by day and tangled again in the night for warmth. Nothing existed, it seemed, beyond the plain; its blanched earth, its vast silence, ringed the tiny island upon the hill like an eternally frozen sea.
Nairn, who regarded seasons with a lover’s eye, watched winter’s changing moods, its astonishing expressions, and learned to write its ancient words: fire and ice, breath and death, dark, night, end. The full moon hanging so clearly among the frozen stars that it seemed to take on dimensions was a word in itself, he thought; it spoke a silent mystery that was somehow connected to the list of patterns lengthening daily under his nib. The glittering path of its light across the dead white plain turned to music in his head; he fashioned its fiery white brilliance with his fingers, played it back to the moon.
He went into the kitchen one morning and found, instead of the tall, calm beauty stirring the porridge, someone darker, slighter, with a tumble of untidy hair and eyes, when she glanced toward him, of a light, startling gray beneath level black brows. She filled a bowl for him briskly without explaining herself.
“Where is Odelet?” he asked, ladling bites into his mouth as he stood there, the way he was used to since they had become friends.
“Upstairs,” was the laconic answer, meaning: in the room with the great hearth and the tables where the more civilized students were eating.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Muire.” She took a poker to the fire under the cauldron with a great deal of energy, until the listless flame leaped to embrace all the wood it could reach. “Salix’s granddaughter. She sent me up here to help out.”
He nodded. Odelet, of the fairer climes in east Belden, suffered in the cold; her eyes and nostrils had been red-rimmed for weeks, and she had begun to make bullfrog noises, coughing in the night.
“Good. Do you know how to cook?”
Muire smiled thinly, as though he had asked if she knew how to gut a fish or milk a cow or pluck a hen or any other of a hundred things any idiot knew. “I can cook,” she said. He stood there chewing absently, watching her as she shook a lump of dough from a bowl, dropped it onto a patch of flour on the table, and pummeled it with her fingers until it lay round and plump as a cushion. She took a knife to it, slashed it delicately with one long line across its surface and a shorter line to each side of that, three twigs, he realized slowly, in the ancient pattern for “bread.”
“Do you know what that means?” he asked abruptly. “Those lines?”
She considered them, then him, her dark brows peaked. “My grandmother always does that,” she explained. “To me, it means ‘bread.’ ”
What other magic words had traveled down from ancient days to her? he wondered. Or to Salix? He took to visiting the kitchen when he had a moment, doing the odd task for Muire: bringing in firewood, scrubbing out the cauldron, hauling in water from the frigid well. He left her messages: a twig-word in a dusting of flour on the table, in a spill of gravy. A few she noticed and understood; others she swept up without question with her cloth. Declan, he knew, would have been appalled at him scattering secrets everywhere. But what the bard didn’t know he didn’t have to think about, and how would he find out anyway?
“How do you know these things?” Muire asked him, after he carved the twiglet-pattern for “willow” on top of the butter in the crock. “Salix puts signs like that in her jars and boxes. I thought she made them up for herself because she can’t write.”
“They’re very old,” he answered absently, his mind already traveling down the hill ahead of him. “I wonder where she learned them. I’d like to see your grandmother’s signs.”
Muire paused in the midst of chopping the pile of carrots and parsnips he had brought up from the root cellar. She pushed hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, said simply, “Follow me home, then, whenever you want. She won’t mind.” She resumed her quick, vigorous strokes with the cleaver, running down a foot of carrot in a breath, while Nairn eyed her silently, curiously. Her eyes had been lowered as she spoke, and she didn’t look back at him now, though she must have felt his swift attention. Another message, maybe, in the complex language of the body. Or maybe not.
He plucked a bite of carrot out of the wake of the flashing blade. “I will,” he said.
He did, a few days later, after supper on an evening so clear that stars and the half-moon hanging above the village shone luminous and upside down, like a migrant school of glittering fish, in the black waters of the Stirl.
Salix was a rangy, muscular woman with a cascade of white curls and eyes as dark as whortleberries. Her cottage by the river smelled oddly of smoke, rotting eggs, and lavender when they walked in. She laughed as she stirred the mass in her cauldron, and they reeled back out, pushing their weeping faces into the cold again to drag at air that burned like fire and gave them no relief.
“It’s a good poultice for wounds,” she said. “Graf Dix missed his chopping stump and came close to cutting off his foot with his ax this morning. I’m making a great pot of it for him. Nairn, isn’t it? You were scaring the wolves away from my granddaughter on her way home?”
“Something like that,” Nairn agreed.
“He wanted to see your pots, Gran,” Muire said, untying her cloak. “He’s learning your signs.”
The spoon spiraling through the morass in the cauldron briefly stopped. “Is he now?”
“He says they’re very old words. You never told me that.”
“You never asked. They’re just some odd things passed down from my grandmother.” The spoon was moving again; Salix’s eyes, no more expressive than the dark face of the moon, considered Nairn. “And who might be teaching you? Surely not the bard who came with the barbarian king? Why would he have paid any attention at all to such distant past?”
“The stones,” Nairn told her. “He saw that writing everywhere on the standing stones across the kingdoms.” He gazed back at her, feeling something flow out of her to meet him midway in the flickering lights and shadows of her cottage. “You know,” he breathed, scarcely hearing himself. “You know what they are.”
Her face, the skin clinging so to her bones that it seemed ageless, softened into reminiscence. “Once. Once maybe, when I was your age, I caught a glimpse inside them. What they truly mean underneath what they say they are. But my gran died, and there was no one else to teach me.”
“But what are they?” Muire asked bewilderedly. “If they’re not what they mean? I never knew they meant anything at all but what you called them: ‘comfrey’ and ‘mandrake’ and such.”
“That’s all they are to me now,” Salix said, “those ancient words.” She gave the spoon a turn or two silently, her eyes going back to Nairn. They smiled faintly; she added softly, “I can feel them in you, wanting to speak. Isn’t that strange?”
“Yes,” he said breathlessly. “How do I—”
“I have no idea. But that bard knows, or he wouldn’t be teaching it to you.” She lifted the spoon, rapped it against the iron rim. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know that, either. Come and let me know, will you, when you find out?” He nodded wordlessly. “You’d best go back up now; the wild things are out tonight, hunting under the moon.” She chuckled. “Though they’ll give you a wide berth when they catch a whiff of you. Muire, make him a brand to light his way.”
She slipped out with him, for another clean breath, she said, as she handed him the torch. But the air between them spoke, brittle as it was, and then her smile did, in the firelight. He wondered, as he bent to catch her kiss, what pattern of twigs that lovely word might make.
When he climbed back up the hill, he found the snow around the school churned by wagon wheels and horses. The broad room the students used both as refectory and study was full of wealthy travelers and guards dripping at the hearth. A young man with Odelet’s grace and coloring stood at the hearth, talking earnestly to Declan. The students around them softened their playing so they could hear the news. Nairn, taking off his cloak and watching Odelet come from her chamber wrapped head to heel in a great quilt, realized what they had come for.
“I sent for Odelet’s brother,” Declan explained to the students. “Her health is frail; she needs to be cared for at home.”
Her wan smile, in a face as pallid as eggshell but for her raw nose, seemed genuinely grateful. Nairn bade farewell to her reluctantly the next day, for the band of courtiers, guards, and hunters wanted to get back across the plain before the storms returned.
“Perhaps you’ll come to play in Estmere someday,” she told Nairn. “I hope so.”
He gazed mutely at her lovely face, felt his suddenly heavy heart overladen with wishes, promises, resolves. He saw himself on a fine white horse, riding beside King Oroh to her father’s castle, trumpets sounding, doors
