“Oh, they are not those kinds of words!” she answered. “You see, some words are very old, and their significance forgotten.”

“So Calladons have been here for a long time.”

She nodded. “We built this house on the back of a sleeping giant at the dawn of the Third Age, if that helps you.”

“It doesn’t.”

This Corvus seemed quite difficult to please. She shrugged. “That is our garden, and this my bedchamber. I have been watching you.”

“I know,” said Corvus—not really making it clear how many of the assertions just made by Prim had been known to him. No matter. The bird looked her up and down. She was wearing a sleeping gown that fell all the way to the floor. “Are you a girl, or a woman?”

“Girl,” Prim told him.

“Of how many falls?”

“It is not what matters,” she told him. “Calladons are queer folk. Girls become women, or boys become men, when some occasion requires it. Of late this part of the Land has been quiet and such occasions few.”

“I require a small party of women and men to accompany me on a Quest and lend a hand in its culmination,” Corvus stated.

“What manner of Quest?”

Corvus seemed not to have considered this seemingly basic question. He pondered it for a few moments, then rearranged his wings in a birdy shrug. “Travel, searching, digging something up. I don’t know. Very important. Leave immediately.”

“May I have breakfast?” she asked.

When Corvus seemed taken aback, she explained: “Others will be there, who might help. And in any case it would never do for one of my family to enter womanhood and embark on a Quest without at least saying a few words.”