“Tell me,” Paks said, taking a plum from the bowl.

“The villagers had a well; my uncle cursed it.” Dorrin told the rest of it, hurrying through the details and staring at her hands clasped on the table, for she felt tears rise again and did not want to cry in front of Paks.

“Undoing such evil is no small thing,” Paks said, when Dorrin paused for breath. Dorrin looked up to see that Paks’s eyes glittered with unshed tears in the lamplight.

“It is so … so sad,” Dorrin said, past the lump in her own throat. “And it makes me so angry. All that waste, all that unnecessary pain and struggle … the years they had to send someone all the way to the stream for water, and why? Because my uncle chose it.” She stopped again; Paks said nothing. “And then, at the end, where I expected water fouled past cleansing … the well was dry.”

“Completely?”

“Yes. I felt the rock. Dry as Andressat in late summer; dry as if it had never been a well. I sat there, with the bones wrapped in my shirt, those pitiful bones—” Tears came despite her intent; she felt them on her face, but went on. “And when I asked the gods, no words came to me, nothing, and so I cried, as—as I am now.” She choked, then found her voice again. “My family—does not—cry. All I could think—was the waste—the misery—the pain—we have caused. Year after year, and for what? And then the water came.”

“Came how?” Paks asked, leaning forward. “And where?”

“Out of a cleft of the rock. It is—scarcely believable. I cried like a child, tears dripping right onto the rock, and then … the water came creeping out of that cleft.”

“Did it frighten you?” Paks asked. “You down a well and the water rising? But wait—you had a rope, you could get out safely.”

“Not quite,” Dorrin said. “It came slowly at first and then suddenly, a gush that lifted me up like a branch in a torrent.” An echo of the joy she’d felt at the water dried the tears on her face as she grinned. “What I’m sure will be told behind my back for the rest of my life, one peasant to another, is how I looked, rising up on that gush of water half naked, with my burden of bones wrapped in my shirt.”

Paks stared. “No shirt? But—oh, but you had to carry the bones—but—” She shook her head, chuckling.

“It was not,” Dorrin said, laughter replacing tears, “not the dignity of a duke. I did think of that, on the way up, but too late.”

“In terms of undoing your family’s pride—” Paks began, but was laughing too hard to continue.

“My uncle would be mortified,” Dorrin said. Laughter and tears together had left her now, and she felt more relaxed than she had since—since she could not remember. “My mother—well, she disowned me, years ago, but this would leave even her speechless.”