He sat in the darkness and waited.

Alinor hesitated outside the door of the net shed, listening for him moving inside in the dark, as if he were a strange animal that she had penned. When he was quiet, she turned and ran along the bank to where her own cottage stood, facing the mire, a one-story building thatched with reeds, set square in a little herb garden fenced with driftwood.

Inside her cottage everything was just as she had left it, the embers of the fire on the hearth under an earthenware lid, the runes drawn in the ashes to prevent a spark, the children in the bed in one corner of the room, the pot of gruel by the fireplace with the lid clamped on, to keep it from rats, and the roosting hens in their corner, who clucked sleepily as the cool air, smelling of mud and brine, blew in with her.

She took a bucket from the fireside and went out, inland, along the shoreline where the high tide was lapping at the mud and the reeds. She climbed up the bank, and down the other side using rough-cut steps, to the deep freshwater dipping pond. She held on to a worn post to fill her bucket, then lugged the slopping load back to her own cottage. She poured a bowl of water and set it on the table, took off her cloak and washed her face and hands, using the homemade gray fatty soap, rubbing her fingers with particular care, painfully aware that the priest had held them to his lips and must have smelled the lifelong scent of fish, smoke, sweat, and dirt.

She dried her hands on a scrap of linen, and sat for a little while, staring out of the open door where the sky—pale throughout this white night—was getting brighter and brighter. She wondered why—since she had failed to meet a ghost—she should feel so bewitched.

She shook her head, as if to pull herself back from the shadowlands, and rose up from her stool, to kneel before the fire, using a rag to lift the earthenware cover from the embers. With the back of her other hand she erased the runes against fire that were drawn in the cool ashes. She fed the glowing heart in the middle of the ash with little twigs, and then more driftwood, and when it caught she set the three-legged iron pot in the heat, added water from the bucket, and stirred the soaked oatmeal inside, bringing it slowly to the boil.

The children, in the one bed, slept through the sounds of preparation. She had to wake them, touching each one on the shoulder. Her daughter smiled in her sleep and rolled over to face the rough wooden wall, but her boy sat up and asked: “Is it morning?”

She bent down to hug him, burying her face in the warmth of his neck. He smelled of himself, sweet as a puppy. “Yes,” she said. “Time to get up.”