“I know she was the only girl you ever loved,” she answered him. “And never me. Even when you built a house for me, your heart belonged to her. I’ve seen you staring at this house over all these years and I knew who it was you had built it for, even though she was still too young. I knew who you were thinking of. But it never crossed my mind that you were looking at her grave. Her clothes were torn off. Did you have her the once before she died?” The wife was taking no pleasure in this. She was being more ruthless with herself than with the murderer. “When you stare at this house of a night or of a morning, are you grieving for her? Or remembering that you were the only man ever to possess that beautiful child?”

There was a growl of rage now among the men. Not at the wife, but at what the wife had seen and what her words meant.

Ram Odin strode to the murderer and put an arm across his shoulder. “Let me take you back home, sir. You have some work to do tonight, I think.”

He wasn’t out of earshot when other women offered to take in the children and the wife herself for the night. The murderer would have his own house to himself.

This much goes to his credit: He did not kill himself inside the house, or in any other place where it would be one of his children who found him. He went into the smokehouse during the night and hanged himself from a short rope tied to one of the hooks.

Rigg and Ram Odin left the next day, walking on toward the next village. “We thought you’d winter here,” said Onishtu’s father.

“We owe you much,” said Onishtu’s mother. “Winter with us.”

“We have a place farther on,” said Ram Odin, “but your offer is kind.”

Rigg silently agreed, for he could not bear the thought of staying in this place. Justice had been served, he believed. But he also knew the repercussions would be long and hard. He had spared the lives of the murderer’s children by not changing the past in such a way that they would never be conceived, but their lives would be forever altered by the knowledge of what their father did, and that it was their mother’s testimony that condemned him in the eyes of the village.

As they walked toward the mountain pass that led to the next village, Rigg said, “I can’t figure out if he finally felt remorse at the end, or if he had felt it all along.”

“I don’t think he ever felt anything like remorse,” said Ram Odin. “I think he treasured the memory of the rape and the murder, both, indistinguishably.”

“Then why did he kill himself?”

“Because he couldn’t conceive of life outside his own village.”