Or the skill of a good midwife. But Elen didn’t say that. “That’s why your daughter and your grandchild both survived. Maybe I never told you, but my sister had a few strong words for the archon refusing to lie in with the other women, especially when there was no other midwife available. Does the archon blame the other women too?”

“Yes. She made their lives miserable afterward, too. Both left Fisherman’s Rest for other villages. But I have no kin to migrate to. Here I was born, and here I will die. My daughter died from a flux, five years after the birth. She was the only one of my children who survived childhood. Her daughter is all I have left. Ten years now. The bright star of my life. Maybe if my precious grandchild had died, too, the archon would have resented me less.”

Elen rubbed the smooth surface of the brass griffin. “What has the archon’s resentment to do with this ornament?”

Oflidu swallowed anxiously, but Elen’s nod encouraged her to go on. “This time of year, I take my grandchild up to Cloudberry Ridge. There’s always late-harvest cloudberries. They dry well. We eat them during the winter season. But I don’t have a license to glean there. It’s part of the archon’s holding.”

“I see. You fear the archon will prosecute you out of spite.”

“She is justiciar. What if she takes away my child to serve in her household? Or condemns the child to death for theft?”

Elen didn’t ask if a justiciar could impose such a cruel sentence. As the intendant had once said, where the law is severe, it is meant to be eased with mercy, and where it is merciful, it is meant to be ruled with a strict observance of justice. But where the justiciar is bent on their own selfish desires, it can be twisted into any wicked form.

“But you have given this to me. Why? Knowing the risk?”

“Because my grandchild sneaked up there on her own. She’s old enough to do that.”

“To disobey you because she believes you need her help?”

Oflidu wiped tears from her cheek. “She’s such a good girl. It will kill me to lose her. But I suppose the archon would be glad of that too. I am just the charwoman. The archon told me she was cheated of the child that should have belonged to her. For you see, she refused to come labor in the temple with the rest of us. It being beneath her consequence. And then—”

Elen saw that the woman was about to repeat her description of the births and death and the archon’s selfish anger, so she broke in. “What about the ornament? Who found it? Your grandchild?”

“No, no, I found it. She had gone up the day before.”

“Yesterday?”