“Must be lonely, watching out for him from so far away,” said Taleswapper.

She shook her head. “Not to me. I got folks all around me, all the time.” She looked at Taleswapper and smiled wanly. “It’s almost a relief to spend time with that one boy who doesn’t want a thing from me, because he doesn’t even know that I exist.”

“I know, though,” said Taleswapper. “And I don’t want a thing from you, either.”

She smiled. “You old fraud,” she said.

“All right, I do want something from you, but not something for myself. I’ve met that boy, and even if I can’t see into his heart the way you can, I think I know him. I think I know what he might be, what he might do, and I want you to know that if you ever need my help for anything, just send me word, just tell me what to do, and if it’s in my power I’ll do it.”

She didn’t answer, nor did she look at him.

“So far you didn’t need help,” said Taleswapper, “but now he has a mind of his own, and you can’t always do for him the things he’ll need. The dangers won’t come just from things that fall on him or hurt him in the flesh. He’s in as much danger from what he decides to do himself. I’m just telling you that if you see such danger and you need me to help, I’ll come no matter what.”

“That’s a comfort,” she said. That was honest enough, Taleswapper knew; but she was feeling more than she said, he knew that too.

“And I wanted to tell you he was coming here, first of April, to prentice with the smith.”

“I know he’s coming,” she said, “but it won’t be the first of April.”

“Oh?”

“Or even this year at all.”

Fear for the boy stabbed at Taleswapper’s heart. “I guess I did come to hear the future after all. What’s in store for him? What’s to come?”

“All kinds of things might happen,” she said, “and I’d be a fool to guess which one. I see it open like a thousand roads before him, all the time. But there’s precious few of those roads that bring him here by April, and a whole lot more that leave him dead with a Red man’s hatchet in his head.”

Taleswapper leaned across the doctor’s writing table and rested his hand on hers. “Will he live?”

“As long as I have breath in my body,” she said.

“Or I in mine,” he answered.

They sat in silence for a moment, hand on hand, eye to eye, until she burst into laughter and looked away.

“Usually when folks laugh I get the joke,” said Taleswapper.