“You had her, then,” I said.

“No, we did not lie together,” he answered quietly. “It seems strange to me now that, at the time, I never thought of her in that way, never desired her.”

“She was my mother,” I said, dry-throated. “She bore me and left me. I never knew her, but I have heard from some who did. She betrayed and killed my father, that I am sure of.”

“Did she?” he asked. “That’s very odd. She never seemed to me a woman who would kill for spite. It is long since. Perhaps I remember poorly. She came among us like a lost child. We were journeying then; I recall we believed a big cat, a lynx, followed us across the marshes, but it was she. One night she stole the offering we left for our gods. Yet when we found her and took her in, she was withdrawn and compliant. The woman said she wept as we walked. Then she would talk to herself, names and phrases in other tongues. But this ended. If she was distracted, it was the mania some god had sent her. Also, I recollected after, it was said that she had spoken a language very like that which our priests revealed to us, before the krarls were scattered—the language of the Golden Books. That was uncanny, for we were on our summer wayfaring then, making for the sea, and a tower where one of these Books lay hidden. In those days, my krarl came every year to the spot—it lies not far north of this village, an hour’s journey or less. Qwenex was the chief. He brought out the Book when we had gathered at the tower, and showed us. She, too, the white one, put her hand on the gold. Later, after the Summer Dance, when the Circle of Remembrance had been formed, she came and broke the Circle, thinking we were tranced, or dead perhaps. Thus she learned that the pages of the Book are blank, that only through empathy and dream can we reach back to the suffering and the terror, those cruel lessons to be garnered there, along with the lesson of Power. This she did not understand. Neither our Circle, nor our motives.”

I said, “She stole from you, and, as your guest, interrupted your sacred rite. This sounds like her. Did she do you any good?”

He smiled at me.

“Must you be done good in order that you love?”

“Love,” I said. “If you loved her, you loved Mistress Death.”

“My life, at least, she saved,” he said. Indeed, he spoke of her as if he loved her, but without regret. I thought of the blue-eyed white woman he had lain with to father Hwenit, and wondered if he had found a ghost of my goddess-dam in her. As for me, I was caught in the tale like the fish in the net. She seemed to have been everywhere before me, Uastis, my ice-witch mother.