There were always some children at the manse, though their number fluctuated with mortalities. At this time, there were two, Ezekiel and Margaret. Ezekiel was undersized and rickety, but thought to be promising: at the age of five, he had mastered three alphabets—European, Greek, and Hebrew. Ellin had practised on changelings, so mortal children came easy. She soon discarded Margaret, whose thoughts dwelt on food and arithmetic. Ezekiel, the younger of the two, was more rewarding. By listening to his thoughts, and clearing away what his father had taught him, she discovered that he lived in a world of words—turning them over in his mind, repeating them to himself, fitting them with new meanings or deepening the meanings he knew. Ellin put new words into his mind, choosing them carefully and observing what he did with them. She got some of her best results with simple technical terms which he could not relate to anything in his experience. “Hemming and felling193” absorbed him for days. In the end, they became a ceremonial leaping from pew to pew. In the course of listening to his thoughts she picked up several words unknown to her, such as Urim and Thummim194, which according to Ezekiel were blue lamb’s-wool mittens; but she was content to leave them a mystery.

Whenever the ground was free of snow, the children were sent out to collect fir cones for kindling. The fir plantation neighboured the graveyard; there were always cones to be found there, and entertainment—especially for Margaret, who added up dates of births and deaths, divided the sum total by 666 (the Number of the Beast), or the seven lean kine, or the Ten Commandments, or whatever she fancied at the moment, and calculated the average age of demise for living parishioners by the statistics of the dead. She was hampered by the insufficiency of her material. Many of the inscriptions were blunted by time and lichen: it might be a 5, it might be an 8. Others had gone underground with their swallowed headstones. One word was so deeply cut that it was inescapable. It was incised on a large slab which was embedded in the ground above a family grave: the word was ‘LAIR’. Ellin had noticed that Ezekiel avoided this slab, leaving its fir cones for Margaret to gather. She drew his attention to it. She heard a turmoil of thoughts, words snatched up at random to smother the thought beneath. She imposed a word. A tiger striped with blood leaped out of the lair, and the boy ran screaming, just as the changelings had done when she experimented with wolves. His screams were heard. His mother ran from the house, bundled his head in her apron, and told him to be quiet, for his father was writing the sermon.