The snow retreats, the elderflowers bloom, the ewes lamb, a pair of wood pigeons nests in the thatch of the roof, and Nida and her mother sell honey and melons and pine nuts in the village market, and by late summer they have enough silver to buy a second bullock to pair with the first. Soon Omeir is using an old dray to cart felled trees down from the high forests, and sell them to mills downriver, and in the fall Nida is wed to a woodcutter in a village twenty miles away. During Anna’s second winter in the ravine, the boy’s mother, in her loneliness, begins to talk to her, slowly at first, then in torrents, about the secrets of cultivating bees, about Omeir’s father and grandfather, and finally about her life in the little stony village nine miles downriver before Omeir was born.

As the days warm they sit beside the creek and watch Omeir work his spindly, uncooperative oxen, using the solicitous voice he reserves only for cattle, and his mother says that his gentleness is like a flame that he carries inside him, and in good weather Anna and Omeir walk together beneath trees, and he tells her stories of funny things that his grandfather used to say: that the breath of deer can kill snakes, or that the gall of an eagle, mixed with honey, can restore a person’s eyesight, and she comes to see that the little ravine beneath the broad-shouldered mountain is not as foreboding and steep and barbaric as it first seemed—that indeed in every season, at some unexpected moment, it will reveal a beauty that makes her eyes water and her heart thump in her chest, and she comes to believe that perhaps she has indeed journeyed to that better place she always imagined might lie beyond the city walls.

In time she ceases to notice the defect in Omeir’s face: it becomes part of the world, no different than the mud of spring, the mosquitoes of summer, or the snows of winter. She gives birth to six sons and loses three, and Omeir buries the lost sons in the clearing above the river, where his grandfather and sisters are buried, and marks each grave with a white stone he carries down from a high place known only to him. The cottage grows crowded, and Anna manages to construct clothes for the boys, sometimes adding a clumsy vine or a lopsided bloom with thread, smiling when she thinks of how crude Maria would find her needlework, and Omeir takes his mother on the donkey to live with Nida, and then it is only the five of them in the ravine by the mouth of the cavern.