He is trundled home, injured, in a cart down Skeel Street and into Tiller, one leg still with the seaboot on and the other flopping loose in his breeches. He doesn’t look like Granda Jeemsie at all.

That florid scowl of his is pale as boiled cabbage. He breathes hard, panting sharply—just like I saw a seal do once before Da and Buckey’s John knocked it dead. I cried for the sealie, cried for hours. I don’t cry for Granda.

Mackie’s Peter, spry old feller he is, older than Granda by a decade or more, wheels the cart into the but and eases himself into Granda’s chair, stretching his stiff legs by the fire.

Rise, ye old gaak, an’ get me out, Granda wheezes.

Aye, Peter says but he takes his own time, indeed he does, and looks down on him as though Granda is a large, amusing child.

By the time Granda is in the chair himself, bootless and wincing, Ma has boiled water and is mixing hyssop and mustard into a bitter-smelling paste.

An’ how did a beastie manage to break your leg, too? she demands to know.

Never ye mind, lass. Just strap it up quick an’ get that poultice on here. Granda thrusts up his big hairy arm and opens a palm already pussed-up and swelling.

Mackie’s Peter snorts and Ma gives him one of her Looks. I can tell, plain as flour, that as far as she is concerned it is no laughing matter to have Granda laid up and helpless and generally in the way. But that old man, that Mackie’s Peter, he has a funny way of looking on things, and in any case he would pay no more mind to Ma and her Looks than to his own wifie.

Old gaak, he is, he tells Ma. Or maybe his eyes be gone, for it’s purest foolery to grab the beastie by the fins of its back. Tripped hisself over his own boots with the shock of it an’ fell half into the hatch. The poison got him. Aye, got him good!

Mackie’s Peter is enjoying himself.

Granda glares and probably has words of his own all ready to say, but it’s then that Ma slaps the paste onto his palm. Such a roar! I clap my hands on my ears, and when I dare to look it’s as though Granda’s real face has slipped off like the skin of a hare boiled all the day, and left behind a punch of dough, all pink and grey and bloated.

Another snort from Mackie’s Peter as he backs out of the door.

Me, I’m jumping to know what beastie has poisoned Granda’s hand, so I skitter after Mackie’s Peter.