“It was Alys kept him from flinging me into the fire. Others came and held him down. He roared into the night, they say, cursing all flesh and the wind and the gods, even cursing the sea that be his livelihood.

“He was a hard man to start, they say. My mum, she softened him a bit, but when she was gone he turned to stone. And the stone had an edge to it, sharpened against me, for I had killed her.”

“But it wasn’t—” Claire began, then stopped. He hadn’t heard her.

“Others raised me. Village women. Then, when I was old enough, he tooken me back. Said it was time for me to pay for what I done.”

“What did that mean, ‘old enough’? How old were you?”

He thought. “Six years, mayhap? My front teeth had fallen out.”

She shuddered at the thought of a little boy expected to atone for his mother’s death.

“I didn’t know him. It was as if a stranger took me. I went to his cottage, for they said I must, and that night he gave me food and drink, and a blanket to wrap around me as I slept on a pile of straw. In the morning he kicked me awake before it was light and told me he would make a fisherman of me, for I owed him.

“After that, every day, until I was growed, I went with him to the boat and on the boat out onto the sea. He never spoke a soft word. Never told me about the kinds of leaves, or creatures, or pointed to the stars in the sky. Never sang a song to me, or held my hand. Just kicked me across the deck if I be clumsy, laughed when I be twisted in the ropes and sliding pure froze in the water that washed aboard. Slapped me in the head when the sea was rough and I puked over the side. He hoped I would wash overboard and drown. He told me that.

“He made me climb the mast to untangle the lines and he laughed when my hands slid from the salty wood and I fell onto the deck. When I broke my arm he kept me on the sea all day, hauling nets, then sent me to Alys that night and told her to have it fixed by morning or he’d break the other.”

“You should have killed him,” Claire said in a low voice.

He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “I had already killed my mother.”

He stood suddenly, leaning on his stick. He went to the door, cracked it open, and breathed the wind. She was afraid he was going to go out into the bitter cold, that telling her his past had now forced him to punish himself in some way. But after a moment he pulled the door tightly closed and came back. He sat down again, leaning his stick against the wall, and took several deep breaths.

“I growed very strong,” he said.

“I know.”

“I growed taller than my father and so strong, I could have picked him up and flung him into the sea. But I never thought to do that. I stayed silent. I obeyed him. I cooked for him like a wife and washed his clothes and was a wife in other ways too terrible to mention. I made myself into stone. I willed myself deaf when he cursed me and blind to the look of hatred in his eyes. I waited.”

“Waited for what?”

“To be old enough, strong enough, brave enough, to leave. To climb out.”

“What went wrong?” she asked him.

“Naught in the climbing out. I trained for it. I was ready. I knew I could do it and I did. It went wrong after.” Einar moved one damaged foot slightly, staring at it. His tone was bitter. Then it changed and became more gentle, and curious. “Why do you be asking about this?”

“I must try,” Claire told him. “I must try to climb out.”

He stared at her. “No woman ever done so,” he said.

“I must. I have a child out there. A son. I must find him.”

She had known he wouldn’t be scornful, for that was not his nature. She had thought, though, that he might laugh at the impossibility of her plan. But he did not. And she realized that he already knew of the child, that he had heard the talk of it.

He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Push against this.” He extended his arm toward her, his hand held out upright at if to shove something away.

“Like this?” Claire held her hand up against his.

He nodded. “Push.”

She did, summoning her strength to try to move his hand, to bend his arm. It was firm. Rigid. Immobile. Her own arm trembled with her effort. Finally she gave up. Her hand dropped back into her lap. It ached.

Einar nodded. “You’re strong, at least in the arms. Can you climb?”

Claire pictured the vertical rock cliff that hung over the village and hid the sun for half the day. She shook her head. “I climb the path up to the meadow where you keep the sheep. You’ve seen me do it often enough. And sometimes, gathering herbs, I go up into the woods near the waterfall. I never get tired. And it’s steep there. But I know that’s not what you mean.”

“You must start to harden yourself. I’ll show you. It won’t be easy. You must want it.”

“I do want it,” Claire said. Her voice broke. “I want him.”

Einar paused, and thought, then said, “It be better, I think, to climb out in search of something, instead of hating what you’re leaving.

“It will be a long time,” he told her, “to make you ready.”

“I know.”

“Not days or weeks,” he said.

“I know.”

“Mayhap it will take years,” he told her. “For me, it was years.”

“Years?”

He nodded.

“How do I start?” Claire asked.

Ten

Einar says I must do this every single day. It strengthens my belly, where the scar is. Watch.”

Alys glanced over from the fire, where she was stirring a pot of onion soup. She watched for a moment as Claire, lying on the floor of the hut, wedged her feet under a slab of rock that jutted from the base of the wall, and then lifted the upper half of her body and held herself at a slant, taut, for a moment before she lowered herself slowly back down and took a breath.

“Surely you didn’t show that lad your scar?”

“Of course not. But I told him of it.” Claire bit her lip, held her breath, and raised herself once again. Then down, slowly. And again.

“There,” she said, gasping, after a few moments. “That’s ten. He told me to do it ten times every day.”

“Here. Have some soup and bread now,” Alys told her. “I’ll start bottling some strengthening brews for you, as well.” She glanced up at the dried herbs hanging from the beams that supported the hut’s roof. Claire could hear her murmuring the names—white willow, nettle, meadowsweet, goldenseal—and knew she was pondering what combinations to create.

She had told Alys of her plan. No one else knew.

Claire thought of Alys as the calmest person she knew, the person who had seen the worst of things over her long life and was not surprised or distressed by any of it anymore. Claire had watched her stitch the flesh and wrap an astringent poultice around the leg of a small child gashed by a fall on the slippery rocks, soothing both the terrified mother and the screaming toddler at the same time with her reassuring voice. She had seen her, quiet and commanding, attend the most difficult births, with the babies upside down or sideways and the mum begging for death and the dad puking in the dooryard. Claire had been there at deaths—Andras’s mother from fever and cough; a fisherman with his skull crushed by a broken mast; a young boy racked by fits from the day of his birth, finally at five dead with foam on his lips and his eyes rolled back to white. Alys had tended them, tended their families, weighted the eyelids and folded the arms, then returned to the hut to wash her tools, cook supper, and wait for the next frantic villager who would come to the door begging for help.

She had never seemed alarmed—until the day Einar and Claire told her that Claire must climb out.

“That canna be,” she had said loudly, and began to rock back and forth in her chair as if to try to soothe a deep pain. “Oh, no. Canna! You’ll die!”

She turned to Claire fiercely. “You’ll die on the cliff. You’ll fall and be broken to pieces! I’ve seen the others who was! And look at him, who was once fleet and sure-footed—look at him now, ruined by climbing out! I’m sorry, Einar, you’re a good lad and I loved your mum, but you’re bloody ruined by that mountain and I won’t have you do it to my girl!”

“It was not the mountain ruined me, Alys,” Einar said firmly. Claire, listening, was startled by the sudden sureness of him. He had always been so shy and halting in his speech. But now he spoke with certainty to Alys. “I strengthened myself for it and did it. I climbed out. It was after. And I’ll teach her of that. But for now I’ll make her strong. That’s how we’re starting, and we need you to help, Alys, for she wants her son and must have a way to find him.”

“Boat,” Alys wailed. “She can go forth on the sea, surely, if she must go.”

“No. Not by sea. I won’t.” As much as she feared the cliff and the climbing she must learn to do, Claire feared the sea more.

“It’s winter now,” Alys said to them, weakening a bit. “Mayhap in spring we can toughen her up. The sun, and air. That’ll be good for strength.”

Einar laughed. “We’ll start now, Alys,” he said, “and spring will come before we know it. It always does.”

It did. Spring came. Through all the months of winter she had, each day, lain on the hut floor, put her hands behind her head, and raised herself. Her scarred abdomen had become tight and smooth, and she no longer breathed hard at the effort.

She told Einar, “I’m ready.”

He laughed. They were standing beside the door of the hut, and he told her to run up the hillside path, up to the waterfall, and back down to where he stood.

There was a fine rain falling, as there had been all week. The path was slick with spring mud. Claire made a face.

“It’s too slippery.”

“It’s smooth and dry, if you think on it compared to the mountain.”

“Yes, well—”

“Run up it. Grip with your feet.”

Claire looked down at her own feet, encased in thick wool socks under her coarse leather sandals.

“Take them off,” Einar said.

Claire sighed and obeyed. She pulled her sandals off, and the socks. The ground was very cold, still. Spring was young and the drizzle was chilly. She wiggled her toes into the cold, wet earth, to get the grip, and then began to run.

The path steepened partway up and she slipped, scraping her knee on a rock. She righted herself and now her hands were thick with mud and a red trickle of blood patterned her leg. Catching her breath, she eyed the wet path above; then she took a breath and continued. Run, Einar had said. She had climbed this path often before, but always slowly, placing her feet carefully. Now she ran. She tried to dig her toes into the ground, but they slid and she fell again and righted herself again. By the time she reached the top of the hill and stood by the rushing waterfall, she found herself in tears. She was coated in mud, shaking with cold, and her knee was swollen and sore. From where she stood, she could see him below, looking up, watching her. She hoped he couldn’t see her crying.

“Now down!” she heard him call.

Sliding partway, grasping tree roots to keep from falling, she stumbled down the treacherous path to the bottom. She wiped her tearstained face with muddy hands and hurried to where Einar was waiting.

“Good,” he told her. “Now do it again.”

Each day through the summer she ran the hill path. On fine days, the mist of the falls made rainbows, and she began to smile when she reached that place, instead of weeping as she had the first time. It began to feel not easy, but doable. She began to come down grinning and proud.

Einar grinned back at her. “You’re growing strong,” he said, then added, “for a girl.”

She glanced at him and saw that he was teasing her. His look was fond. He turned away quickly and tried to hide the fondness, but Claire knew. She had seen him look that way at a half-grown lamb prancing in the meadow on a midsummer afternoon, admiring its agile charm. She had seen him look that way at her, and knew there was a longing to his gaze.

When she felt she had mastered the path, he made it harder. He tied her hands together so that she couldn’t use them to steady herself. When the spring moisture had dried, the path became gritty and treacherous in a different way. She couldn’t grip it with her toes. When she fell, bruising her shoulder because she couldn’t break the fall with her tethered hands, he taunted her. When she wept, he ignored her. She dried her tears and ran.

One afternoon Bryn, her baby in a sling on her chest, stopped by the hut to get a remedy for a spider bite on her ankle. Alys and Claire looked at the hot, swollen sore. “Comfrey root oil,” Alys told her. “I have it here. Sit while I heat it.”

Bryn handed little Elen to Claire. “I’ll take her outside,” Claire said, and she carried the sturdy, curly-headed girl to the dooryard to show her some black-eyed Susans in bloom.

Einar appeared. He came every day now, if Claire didn’t run to the sheep meadow and meet him there.

“It’s Bryn’s baby,” she told him. “Isn’t she sweet?” She handed a picked flower to Elen, who grasped it in a fist and waved it in the air.

“Run with her,” Einar said.

Claire was startled, but she laughed. Then, holding the baby, she ran around the small dooryard. Elen waved her arms in delight.

“Let me feel her weight.” Einar took the baby from Claire. She could see that he had no experience with a human infant, though he was sure and facile with lambs. She watched as with his large hands under her, Einar assessed how heavy Elen was.

“You must start running with weight,” he said, and handed the baby back. “I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

The next day he was back with a crude leather sack half filled with rocks. He tied it to Claire’s back and told her to run the hill path. She did so, and arrived panting at the waterfall. She was tempted to throw a few of the rocks into the rushing torrent, to ease the burden for the run back down. But she didn’t. She ran with the weight, and then ran the path again, and found that her breathing changed, to accommodate the heaviness. After a few runs, the longer breaths she needed came naturally, and it was as if she had always carried it. Alys told her that it was the way of women, to tote a newborn and then adjust as it grew until by the time the child was plump and heavy, the weight seemed naught. Einar left a pile of rocks beside the base of the path and told her to add one more to the sack each day.

Her legs grew muscled and firm. She showed him, one day, how strong and sure they had become. He felt where she showed him, pressing his large hand against the taut, smooth skin above her ankle, and nodded. Then he left his hand there, encircling her leg, and they looked at each other for a moment before he took it away. She felt his fondness again, and her own for him, and the futility of it for them both. She could not stay here.

One morning Einar set a thick log on end. It reached to her knee.

“Step up on that,” he said.

She reached for his hand, needing it for support, but he backed away. Claire checked the log to be certain it was firm on the ground. Then she measured the height with her eyes, raised one leg up, placed it on the top of the log, shifted her weight, and picked up her other foot. But she lost her balance and fell back.

“Try again.”

All afternoon she stepped onto and down from the log. At first she held her arms wide, using them for balance. Then Einar approached with the coarse rope he had used to restrain her hands on the steep path.

“Wait,” she told him. “I don’t need my arms tied.” Firmly she held her own hands at her sides. Wobbling at first, she tested herself again and again until without moving her arms she could maintain her balance as she mounted the log.

“Good,” he said. The next day he brought a higher, narrower log.

Winter came. Outdoors, she ran and climbed on ice. He began to teach her to use a rope, to knot it and twirl it and fling it so that it caught on a rock or a branch. At first it caught things at random. Then, after a bit, she found she could aim with the noose of the rope, that she could choose a log or a bush and catch it precisely on most of her attempts. Then he made the noose smaller. He directed her to capture smaller things: a seedling pine reaching upward from a crevice; a stone balanced on a tree stump. He took away the thick, coarse rope and gave her a thin, woven cord that whistled when she spun it out into the cold air and snapped a twig with its tiny noose.

Inside the hut, in a corner that Alys had cleared for her, she walked back and forth on a piece of rope stretched taut between two posts, her toes gripping the rope, her breath even, her eyes focused, her arms at first stretched for balance, and then, as spring approached, her hands at her side and her movement steady and controlled. She walked the rope forward and backward. She stood on it still as a post: on one leg, then the other. Slowly she bent one knee, lowered herself, remained there poised, then rose again.

Yellow-wing twittered and pranced on his perch, excited as he watched her. Alys, watching, held her breath and then gasped at each new move.

But Claire was calm. She felt strong. She felt ready.

“Now?” she asked Einar.

Einar shook his head. “Next, we begin to strengthen your arms,” he said.

By the following spring, Bryn’s baby, Elen, was sturdy and walking. Bryn was expecting another and hoped for a boy. Bethan, Delwyth, and Eira were tall now, with long legs and secrets that made them whisper and giggle.

Most of the village had lost interest in Claire. She was no longer new and mysterious. The scandal of her child was forgotten; there had been more recent disgraces—a woman who took up with her sister’s husband, a fisherman who was caught stealing from his own brother. The villagers took little note of Claire’s odd new hobby; the hill paths were not visible, and Alys’s hut was separate.

She continued her everyday chores, helping with the gathering of plants, accompanying Alys to births and deaths. Sometimes Alys sent her alone to tend a simple cough or fever or rash. The old woman was increasingly bent over, and her walking now was slow. Her eyesight was dimmed. She needed more rest.

Claire teased her gently and told her that she should train to climb out. “Look how strong Einar has made me!” she said, and held out her bare arm, tightening the muscles with pride.

Each evening, after she had cleaned up the hut from dinner and while Alys sat knitting in her rocker, Claire took up her position, lying on her side on a mat near the wall, and breathed deeply. Then, legs straight, she raised her body on one arm, held herself there, hovering, and then eased herself slowly down. Again and again. First one arm. Then the other.

Her sack of rocks was so heavy now that an ordinary person groaned, trying to lift it. But for Claire it was easy. She swung it onto her back each day and wore it while she tended the garden or gathered the herbs. She ran up and down the hill path with the sack on her back and another in her arms. Steep, rutted places that had once made her stumble and slip were now familiar and easy.

He had her run the path at night. Things felt different in the dark. She trained her feet and hands to know the shapes of things and her mind to sense when she neared an edge and must back away lest she fall.

He wanted to blindfold her so that she could practice the dark in daytime. But she said no.

“I’ll do it at night, even in the middle of the night, when there’s no moon and when it’s bitter cold. But I can’t have something tied over my eyes. It’s like being on the sea. It’s a fearsome memory that I can’t—”

She turned away and couldn’t finish. But he seemed to understand. “You must learn the dark, though,” he told her. “Part of the climbing out will be in dark. You’ll start before the sun comes up.”

“Why?”

“It’s too long a climb to do it all in daylight. If you wait and go at dawn, at sunup, then the dark part will come near the top. You’ll be making your way up and around places where a mistake will bring death on you. I’ll teach you to feel every bit with your feet, but even so you’ll need your eyes as you near the top.”

Together they looked up at the shadowy cliff. Claire had to lean back to see the top. Mist swirled there and she could see hawks circling.

He had said he would teach her to feel with her feet, and after some time she became aware, amused by it, that even her toes were supple now. With astonishment she realized that she could perceive the smallest of pebbles—and pick them up, if need be, with individual toes. She could grasp a twig between the third and fourth toe of her left foot, or carefully feel her way around the sharp edge of a flat rock by her right big toe, which was as sensitive now as a fingertip.

She told this to Einar with delight. “Imagine that!” she said. “Toes!” He nodded in agreement but looked sad.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him.

But he turned away and didn’t reply. Guiltily she realized it had been cruel to be so gleeful over the strength and agility of her feet to someone who had lost his own.

Eleven

Twins! Two boys with bright red hair. Bryn, exhausted as she was, lay laughing at the surprise and the sight of them. Claire held one in each arm and then laughed herself as she realized she was raising and lowering them slightly, the same way Einar had her raise and lower heavy rocks to strengthen her forearms.

It was almost winter again. She moved Yellow-wing’s cage indoors. It had hung all summer and into autumn from a tree branch in the dooryard. Now, in the warmth, he fluffed his wings and chirped. Bethan was there, and Elen. Their mother needed quiet to tend her two new boys, and sent the girls off to amuse themselves. Now little Elen, squatting on the floor, twisted twigs into a bird shape and pretended she had made a wife for Yellow-wing. Bethan was busily helping Alys sort some dried herbs to be packed into bags and stored. Claire, watching, realized that Alys was beginning to teach the young girl in the same way that she had taught Claire for these past years. The village would need someone to take Alys’s place. It was clear that it could not be Claire.

She wrapped her hands around the thick branch that Einar had peeled and set firmly in place above the door. She lifted herself up until her chin was level with the peeled wood. She hung poised there and counted to ten, then lowered herself slowly. Doing this still hurt. That meant she needed it. She must do this each day until it stopped hurting. Then, she knew, Einar would tell her to put on her backpack filled with rocks and begin doing it again.

Briefly, on a day when she was exhausted, she thought of Einar with frustration, of how demanding he was, how relentlessly he made her do the exercises again and again. Then she thought of how he watched her, assessing and admiring her strength, and she knew that his gaze was also that of someone who loved her.

Tall Andras had married in midsummer, his new wife a fresh-faced, quick-smiling young girl named Maren. Standing at the ceremony, Claire felt no sadness; she had never wanted to be his wife. But once he had hoped for it, and now he had moved on and seemed happy. She thought sadly of Einar, alone in his hillside hut, and knew that a part of life was passing both of them by.

“Soon?” she asked Einar, after she showed him how she could hold herself raised on the branch with her arms taut and unshaking, even while wearing the sack of rocks at its heaviest. He ignored her question.

“One arm now,” he said. While he watched, she struggled to lift herself with just one. He wanted her arms to be equally strong on both sides, as her legs now were. On either leg she could hop up onto a rock slippery with damp moss and stand balanced there with the other tucked up like a waterbird. After rain she could slide, standing on one foot, down the steep muddy path and stop herself at any point by pressure on her heel or toes.

She could hold a pebble on her raised foot and then move it by concentrating on it until it was between two toes, then under. From there she could move it from toe to toe, under and over. It made little Elen laugh uproariously to watch and then try the same feat with her own chubby toes.

“Why do I need to spend time learning foolish tricks?” Claire asked Einar. “This seems a waste.”

“It won’t be. It’s important. You’ll see.”

She was eager to go. She had waited such a long time.

But she had come to trust Einar, his wisdom and caring, deeply. So she sighed and nodded.

In the winter she slept beside Alys. When the fire died late one night, with wind howling outside, the old woman shivered and Claire embraced her, trying to send warmth from her own body into the frail limbs that could no longer hold on to their own heat.

“You’re a good girl,” Alys murmured. “Your own mum must miss you fierce.”

Claire was startled. When she tried, in response to Alys’s words, to think of her mother, there was little that came forth. Parents. Yes. She had had parents. She could remember their faces, and could even recall the sound of their voices. But there was little else.

“No,” she told Alys. “I don’t think she loved me.”

Alys turned in the bed and through the dim light of the last embers that glowed in the fireplace, Claire could see her bright eyes, open in surprise. “How could that be, child?”

Claire chuckled and hugged her. “I’m not a child anymore, Alys. Maybe I was when you found me. I was a young girl, then. But so much time has passed, Alys. I’m a woman now.”

“To me you’re a child, still. And a mum always loves her child.”

“It should be so, shouldn’t it? But something stood in the way of it. I think it was a—well, they called them pills. The mothers took pills.”

“Pills?”

“Like a potion.”

“Ah.” That was something Alys understood. “But a potion is meant to fix an ill.”

Claire yawned. She was achy and exhausted.

“My people—” (“My people”? What did that mean? She didn’t really know) “They thought that it fixed a lot of ills, not to have feelings like love.”

“Fools,” Alys muttered. Now she yawned too. “You loved your boy, though. That’s why you’re soon to climb out.”

Claire closed her eyes and patted the old woman’s back. “I did,” she said. “I loved my boy. I still do.”

Twelve

In late spring, Tall Andras had a plump newborn son, and there were lambs prancing in the upper meadow, their soft fleece warm in the changed, gentler weather. Early wildflowers were in bloom, and lavender butterflies with lacy-patterned wings darted from one to the next. Bryn’s twin boys grinned and showed two teeth apiece. The fishermen folded freshly knotted nets they had mended in winter while their wives, beside them at the fire, made the sweaters they would wear on their boats.

Even the wind seemed new. It wasn’t the same brutal wind that had ripped the roof thatch and swirled the snow. Now it pulled the warm scent of brine-washed sea urchins, mussels, and kelp from the rocks and carried it gently across the beach and up the hill. It lifted Claire’s long curls as she knelt and filled a basket with nettles. The rigid stems and heart-shaped leaves were covered with stiff hairs that were painful to touch, but she was wearing the special protective gloves Alys had made. The plant would be a valuable pain reliever for Old Benedikt, who was suffering from gout.

“Don’t touch,” she warned Bethan, who had come with her and wanted to help. “It stings. You gather the elder bark, over there. Your mum needs it for your brothers.”

Bethan peeled bits of the bark and added it to the basket. The twins were fussy from teething.

“When I leave, you’ll be in charge of the gathering, then. Alys will make gloves for you. You must be careful with these nettles.”

Bethan hung her head.

“Do you think you can’t do it? You’ve learned so much,” Claire reassured her.

“I can do it. But I don’t want you to leave.”

“Ah, Bethy.” Claire hugged the slender girl. “You know why I must go.”

“To find your baby.” Bethan sighed. “Yes, I know.”

“Not a baby anymore. He’s a boy now. If I don’t go soon to find him, he’ll be a man!”

“I fear for you, Claire.” Bethan’s voice was low.

“Why is that? You know how strong I am. Look!” Claire reached up with one arm and grasped a limb of the elder tree. She raised herself until she balanced, unwavering, from the one muscled arm. Then, slowly, she lowered herself back to the ground. “Not even your pa can do that, can he?”

Bethan smiled slightly. “No. And Pa’s getting fat, too, Ma says.”

“You mustn’t fear for me, then. You can see that I’m strong, and swift, and . . .”

“Smart, and sly, and . . .” Bethan giggled. It was a game they often played, with the sounds of words.

“And silly!”

“And sleepy!”

“And slugbucket!”

“Swatbottom!”

As it always did, their word game dissolved into nonsense and they laughed as they carried the basket back down the hill.

Time passed quickly now. The seasons flowed into one another and Claire was no longer surprised as the changes came. Like the other villagers, she bundled herself against the increasing cold as each winter approached, and welcomed each new spring. The growth of the children made her aware of time passing. Bethan and her companions were no longer giggling, exuberant children; they were becoming taller, quieter, preparing for womanhood to come. Elen, no longer a baby, was the small, mischievous one now, playing the imaginative games that her sister once had. The redheaded twin boys scuffled and scampered together while Bryn, their mother, fretted over their misbehavior and laughed at their antics.

Each spring the snow melted and Claire took Yellow-wing’s cage outside to hang it once again from the tree. Each fall, when the wind swept in from the sea and the leaves fell rustling on the ground, she brought her little companion into the cottage once again.

“How long will he live?” she asked Einar one day when she was feeding the bird. Suddenly she was aware that each life had a beginning and an end.

“Birds have a long life. He’ll be here to keep Alys company when you be gone.”

Claire glanced at him. He had not mentioned it in a long time, the fact of her leaving. He tested her strength, still, and kept her working at it, but he had not spoken of the climbing out for many months. It had been six years now since the day she had been carried in from the sea, and five since the morning that Elen’s birth returned the memory of her son to her. Somewhere he would be a half-grown boy: running, shouting, playing.

Einar saw her questioning look.

“Soon,” he told her.

With summer approaching, plants coming into flower, and Alys in need of more help as her strength began to ebb, there was a great deal to do. The daily exercise had long been part of Claire’s routine. She rose before dawn each day and lifted sacks weighted with stones many times with each arm before she put the kettle over the fire. Then, while she waited for the water to boil for tea, she practiced the lifting of her legs, and the raising of her upper body as she lay flat. She could now do these things with great ease. It made her laugh to remember how difficult they had been when she started. Now she tied heavy rocks to her ankles and wrists but still performed the familiar motions without effort.

She cleaned Yellow-wing’s cage as she did each morning. It had been raining for some days, but now the rain seemed to have ended; it was a simple cloudy spring morning. She carried the cage outside and hung it from the willow tree beside the hut. She whistled and chirped back at the bird, who was excited at being outdoors. Then she heard a familiar answering whistle and turned to greet Einar, who was approaching from the meadow path.

“Alys baked bread yesterday,” she told him cheerfully. “And she made extra. We have a loaf ready for you.”

“Look at the sky,” Einar said.

She did. Above the looming cliff, the pale wadded clouds reminded her of Einar’s sheep when, after the snowmelt, they still huddled for warmth but with heads down moved across the meadow nibbling at new shoots. But somehow she knew that wasn’t what he meant.

“What?”

“There’s sun behind. The rain’s done for a while.”

Those who tended stock, like Einar, or who farmed, like Andras, or all of the village fishermen—they knew the sky. Claire nodded cheerfully at what he said. “Good. I can do the washing and hang it out on the bushes.”

“No,” Einar said. “No more washing. It’s time to climb out.”

Thirteen

There were still stars visible in the night sky. A sliver of spring moon was low, just above the quiet-moving sea. In the meadow, the huddled sheep were silent. The only sound was the rush of water from the falls above, through the woods to the side.

They stood there together. Then Claire said, “I’m sorry for what happened to you.”

“Aye. I know.”

He had told her, at last, how he had been damaged. It was worse than she could have imagined. But she knew she must not think of it now. When she reached the top would be the time. She would have to plan, then, and what he had revealed to her would be part of her planning. But for now she must concentrate only on the climb.

“He’ll be there at the top, do you think?”

“Not at first. You’ll wait there and he’ll come. Don’t think on it now.”

“But I will know him?”

“Aye. You will.”

“Do you think I’ll make it, Einar?”

“You will.” He laughed and touched her cheek. “I’ve given you what’s been in my mind for all these years, since I climbed out. Every night since then I’ve climbed out again. I’ve felt again each rock, each bit of moss, each twig and hollow and cleft and turn: at night, when other men are mending their nets or sharpening their tools or making love to their women—I’ve been remembering the climbing. I have a map in my mind and I’ve given it to you and you’ll be safe.”

He chuckled and hugged her. “You must. If you don’t, I’ll be made a fool of, for I was the one what made you strong! Let me see your pack now, to make it tight against you.”

Claire knelt on the path at the base of the cliff while Einar leaned his walking sticks against the rock wall and adjusted the pack on her back.

“Knife?” he asked her.

She showed him how it was firmly knotted onto the cord that hung around her neck.

“Rope?”

It was coiled neatly and wrapped around her shoulder.

“The water gourd’s in your pack. Don’t try to reach it when you’re on the rock, even if you thirst fierce. There are places where you can stop and rest. Ledges, they’re called. If you climb steady you’ll reach the first one at midday. You can stop to drink there.”

“Yes, I know. You told me.”

“What’s this?” He was feeling her pack. “Down by the water gourd, with the gloves?”

“Alys put that in. Herb salve for healing.”

“Aye, that’s good. Mayhap when you use the rope, you’ll burn your hands, even with the gloves. If you slip on the rope, it pulls against your skin. But don’t let go.”

“I won’t. You know I won’t.”

“Don’t put on the gloves lessen you use the rope. You need to feel with your fingers.”

“Einar?”

“What?”

She showed him. “Alys made this. You can’t see it because it’s too dark, but feel.”

She handed him the flat, round object and waited while he felt it.

“It’s just an ordinary rock. But Alys sewed a piece of cloth around it. It’s bright red. She made it from the woolen hat I wore last winter.”

“Whyever?”

“When I get to the top? You told me there’s a very steep place just before. The place I must be so careful . . .”

“Aye, the place with the rock steps. Don’t look down.”

“No, I won’t. I’ll do it just the way you told me, feeling for each step, being so careful, not looking down, not being gleeful because it’s the top.”

“What, then?”

“When I finish climbing all those steps and am at the top, and feel my feet in the solid earth? Then I’ll fling this rock out into the air and down.”

“The sun will be setting.”

“Yes. I’ll fling my rock out into the sunset. You look tomorrow. Look on the ground down here for the bright red. Then you’ll know that I did it. That I climbed out.”

“Aye. I’ll look. It’ll be a sign.”

He touched her cheek and held his hand there tenderly for a moment. “I will miss you, Water Claire,” he said.

“I will never forget you, Fierce Einar,” she replied.

They both smiled at the long-ago names. Then he kissed her, turned away, and reached for his sticks. She would not see him again. It was time for her to start.

The base of the cliff was large boulders, some of them slippery with damp moss on their shadowed sides. They were easy for her to climb; she had practiced here occasionally, after dark. So her feet (bare, though her sandals were in her pack for later) knew the feel and shape of them. But it would be too easy to dismiss the dangers even of this familiar beginning place. A slip on the moss, a misplaced step, a turned ankle, and her mission would end before it began. So she reminded herself to be vigilant. She focused on each move, placing each foot meticulously, feeling the surface with her toes, assessing the texture, shifting her weight before she took the next step. Once she jostled a small rock in passing and sent a shower of stones clattering down. She scolded herself for that. It was a small misjudgment and caused no harm. But she could not afford a single mistake this day.

Einar had told her to think of nothing during the climb but the climb itself. But now and then, during this early section that she could maneuver with ease, she found her thoughts straying from the cliff. If only, the voice in her mind whispered. What if.

If only I had taken the baby that day. What if I had brought my little son here, and he could have grown up with Einar teaching him about the birds, and the lambs . . .

He would have died in the sea. She shuddered, thinking of it.

What if Einar had not tried to climb out? What if he had stayed whole? Then he and I could go together, and find my son, and . . .

She willed her thoughts to stop. Concentrate, she told herself. Concentrate only on the cliff. On the climb.

There were plants here, in places where wind-borne seeds had dropped into the rocky crevices and been nourished by melted snow, sprouting now in this early spring, their stems reaching up. By daybreak she would be able, perhaps, to see them move as they sought the sun. Now, in the dark, she could only feel them there, tendrils brushing against her bare legs. She tried not to trample their fragile growth.

Ah. Here. This was why Einar had told her not to let her thoughts wander. Here was the place he had described, where suddenly, in this massed section of boulders, was a rift, a deep gap in the rocks, a place where she must jump to the next foothold. He knew it would still be dark when she reached it.

“Why don’t we go there now, in daylight, just for practice?” she had asked him. “Then I’ll know exactly the length of the jump, and—Oh.” She caught herself, realizing that it would be impossible for him. He struggled each day, making his way with difficulty down from the sheep pasture in order to teach and help her. He could not scramble up this mass of uneven rocks.

But he had helped her to create the practice place. He measured the distance and height; they built the shapes from mud and let it harden. She jumped it again and again. It was not difficult. She was to leap from the top of a jagged boulder across the gap to a flat granite surface. He had her do it repeatedly on moonless nights, so that she could not see, and she began to feel the distance so accurately that her feet found the same landing place every time.

“You’ll come to a place where you must squeeze betwixt two rocks as high as your shoulder. Matched. Same size, like Bryn’s boys,” he had told her. “When you get yourself through—mind you don’t catch your pack in the squeeze—then you go upward to the top of the next rock. It slants up, and there’s a sharp edge you’ll feel. That’s where you plant yourself, on that edge, and jump outward and down.”

It was just as he had described. The twin rocks were as high as her chin, and the space between them narrow. Carefully she used her hands and felt the surface all the way down each one, to make sure there would be no rough places to scrape and injure her as she squeezed herself between them in the dark. Then, arching her back to accommodate the lumpy pack—it would be a disaster should her water gourd be crushed—she slid through.

The next rock was what she expected, a sharp upward slant with jagged outcroppings. She mounted it inch by inch, avoiding the daggerlike places that might gash her soles. She used her trained toes like fingers, feeling the way. It was slow going because she took such care. It was what he had taught her to do. Finally she reached the top of the slant, the sharp edge where he had instructed her to plant her feet for the jump. She balanced there, took a deep breath, recalled in her mind the feel of the distance she must cover, then made the leap into darkness with certainty. She landed on the flat granite, balanced perfectly. It had been her first challenge, really, and a small one. But even the small ones could be disastrous if they went wrong, and it was satisfying to have it behind her. She took her water gourd from the pack, sipped, and rested there for a moment, thinking through the next part of the climb. On the horizon, looking out across the sea, she could see a thin pink line of dawn emerge.

Fourteen

Midday. The sun was directly overhead now. Claire could see, below her, that the tops of the trees were moving slightly. So there was a bit of a breeze. But it didn’t reach here. She wiped sweat from her forehead and pushed her damp hair back. She retied the cord that held it bunched at her neck, then wiped her sweaty hands carefully on the woven cloth of her garment. She could not afford the least slip of her hand on the rock face of the cliff. Earlier, farther down, she might have recovered from a falter or stumble, might even have bound up a twisted ankle and continued on. But here, now, an instant of missed footing or a lost grip on a handhold would mean certain death. She blew on her hands and dried them again.

She was balanced now on a narrow ledge. Einar had told her she would reach this place at midday and it would be safe to stop here and drink from her gourd. She had done so already, once, at dawn, on the lower rocks, when it was still easy to stand and rearrange her pack. Here it was much more difficult. The hours of learning balance were helping her now. Turned sideways on the ledge that was no wider than her two feet side by side, she wriggled the pack around so that she could reach in and grasp the gourd. She held it carefully with both hands while she drank, then replaced it and withdrew the gloves from the pack. She would need them next.

If she had needed her arms for balance on this precarious perch, she would not have been able to drink. But her body needed the water, and he had prepared her for this. After she moved the pack again to its place between her shoulders, she stood with her legs steady and firm and pulled a glove onto each hand. Then slowly she uncoiled the rope.

It was amazing, really, that having made this climb only once—then down again, so perhaps that counted as twice; but he was injured then, and could hardly have been memorizing the ledges and grasping places—Einar had been able to recreate it for Claire. She imagined him alone in his hut, all those years, making the climb again in his mind, creating the map of it night after night.

Here you must stop and look carefully ahead and slightly up, for the next hold.

At this place there is loose rock. It deceives. Do not place your foot on the ledge here. It won’t hold.

A gull has nested here. Feel under the nest, through the twigs. There’s a place to grasp.

Use the rope here.

Feel with your toes now.

Don’t look down.

She was now at the place where he had said to use the rope. She must find the spot up and ahead where a gnarled tree jutted from a slice in the rock face. There would be a small ledge beneath it. Between here, where she stood balanced on this ledge, and the one below the tree, was nothing she could grip or hold. So she must capture the tree with the noose of her rope and use it to get across the wide expanse of vertical rock.

She formed and knotted the noose. Across and above, she saw the stunted tree. She measured it with her eyes, to know how large the noose should be. Einar had said it may have grown in the years since he had done this. She might have to make a large noose, he had told her, to whirl it over the crooked branches, then tighten it around the twisted trunk.

But she could see from here that it had not grown at all. Instead, it was blackened, and one of the branches hung crooked and dead, split from the trunk. Lightning, Claire thought. It has been struck by lightning.

She tried to see where the roots emerged from the rock. Were they split as well? Would they hold? But they were hidden from her sight by a thick knob on the trunk itself.

He had warned her not to look down here. She was tempted to do so, in order to know what would happen if the tree failed her, if it broke from her weight and she fell. But she could hear his voice: Think only on the climb. Think on what you control.

She could not control the tree, or its blackened, split trunk. She could not control the strength of the gnarled roots that held it to the cliff.

But he had taught her how to control her body: her arms, her hands, her fingers, her feet and legs. And with them she could control the rope. She let it out, looping between her gloved hands, until it seemed the length was right. Then she began to twirl the noose. She had practiced this with Einar so often.

Now. She sent it loose and the loops unwound between her gloves as the rope shot out like a snake she had once seen unwind itself in pursuit of a mouse frozen in terror. The snake had killed the mouse in a split second. Claire’s aim was just as accurate, but she had made the noose too small. It caught the end of the tree but didn’t encircle it entirely; it was caught in the Y of a small forked branch.

She jerked at the rope and to her relief the twig on which it was caught snapped and the rope fell loose. She brought it in, hand over hand, and coiled it again. She remade the noose, slightly larger this time, and looped it for a second time between her gloved hands.

She called back the image of the snake: its eyes, its aim, the swift accuracy of its strike. One more time she twirled the rope and sent it out. This time, snakelike in its precision, it encircled the tree.

Claire tightened the noose, pulling it in close around the trunk by its base near the rock wall. Then, still balanced on the tiny ledge where she stood, she knotted the rope around her own waist. Her next move must be to leave the ledge, to steady herself with the taut rope and walk herself across the expanse of vertical veined granite, feeling for tiny protrusions to grasp with her bare toes. If the tree uprooted and fell, she would fall with it and die.

Think only on the task. On the climb.

She reached out with a foot, pressed it into the wall, and anchored it there. She tightened her grip on the rope and lifted her second foot from the ledge. For a breathless moment she dangled there in space. Then she placed her foot on the wall and steadied herself. The tree was holding. She moved her first foot an inch, then another. The tree still held. She tightened the rope, moved her second foot, and then the first again. She took in more rope through her gloved palms as she moved herself slowly across.

When at last she reached the small ledge below the tree and felt her feet firmly in place there, she took a deep breath. From here she would go upward though a diagonal crevice, but there would be footholds—she could see the first ones just above her—and at the top, another resting place. With difficulty she pulled the rope loose from the tree and rewound it. There was no way to return her gloves to her pack here on this tiny precarious place, so she fixed them under the rope on her shoulder. Then she reached up for the first wedge of rock and lifted herself by one arm into the crevice.

It was cooler here in the shadows. She realized she was getting tired. And it was only early afternoon. There was still a long way to go.

It took Claire longer than she had expected to make her way through the narrow shadowed tunnel that the crevice had formed. It was not life-threatening, as the rope-assisted passage across the cliff face had been. There was no sheer drop here. She was moving upward at a slant between two walls of rock. It was cool, which helped, for it had been very hot on the cliff face, and the sun had made it hard to see at times, shimmering as it did on the granite. Here, it was hard to see for the opposite reason: the shadowy darkness that made it cool. But it was like the night climbing at the bottom. She did it by feel.

The chill had also made it wet. Snowmelt had seeped into the rock tunnel, and the small opening had not allowed the sun in to evaporate the water. So the rock walls were damp and slippery. Twice Claire’s fingers slid loose from their holds and she went backwards, sliding down into the space she had just climbed through. She wiped her hands firmly again on her clothing, but the fabric too was now soaked through. Finally she thought to put on the gloves that she had wedged under her coiled rope. But when she pulled at them, there was only one. The other glove had slipped free and fallen someplace. For a moment she despaired. Then she remembered what Einar had told her: When something went wrong—and it’s sure that something will, he had said—you stopped to think, then found a way around it.

She lay at a slant in the tunnel, holding herself there with her legs taut against the walls, and thought. Then she put the remaining glove on her right hand, turned, grasped the next handhold, the one she had slipped from, and held herself there. The glove made it easier. It was thick and coarse. Even damp, it held fast. So she was secure for the moment. She worked her legs up an inch at a time, on either side, until they held her.

Then slowly, carefully, she took the glove off, put it on her other hand, and reached up farther for the next handhold. She grabbed, held on, and began again to inch her legs up. In the darkness she felt the wall with her ungloved hand, trying to find the next holding place; when she had found it, she carefully switched the glove again so she could hold fast. It was painstakingly slow, but she was moving upward instead of sliding down. Far up and ahead she could see the sunny opening where she would emerge back onto the side of the cliff. This, she remembered, was where she would find a large nest. She was to reach under the thick twiggy construction for a place to grasp. From there she would move onto a series of outcroppings that formed something almost like steps.

“Nest. Steps. Nest. Steps.” She began to murmur the two words, giving them a sort of rhythm that helped her move upward and forward. It gave her something to focus on as she continued the agonizingly slow ascent between the dark, damp walls.

Fifteen

Emerging from the tunneled cleft in the cliff wall, Claire was once again faced with the sheer drop of it, the certain death if she were to fall. Just in front of her, she was reassured to see the large nest that Einar had told her she would find. She caught her breath, then stretched forward and pulled loose some dried seaweed that formed part of its construction. She used it to dry her perspiring hands, then tucked it into her sleeve.

Reach under the nest, he had told her. There’s a place to grab on to, there.

She began to follow his instructions, leaning against the cliff toward the nest. Nest. Then steps.

The attack was swift, painful, and without warning. From behind and above, something huge swooped and stabbed her viciously behind her ear. She could feel the blood flow down her neck.

She retreated with a gasp back into the tunnel, supporting herself with her feet pressed against the side walls. She held the wad of seaweed against her wound but could feel the blood pulsing.

Immediately she understood what she was facing. Einar had made the climb in winter. The nest had been empty then. Now there must be new chicks. Yes. She listened and could hear the tiny squawking cries. Peering out, she could see the shadow of the parent gull, circling.

The neck of her shirt was wet with it, but the flow of blood gradually eased. Tentatively she lifted the homemade bandage. Good. The wound was only oozing. The sharp pain had subsided. She knew that she would be bruised and sore later, but that was not a concern now. Her urgent need was to figure out how to get past the nest, using its important handhold, and to the steplike rock protrusions that would be the means of her final ascent to the top.

After testing her legs and feet against the walls to be certain her perch was secure and she wouldn’t slip back down into the tunnel, Claire reached back into her pack and took out her water gourd. She drank deeply. Then she remembered the healing salves that Alys had placed in the bottom of the pack. If she returned the gourd, she wouldn’t be able to reach the medicine. But she had no place to put the water container. She shook it, and realized there was little water remaining. Finally, knowing there was a risk in this, she gulped the remaining liquid and dropped the empty gourd into the tunnel she had just climbed through. She could hear its single hollow thud against the wall as it fell, and then silence.

Now she was able to reach into the pack. First she removed her sandals, the laces of which were tied together. She hung them around her neck and removed the container of salve. It opened easily, and she smeared the healing paste thickly on her wound. She returned the small clay pot, and the wad of bloody seaweed, to the pack, which now dangled, near empty, from her shoulders.

She felt ready to try again. The shadow of the gull had stopped passing over the opening. She hoped it had soared to the sea and wouldn’t return until it had a beak full of fish for its young. She would be fast. She planned it in her mind. She would lean from the opening, throw herself across the steep rock, and make a quick grasp of the hold beneath the nest. From there she had only to pull herself across quickly and to find the first step on the other side. He had told her it was quite close. Easy to reach. She thought it through.

One. Move quickly out of the mouth of the tunnel.

Two. Reach with her left hand, arm stretched across the rock, under the nest and grab the handhold firmly.

Three. Push with her legs. Holding on with the one hand (how grateful she was now for all those months of arm strength exercises!), move across the cliff side. Feel with her toes for small ledges; they would help.

Four. Find the first step and reach for it with her right hand. Then she could move her left arm away from the nest and go beyond the place where the gull would see her as a threat.

Time to start. From her brief glimpse of the sky when she had tried to reach the nest before she was attacked, she guessed that it was now very late in the day. She must do this quickly. Once she passed this danger, the end was in sight and she could reach it before darkness.

Go!

Claire hoisted herself up until she was kneeling at the lip of the tunnel. She reached across with her left arm quickly, into the debris that formed the thick base of the nest. She found the knobby handhold there and grasped it. The squawking from the chicks became louder. They were frantic with fear.

Holding tightly with her left hand, feeling the strength in her arm, which would now briefly be her only support, she planted her feet firmly to push off and propel herself across the rock.

From the sky, its black wings folded tightly against it, the parent gull, summoned by its young, dove at her. She could see its pink legs folded against the white underparts, and the red spot at the tip of its razor-sharp yellow bill. But it was just a split second. The gull speared her arm, ripped at it, wrenched it loose from its hold. Claire screamed and fell back into the tunnel, instinctively using her feet once again to wedge herself against its walls.

She was bleeding badly. She could see the bone of her arm exposed by the huge gash the bird had made when it tore at her with its beak.

She leaned her head as low as possible and took deep, shuddering breaths. If she fainted, she would slide all the way back down the tunnel that it had taken her several hours to climb.

She would not allow herself to faint.

She would not allow herself to be killed by a bird.

It came to her what she must do.

She removed the container of salve again from her pack, opened it, and applied it thickly to the gaping slice in her flesh. She used the salve as a paste to compress the wadded seaweed against the wound. Still it bled. The little pot was empty now and she let it drop, hearing it fall as the water gourd had. She reached into the pack again and found nothing remaining there but the red-covered rock intended as a signal when she reached the top. She held it between her teeth while she used her knife to cut through the fabric of the pack itself and made a strip of the leather. Then she placed the flat rock over the seaweed and held it fast there with the leather strip wrapped tightly around her injured arm. She tested it, moving her arm in several ways, and the dressing stayed firm. Then she dropped the ruined pack down into the tunnel and it disappeared into the darkness.

Next she moved up to the top opening of the tunnel. The gull was circling, waiting. Claire ignored it. She uncoiled the rope that she had been carrying looped around her shoulder. She made a noose.

Then once again she planned what she was about to do. She did it in her mind, rehearsed it: this motion, then that. She knew she must be very, very fast. Another successful attack from the black-backed gull would bring about her death. She could not let that happen.

When she was ready, she thought: Now. She lifted her upper body from the tunnel lip, spun the noose, and let the rope fly. It was just a short distance, and her aim was accurate. She lassoed the nest, tightened the noose, and pulled. It was startlingly heavy for something made of twigs, seaweed, and grass. But it crumpled, folded upon itself, and she ripped it from the rock, flinging it outward into the air. She watched it, and the chicks, falling for a moment, and the enormous gull swooping toward it and shrieking.

Then she lifted herself, reached across, grabbed the now visible handhold with her uninjured arm, and pulled herself triumphantly across the cliff face and to the steps that would lead her to the top.

Sixteen

Claire lay panting upon the solid earth. It was dark now. The attack of the gull had consumed precious time, and when she reached the steps that would be the final climb, dusk had come. He had said “Don’t look down” because this very last section, although it was made relatively easy in its climb because of the odd outcroppings that formed footholds, was sheer in its vertical drop. It could have been terrifying to look down and realize the distance that a fall would be. To lose your grip out of terror after such a dangerous and difficult day, to fall at the very end of it—that was what Einar feared. But she rose and looked down now from the edge at the top and saw nothing but darkness. Above her, the sky was filled with stars.

She felt the wound on her neck. It was encrusted with dried blood and very sore, but she thought it was not a serious wound; she had seen worse on children who had tumbled on rocks. Her arm was a greater concern. Gingerly she untied the tight leather strip and let it fall away. The flat rock was stuck to the seaweed, and she pried it loose carefully. Its red covering had been meant as a sign that she was safe. She wondered if Einar would be able to see that it was stained with her blood as well. She held it to her lips briefly, trying to impart a message, a thank-you, a goodbye; then she threw it as hard as she could out into the night beyond the cliff.

She left the seaweed on the throbbing gash and retied the leather strip around it, using her teeth and her right hand. Then she put on her sandals. She was to wait here, Einar had said, for dawn. At dawn the man would come, a strange man wearing a black cloak. He was the one who would take her to her son. Einar did not know how. He only knew that the man had special powers. He came to people who needed help, and offered himself.

Claire was to say yes to the man. There would be a price. She must pay it, Einar said. There would be no choice. To decline the man would bring terrible punishment upon her. Einar knew. The man had approached him, assessed how desperately cold he was after the climb, seen that his toes were white with frostbite, and offered—for a price they would agree upon—to provide him with warmth, comfort, and transportation to whatever his destination might be. It was tempting. But Einar was both willful and proud. He had said no.

“I don’t need you,” he had said. “I’m strong. I climbed out alone.”

The man had offered again. “One more chance,” he said. “The price will be something you can afford, I assure you. A fair trade.” But Einar, suddenly mistrustful, had again said no. Without warning he had found himself on the ground, struck down and weakened by a mysterious power summoned by the man. He lay there unable to move, watching in horror while the man reached under his cloak, withdrew a gleaming hatchet, and chopped off half of his right foot. Then the left.

This was the person Claire was to wait for and say yes to.

She moved carefully away from the cliff’s edge, feeling her way in the dark to a mossy patch beside some bushes. She arranged herself there and fell into an exhausted sleep. When he came, it was morning, and she was still sleeping. He touched her arm and she woke.

“Exquisite eyes,” he said when she opened them. Claire blinked. She stared at him. He was not what she had expected. He was ordinary. Somehow she had thought he would be powerful in appearance. Large. Frightening. Instead, he was narrow-shouldered and thin, with a sallow complexion and neatly trimmed dark hair. And for such a desolate place—she looked around and saw nothing but a barren landscape—he was oddly dressed, in a fashion that was unfamiliar to her. Behind the cloak that Einar had described she could see that he wore a tightly fitted dark suit with sharp creases in the trousers. On his feet were highly polished shoes of a fine leather. There were gloves on his hands, not knitted gloves such as those she was accustomed to wearing in winter, or the coarse gloves that had helped her grip the rope as she climbed. The man’s black gloves were of a thin, silky fabric and molded to fit his slender fingers.

The gloved hands frightened her. He was reaching for her arm, and Claire didn’t want to be touched by those sinuous, silk-encased fingers. She shrank back and rubbed her eyes (“exquisite eyes”? What did that mean?), then rose without his help and stood.

He moved back slightly, facing her. Then he bowed, and his lipless mouth stretched into a mirthless smile. “Your name, I believe, is Claire,” he said. “And perhaps my presence comes as a surprise? Allow me—”

She interrupted him. “No. I was told you would be here.” She could tell that the interruption annoyed him. But she felt vulnerable and humiliated, standing there in her shredded clothing, bleeding from wounds and in need of his help. She wanted to assert herself in some way.

“Indeed. I am here at your service, prepared to offer a fulfillment of your wishes, at a price to be negotiated to our mutual satisfaction.”

Claire drew herself up. “I understand that,” she replied, and could see him stiffen with annoyance again. He wanted her to be weak, and needy. She swore to herself that she would not be. “You realize,” she went on, “that I have nothing of value to give to you.”

“Shall we let me be the judge of that?” He spoke now in a threatening whisper.

“If you wish,” Claire said.

“Let us begin, then. Let us commence. Let us undertake to establish what it is that you hope to achieve or acquire, what it is that I may provide to you for this yet-to-be-determined price.”

She could feel her resolve weaken, and her voice faltered as she told him. “I have a son,” she said. “I want to find my son.”

“A son! How sweet. Maternal love is such a delicious trait. So you don’t want riches, or romance, but simply . . . your son?” The way he said the word, hissing it, sneering it, made her feel sick.

“I was told that you could help me.”

“You have been informed correctly. Accurately and precisely. But! We must agree on the price to be paid. The trade, do you see? A son in return for—”

She made her voice as firm as she could. “I have nothing. You can see that. I was hoping—”

To her horror he reached forward and grasped a thick handful of Claire’s long hair. She flinched.

“What is this, then? You have beautiful hair. Luxuriant tresses, I would say. Sweet-smelling despite your recent ordeal. Do you call this nothing?”

He put his face into her hair and inhaled. His breath was foul-smelling, and Claire willed herself not to step back in disgust. He was twisting the hair he held and hurting her, but she stood her ground. Was that what he wanted? Just her hair? He was welcome to it. It was dirty and tangled and she would be glad to free herself of it, Claire thought.

But he opened his gloved hand, released the handful of curls, and stood back to look at her with his slitted, close-set eyes. Her first thought on meeting him had been: ordinary. Now she saw that he was not ordinary at all but darkly sinister. It was not just his breath that smelled. Suddenly he was enveloped in a rancid aroma so thick that it was almost foglike. His words seemed to ooze from his lipless mouth.

“Hardly a fair trade, is it? A head full of coppery curls in return for a living boy? A son?” Had she imagined that his tongue darted in and out, like that of a snake, when he hissed the word?

“No,” Claire agreed. “It doesn’t seem an equal trade. But as I told you, I have nothing.”

“Nothing is such a pathetic word, isn’t it? But then, you are pathetic. Your clothes are rags and you have a pustulous scab on your neck. Still . . .” He hesitated. “My calling, my mission, my motivation and my very existence, is to create trades. This for that! Reciprocity!”

The tongue flickered again as he drew out the word “reciprocity.” Claire shuddered but maintained her composure.

“So you want your boy. Your son. Tell me his name.”

“I’m sorry—I’m not certain. My memory has been damaged. I think he was called Babe.”

“Babe?” His voice was contemptuous. Claire felt as if she were failing a test.

“Wait!” she said. “Maybe it was Abe! It was so long ago. It might have been Abe!”

“Abe, Babe . . .” The man’s body swayed as he repeated the words in a singsong voice. Then he fell silent, moved close to her, leaned forward, and whispered harshly. “I offer you this trade. I make the offer only once. Take it or leave it. Ready?”

Dreading what he was to say, Claire nodded. She had no choice.

He grabbed her neck with his eerily smooth gloved hand, pressing into her wound so that pain sliced through her, and drew her face close to his. She could smell his foul breath again. “I want your youth,” he said harshly into her ear, and his warm saliva sprayed across her cheek.

“Trade?” he murmured, still holding her in his awful embrace.

“Yes,” Claire whispered.

“Say it.”

“Trade,” she said loudly.

“Done.” He released her then and shoved her away from him. When he turned and walked away, she understood that she was to follow. Surprisingly, she found it difficult to walk. Her legs were weak. She couldn’t straighten her body easily. Had it been only twenty-four hours before that she had leapt from rock to rock, had climbed and grasped and pulled herself up the sheer cliff? Now she was shuffling and bent, and it was hard to catch her breath. She struggled to keep up with the man, who was striding quickly ahead. Her hair fell forward over her face, and when she reached up to smooth it back, she saw that her hand had changed, had become veiny and spotted; and she saw, too, that the loosened hair was no longer the thick red-gold curls he had admired a few minutes before. Now it was a sparse handful of coarse gray.

He paused, looked back, and smirked at her confusion. “Get a move on, you old hag,” he said. “And by the way . . .”

He watched her contemptuously as she made her way, shuffling around a boulder in the path. “Your son’s name is Gabe,” he said.

“And mine? My name,” he added, with a superior and hostile smile, “is Trademaster.”