She said, "Stronghand."

"I am here."

She said, "Go to the fjall. The WiseMothers await you."

The air twisted around him, spinning the staff he held in his right hand, and he staggered backward and found himself tossed out the doorway, surprised by the light. The SwiftDaughters had vanished. Below, the ships rode high, or had been pulled up onto the strand, lightened of their load.

How had time passed so swiftly? Around the hall and the farther village, seen through a fence of pine and spruce, folk were busy sorting and accounting. Most had gone back to work now that the excitement of his arrival had faded.

They had not forgotten him. He walked among them to reach the trail that led up into the highest reaches of the valley, and as he bent his path in that direction he found himself with an escort, mostly children, none daring to ask what venture he'd set himself this late in the day.

The children loped alongside like a pack of overgrown puppies, all in a tangle that sorts itself out into pairs and triads before melding together again. Human children ran with the hatchlings he had sired. They jostled each other like littermates, and the softer, weaker human kin whacked at the four-legs with stout sticks to keep their sharp teeth at bay when the nipping and tussling got out of hand. The sight of this extended pack caused a stab of foreboding. What strengthened the human children would surely weaken the children of rock, who did not leap to the kill as they would have done in the old days in such a crowd. They ran as one great many-limbed beast, so that he could scarcely tell one limb from another as they tumbled and shouted and galloped and giggled around him.

Perhaps it was too easy to condemn, he thought as he strode on tireless legs, as he inhaled the sweet scent of home flavored with burning charcoal, pine sap, and the cold bite of northern air. The old days, by the reckoning of his kind with their short lives, were easily swallowed by the longer span of years in which humankind revel and which they did not fully appreciate. To live seventy years, as some of them did! Even Deacon Ursuline, who claimed to have survived forty or fifty seasons, could boast of a life span unknown even to the sorcerers of the Eika tribes, the ones who schemed and stole hearts and souls and magics in order to extend their lives.

No matter. A flame may still burn brightly, though its wick is short.

Rikin Fjord prospered because it was now a many-limbed beast. Sheep grazed where meadows found purchase on level ground, although he noted few twin lambs among the ewes: harbinger of a hard year ahead. Goats scrambled nimbly along the steep slopes of the valley. Pens held pampered cattle, who needed a cozy byre to outlast the winter. It was winter still, with frost crackling under each step and snow heaped where shadows lingered longest. A late sowing might prove too short for a decent crop.