Evidently it was even news to Weaver. “That may very well be, my lady, but  . . .”

“But you have no recollection of it, for you must have passed on at least once since then.”

“One would think so!” said Weaver.

Lyne raised his face out of his bread hunk just long enough to gaze across the table at Mard, with a look that said, No wonder she knows so many fucking songs.

“Before you leave, I shall teach you more,” Edda promised.

“That would be a high honor—”

“Not going to happen,” Corvus announced from his perch on the sill of a window that Edda, perhaps unadvisedly, had left wide open. “There’s to be no ‘leaving.’ You’re coming with us.”

For the first time, Edda smiled. She turned her attention to Brindle and Prim, who were seated next to each other.

“You two are as father and daughter,” she observed, “but that is not so?”

Brindle shook his head. “Her mother and father passed on, more than likely. Oh, it happened some time ago—she chose to remain a girl for many years, and I saw no point in rushing her along.”

“Wise,” Edda said. “Dough given more time to rise makes a finer loaf.” Then, to Prim: “You make a fine young woman, which means you chose correctly.”

Prim blushed and fell into a reverie, listening to the tones of Edda’s voice but not at all following the words. Her voice was as complex as her braid, and its strands were flutes, birdsong, and the lapping of waves on a lakeshore in the still of the evening.

Brindle was squeezing her arm under the table. She looked at him. He inclined his head toward their hostess, whose last sentence rushed into her mind all at once: the giantess had said, “I see from the calluses on your fingers that you like archery; I could teach you what little I know of flint knapping.”

“That is most generous,” Prim said. “The heads of my arrows are all forged.”

“Much more practical,” Edda said, “but stone ones have their uses too.”

“Learning that will burn weeks,” Corvus protested. “Think hours.”

Edda didn’t seem to hear the giant talking raven. She turned her attention to the others, each in their turn. She remembered Burr as a warrior who had once passed on gloriously in single combat with an angel. This revelation certainly caused Lyne and Mard to look at the spearman in a new light.

Those two Bufrect boys came in for examination next. Their clan lived round the edges of a steep rocky peninsula projecting from the southern end of Calla. It pointed into a broad, short Shiver that connected straight to the ocean. So they were seagoing folk. They’d joined the Quest on a lark, not without one or two swift kicks in the arse from their matriarch Paralonda. Since then, during wetter, colder, duller moments, they’d made no secret of regretting it. But by the time Edda was done talking to them it was clear there’d be no more second thoughts.