“You make Questing sound grand,” Corvus pointed out. “Perhaps setting foot out of this valley every few centuries would do you good!”

Brindle was the only one of the visitors Edda had not chatted with yet, and so it seemed natural he’d be next. But instead he and Edda merely looked at each other, arriving at some wordless understanding.

Food had made them all sleepy and so at Edda’s invitation they spread out into various rooms of the cottage. For a small place, it had an extraordinary number of nooks and, as it were, backwaters, always surprising the visitor as she came round a corner. Before long Prim had found the perfect one for her, curled up in it, and fallen asleep. She rose once in the middle of the night to go outside and empty her bladder, and as she went in and out she overheard Edda and Brindle conversing in low tones, but could make out only a single word, which was “Spring.” After that she slept very soundly.

She had a dream in which radiant light was shining down from the Palace, and she could not escape its glare, which penetrated even her closed eyelids. She was down on the ground far below, prostrate, but through the earth she could feel, more than hear, a deep grinding, as though the underpinnings of the Land itself were being invisibly reshaped. This was not the pick-and-shovel work of Beedles toiling under the lash, but something that hearkened to the Before Times and the doings of Thingor. Standing up and turning her back to the light, she found herself gazing up into mountains, black at the base, white with snow above that, but hidden at the top behind storm clouds that reached up into the sky as high as El’s Pinnacle, wreathed at the top with blue lightning.

She opened her eyes and flung out a hand to brace herself. In her dream she had been standing on a grassy plain but in fact she was lying on her side, back turned to the light of the morning, which was cutting in under the clouds and coming in straight through a window. That had been real, at least. The Pinnacle and the storm had been dream figments but that deep grinding sound was certainly there, pervading the cottage and coming up into her bones through the floor.

She got up. The sound had a directionless quality that made finding its source no easy task. But soon enough she found her way into the kitchen. At the other end, by the door to a pantry that looked bigger than the rest of the house put together, a stone rested atop another stone. Both were round and flat, like thick coins, or slices of a sausage. Their diameter was about the length of a person’s arm. The one on top had a hole in its center, which was full of golden grain. Edda was standing next to it, one hand resting on the upper stone, and she was pushing it round and round. Flour trickled from a hole in the lower stone and collected in a bowl on the floor. This was, in other words, a mill like any other, save it lacked the waterwheel or the team of beasts that would normally be required to budge anything so heavy. Edda moved it as easily as if it were a spinning wheel.