He was most content, though, watching the sheep in the fields. Accompanying Rae or Mop or Ness into the meadow, he would sit beside them quietly for hours—still, patient, alert. He spotted danger before even the sheep felt any unease, and the flock grew under his care. More, the sheep seemed to adore him: When he sat watching, they milled about him, bristly muzzles nuzzling him with hot, sheepy breaths, like he was one of their own. Sometimes when Rae sat with him, she caught him staring into the mountains, seeming to listen with his whole being, but if he missed his life in the shadows, he never said.

For her part, Rae, as grateful as she was to be returned to her shepherd life, was no longer most content in the fields. At least, she was not content with idle hands in the fields. Having seen Alba—perhaps in a dream—with her faint insect etchings give Mop’s words new life, she’d grown determined: writing. It seemed vital to learn. She enlisted Myntas to teach her.

On market days, when the crowds grew quiet, she practiced with him; at home in the fields, she practiced with a wax tablet and stylus he’d fashioned for her. The tall mountains to make the sound Mm. The beetle-wings to make the sound Buh. The branching tree to make the sound Tuh. He sent her home with pot shards covered with words and drawings, and she copied these, too. Apple, she wrote, looking at the little drawing of an apple he’d made. Cart. The word looked almost like his rough-wheeled sketch. Flower. Pancake. Sheep. Wool. Mop. Ness. Rom. Rae. She practiced and practiced until she began to see the patterns of sound, until she could begin even to read and shape words for which she had no model—hill, cloud, flock, field, bird. She gathered lampblack, she sharpened reeds she cut by the stream, she traded ten wheels’ cheese for parchment at the market—and at last began, slowly, painstakingly, carefully inking Mop’s songs on the pale skins—all she remembered of his lullabies and meadow verses, all Ness and Myntas could recall of his long-ago rhythms, all the market-goers themselves recollected of the songs he performed for them.

And once, at the end of a market day, when a small man, bald but for two tufts of hair by his ears, had come to their stall and bowed and solemnly passed a folded parchment with a great waxen seal to Rae, she’d been able to read that, too.

She was sitting now—as she often did—high in the hills on a ridge overlooking the fields, parchments and reeds and inkpot in hand. Forest shadows, she was writing—trying to remember and reshape Mop’s market song into beetle-bright marks. Her brother sat beside her.

“W-when will you give all”—voice soft as the ink, he tilted his head at the parchment on her lap—“to Mop?”

“Soon.” Rae paused her reed. “I think I have nearly all. All that can be remembered anyway. I think…” She looked down into the meadow where she could see the small figure of Mop watching the sheep and imagined how his whiskers might curl around the word sunshine when she finally showed him the writings. “I hope,” she said at last, “he’ll be happy to know his words”—she lifted a corner of the parchment—“are still here… that his airmongering won’t be forgotten.”