From the Chronicles of Agnolo the Flat-Footed:

And well amazed were the palace advisors who did find the oracle-apprentice beside the devoured body of the king’s governor-advisor. Though she suffered a head wound that kept her insensible for many days, the patient ministerings of the fine priest Maurus did enable her return to health. And advisors who waited at her feet did say that each word she uttered fell like water on parched soil, so full of wisdom was she of the realm and its people. With her sage counsel was the realm guided into peace, its people facing neither hunger nor disease without aid and comfort.

LXIII

LIKE SLEEPING, LIKE DREAMING

The homecoming was as Rae had imagined it. The sheep bleating and thudding through the fields when she and the boy appeared out of the trees, Mop and Ness dropping whatever bucket or lamb or fleece they held in their arms and hurrying toward them, Ness reaching them first and bundling Rae in her embrace—Oh, my girl, my girl—then Mop arriving behind and wrapping his long arms around them both—bird above so it was—then Rae, trying to open her arms to show them the boy, still wrapped in her shawl, wide-eyed and shrinking from the commotion, Rae trying to explain, He was a wolf, but now he’s a boy, but then Mop, somehow—and this was the only thing Rae had failed to imagine—nodding and saying, Oh, my son.

He was their son. The boy who was the wolf became her brother. Rom, they called him, this quiet, gray-eyed boy who listened and listened and took everything in. In the beginning at least, a bit like the lambs trailed after their mothers, he followed Rae everywhere: He knelt beside her in the garden when she pulled the carrots; he walked with her into the fields to gather wild greens; he waited with her in the twilight when she whistled for the flock to return. He, too, learned to pick fleece and sow seeds and prepare balms and tend to the lambs. Outside, in open air, his formerly grub-pale skin grew warm with the sun; he was freckled or dirt-smudged, it was unclear, only that he was exploring so often with Rae, he carried the outside with him everywhere. He grew tall, taller than Rae, and when he ran, long legs leaping, he could nearly outpace the hares he surprised in the meadows; he could bound from rock to rock in the hills almost as lightly as the birds could flit through the branches.

For months he was quiet, all wide eyes and attentive ears, but once, at dinner, as a lamb wandered in and surprised them all, he burst into giggles—a barking bright laugh that showed a scraggle of teeth that themselves look like laughter, crooked and joyful and sharp. After this, words came, one or two, here and there—Rae, sister, Mop, Ness, sheep, home. He pronounced them slowly as though they were precious and fragile.

He could out-eat them all—whole loaves of bread, full wheels of cheese, bowl after bowl of Nessa’s root stew—but with his extra hands, the care of the farm grew easier. And when market days came again, so much fleece and cheese did they have to sell, brother and sister carried almost as much on their backs as the sheep pulled: They sold enough even to buy Myntas a new mule, and though Rom could scarcely be persuaded to step out from behind the booth—so wide-eyed and apprehensive was he of the crowds of men and women and jubilant children—he still enjoyed the date pancakes that Rae ran again and again through the market to fetch for him. When he grinned at her with wild, sticky teeth, his grin matched her own, and her heart brimmed with his happiness.