This year, however, Karlavi and his bailiffs were much preoccupied with a new dam across the Oulu. The old one had broken last spring, after a winter of unusually heavy snowfall, and 2000 hectares of bottom land were drowned. The engineers at Yuvaskula, the only city on Vaynamo, had developed a new construction process well adapted to such situations. Karlavi wanted to use this.

“But blast it all,” he said, “I’ll need every skilled man I have, including myself. The job has got to be finished before the ground dries, so the ferroplast can bond with the soil. And you know what the labor shortage is like around here.”

“Who will ride circuit, then?” asked Elva.

“That’s what I don’t know.” Karlavi ran a hand through his straight brown hair. He was a typical Vaynamoan, tall, light-complexioned, with high cheekbones and oblique blue eyes. He wore the working clothes usual to the Tervola district, leather breeches, mukluks, a mackinaw in the tartan of his family. There was nothing romantic about his appearance. Nevertheless, Elva’s heart turned over when he looked at her. Even after two years.

He got out his pipe and tamped it with nervous motions. “Somebody must,” he said. “Somebody with enough technical education to use a medikit and discuss people’s difficulties intelligently. And with authority. We’re more tradition-minded hereabouts than they are at Ruuyalka, dear. Our people wouldn’t accept the judgment of just anyone. How could a servant or tenant dare settle an argument between two pioneers? It must be me, or a bailiff, or—” His voice trailed off.

Elva caught the implication. “No!” she exclaimed. “I can’t! I mean …that is—”

“You’re my wife,” said Karlavi slowly. “That alone gives you the right, by well-established custom. Especially since you’re the daughter of the Magnate of Ruuyalka. Almost equivalent to me in prestige, even if you do come from the other end of the continent, where they’re fishers and marine farmers instead of woodsfolk.” His grin flashed. “I doubt if you’ve yet learned what awful snobs the free yeomen of Tervola are.”

“But Hauki, I can’t leave him.”

“Hauki will be spoiled rotten in your absence by an adoring nanny and a villageful of tenant wives. Otherwise he’ll do fine.” Karlavi dismissed the thought of their son with a wry gesture. “I’m the one who’ll get lonesome. Abominably so.”

“Oh, darling,” said Elva, utterly melted.

A few days later she rode forth.

And it had been an experience to remember. The easy, rocking motion of the six-legged hailu, the mindless leisure of kilometer after kilometer—where, however, the body, skin and muscle and blood and all ancient instinct, gained an aliveness such as she had never before felt—the silence of mountains with sunlit ice on their shoulders, then birdsong in the woods and a river brawling; the rough warm hospitality when she stayed overnight with some pioneer, the eldritch welcome at the Alfa nest—she was now glad she had encountered those things, and she hoped to know them again, often.