Rigg smiled at her. “I want nothing from you. She’s beautiful. I can feel that wide smile of hers shining in this room, that’s all. It’s what I came for. She’s gone, but some of her beauty remains, and I am taking joy in it. I’m sorry if you thought I meant to exploit your love for her. I don’t.” He turned to Ram Odin. “We’ve ­troubled this good family enough. Let’s be on our way to bed.”

At the door to her room, the father put a hand on Rigg’s chest and said, “I think your gift is real and you know where she went.”

“My gift is real,” said Rigg, “and I don’t know where she went.”

But even as he said it, he was finding out. Without even meaning to, he was tracing the youngest of her paths in the room. Sensing where it went. “It was lambing time when she went, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“It was.”

“And the snow was still far down the slopes, so the flocks were close by.”

“A din and a stink,” said the mother. “It was her favorite time of year. How could she leave during lambing?”

Rigg saw her follow a path she had taken many times before. It wound among the houses and went up through the ruins of a couple of collapsed houses. “Why are there so many abandoned houses here?” Rigg asked.

“Not abandoned,” said the father. “Never finished. Never had the second story or a roof.”

Ram Odin explained. “While you were working to earn our keep,” he said, “I was gossiping with the old men. It’s how folks marry here. A man builds a house for a particular woman. If she says yes, then they put on the second floor and thatch the roof together and they’re wed. But if she refuses him, then he can’t offer that shell of a house to another—it would be wrong. So the walls stand as a monument to false hopes.”

“Not false,” said the father. “The hopes were true, but the girl is free to say no.”

“It shames the fellow, though, doesn’t it?” asked Rigg.

“They say not,” said Ram Odin. “They say nobody knows who built what house, or who it was for.”

Rigg cocked his head a little. “I think maybe everyone pretends not to know.”

The father nodded ruefully. “We always know who’s building,” said the father. “But not always who he’s a-building for.”

Rigg nodded. “Did anyone build a house for Onishtu?”

“She was too young,” said the mother quickly.

“I would have torn down such a house with my bare hands,” said the father. “A girl her age, there should have been no house built for her.”