Cwen only metamorphosed thrice, in her life. Once, she ran out of food in winter, and the storms cut off her island for weeks. She’d finished the mutton, the sheep were off the island already, and it was too rough for fishing. She had fasted before, but not to the extent that her head grew a beak and her arms became wings. When she dived, she fell out of the air direct as a bolt of lightning, dark through the water to where she saw the silver glint. The fish didn’t stand a chance. Oh, that piece of smoked venison was good, when they put it between her lips three days later.

The second time, she flew as well, but upwards. Whatever it was had been mingled with the mushrooms the traveller-girl brought with her, as payment for the prophecy. If the girl knew, she said nothing. That night, Cwen made her usual stew. They ate it sitting in the doorway of her hut, looking out to sea. Soon she felt the beginnings of a lifting in her body, which hitherto she had known only through starvation; and when she held out her hands to the spirits, it was Wind who came and carried her upwards, and she felt it all over her body, and between her thighs, and pressing her feathers so they fitted together like the scallops of a newly-hatched pine cone. The feathers, when she looked around her, were iridescent, the colour of that traveller-girl’s hair, and with the door closed behind them, and the girl’s many tongues in her hollows, and three of her fingers, five, four, ten, no, as many as the stars, searching and finding, she felt herself pushed through the seas, into one star chamber and out through another, and then it was Wind again; Wind, turning her around and around in a cyclone. Which meant that the next day, when she woke, and sat before her usual audience, with her mouth only slightly dry and a swaying in her head, she was able to tell them to be quick in gathering in their harvest this year, for there was trouble coming.

The only other time was in the cairn itself, not in the passage this time, her back pushed up against the huge rough stone of the floor, but in the central chamber, with eight other women and the door closed for darkness. The drums were beating. It was the year that only girl-children had been born, and the island men were troubled. In the beat of the mound’s darkness, with the women swaying around her, Cwen became neither she-bear, wolf, nor raven. She became herself. Her limbs were strong, her mind was clear, she guided the women. They enjoyed themselves so much that, were it not for the advent of boy babies, Cwen might have got in trouble with the menfolk.