We had been on the island two days, and that day’s sun a pale memory of rose across the sea, and the woods powdered with dusk. Hwenit lighted the fire and set out the food, and scolded her red cat, which would not eat its portion of nutmeats, since it had killed a bird in the high grass that afternoon, and was entirely satisfied with this gory fare. The scolding concluded, Hwenit turned to me.

“Tonight I shall gather sea wrack from the beach. Shall you go with me, Mordrak?”

Confusing one Hwenit with the other—Uasti—for a moment, I complied. Shortly, supper finished, I followed her among the rocks and tide-glazed sands. She picked at the red-purple weed and cut it with my knife, then the green-brown and the black. The light was gone. She judged the varieties by starshine, and placed them in a reed-woven basket.

“Once all weed was black,” said Hwenit. “Then one man killed another and his blood fell in the sea, at which some weed became red. But the green weed grew when the Green Maidens, who live on the sea’s floor, swam up and lay with men. It is not weed, but green hair left for a token of love between water and land.”

Catching the drift now, I said it was a nice story, and started to go back up the beach. But Hwenit, the little fox, unlaced her shift and ran into the sea, and returned like a Green Maiden herself, save she was black not green, scented with ocean, with water-jeweled breasts and chains of silver on her thighs. And that was that.

After, she was silent as a rock, as if she must atone for her pleasure with melancholy as some do. It was not her first time by any means. The black folk had no rigid moral laws, being too moral, and too lawful, to construct them.

We went to the tent and she hid herself behind her drapery, and then I heard her crying.

All this I could have predicted. Her thoughts ran on Qwef. Presently she called out to me like a child, “What shall I do? What shall I do?”

There is no reasoning with a girl in this mood. I got up, took down the silly drapery and put my arms around Hwenit, surprising myself somewhat at my own gentleness with her. Demizdor had weaned me to different ways, I supposed. It would have taken a woman who did not consider herself a milk-cow to show me that women are not cattle.

Next, Hwenit hissed, “Mordrak, you are a magician. Make him belong to me. You will be kind, for I have helped you toward your sorcerer’s power. Use it, and help me.”

“I won’t help you to that. Besides, my gift is scarce out of its cradle, as well you know.”

“For this it is strong enough. Oh, Mordrak, I am nothing without him. I shall die of it.”

I laughed, and assured her she would not.