“I have not had the pleasure of your company since two hundred and thirty-seven years ago, when you sat just where you are sitting now, and I taught you the Lay of Valeskara and Blair.”

Prim remembered that vaguely: two lovers who, as a side effect of a war between a hill-giant and a troop of angels, had found themselves on opposite sides of a freshly made Shiver. Before they could find a way across, Blair had become embroiled in a fight with some Beedles, who had put him in chains and taken him away to a castle or something, where Autochthons put him in a dungeon. Valeskara still walked on the cliff top awaiting his return. So that, at least, was familiar. But Weaver’s being at least two and a half centuries old was news to her—and apparently to Brindle.

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.”