“Mrs. Reekie, are you all right yourself?” someone asked, and Alinor, recalled to her work, turned to the mother and with her hand still on the pulsing birth cord, delivered the afterbirth. Mrs. Grace held out the shawl that she had kept for her grandchild, and Alinor wrapped the tiny baby closely and handed her to the grandmother, as the young mother climbed onto the bed and Alinor sponged her parts and bound them with moss, her hands moving with their skill while her head was dizzy with the realization that this baby was a precious gift of life, that every baby was precious beyond imagining, that no baby should be lost if they could be saved, if they could have a life where they were loved and cherished.

All the women crowded around, passing the baby from one to another, admiring her and cooing over her. When the baby came back to Alinor, she tied off the cord, snipped it neatly, and handed the baby to the mother. “Here,” she said. “Your little girl.”

It was as if the baby had come to Alinor’s hands to bring her a message, like the robin might sing in her hedge or the seagulls cry over her cottage. “God bless her, and make her well and strong,” Alinor said, watching the tiny little head and the way that the dark blue eyes blinked open to see the world for the very first time.

Young Lisa Auster was flushed and proud, leaning back on the heaped bedding, her neighbors crowding round to see the baby and kiss her.

“Let’s put her to the breast,” Alinor suggested, and waited while the young mother and the baby fumbled towards each other, putting one gentle hand on Mrs. Grace’s arm to stop her from interfering.

“Is that right?” the young mother asked. “I don’t know if that’s right.” Then she grimaced as the baby latched on.

“That’s right!” Alinor said, beaming with a sense of inexplicable joy. “And it will hurt more, before it hurts less, but you will feel the foremilk come down and you can see the baby is sucking.”

She watched the two of them for a moment and then she realized that she was standing, smiling in silence, as if she had realized something of great importance at this poor fishwife’s bedside that she had never known before.

“It is a gift,” she whispered. “Life. Precious.”

“I hoped it would have a caul,” Mrs. Grace said. “All of us fishwives would like our babies born with a caul, to protect against drowning.”

Alinor nodded. “I know.”

“If you have a caul or even a part of one, I would buy it from you?”

“No, I don’t trade in such things.”

“I thought you were a wisewoman with herbs and secret things?”

“Just herbs,” Alinor said levelly. “No secret things.”

“Not faerie gold? I heard you had faerie gold.”

“I pick up little tokens and pretty shells when I see them. Nothing more than that. Just keepsakes, nothing with any meaning.”