The sleet turns to snow and she sends a prayer through the roof that if her son has some role to play in this world could he please be spared. But in the last hours before dawn she wakes to find Grandfather standing over her. Shrouded in his oxhide cape with snow on his shoulders he looks like a phantom from a woodcutter’s song, a monster accustomed to doing terrible things, and though she tells herself that by morning the boy will join her husband on thrones in a garden of bliss, where milk pours from stones and honey runs in streams and winter never comes, the feeling of handing him over is a feeling like handing over one of her lungs.

Cocks crow, wheel rims crunch snow, the cottage brightens, and horror strikes her anew. Her husband drowned, the horse with him. The girls wash and pray and milk Beauty the cow and bring fodder to Leaf and Needle and cut pine twigs for the goat to chew and morning turns to afternoon but still she cannot summon the energy to rise. Frost in the blood, frost in the mind. Her son crosses the river of death now. Or now. Or now.

Before dusk, the dogs growl. She rises and limps to the doorway. A gust of wind, high on the mountain, lifts a cloud of glitter from the trees. The pressure in her breasts nears intolerable.

For a long moment nothing else happens. Then Grandfather comes down the river road on the mare with something bundled across the saddle. The dogs explode; Grandfather dismounts; her arms reach to take what he carries even as her mind says she should not.

The child is alive. His lips are gray and his cheeks are ashen but not even his tiny fingers are blackened with frost.

“I took him to the high grove.” Grandfather heaps wood onto the fire, blows the embers into flames; his hands tremble. “I set him down.”

She sits as close to the fire as she dares and this time braces the infant’s chin and jaw with her right hand, and with her left expresses jets of milk down the back of his throat. Milk leaks from the baby’s nose and from the gap in his palate, but he swallows. The girls slip through the doorway, boiling with the mystery of it, and the flames rise, and Grandfather shivers. “I got back on the horse. He was so quiet. He just looked up into the trees. A little shape in the snow.”

The child gasps, swallows again. The dogs whine outside the door. Grandfather looks at his shaking hands. How long before the rest of the village learns of this?

“I could not leave him.”