“Good girl.” Mop pulled a feather from her hair. “Now…” He turned to Nessa, who, having swabbed the lamb’s hoof with ointment, was shooing it again out of doors. “Let’s see if there’s stew enough for all three of us.…” Nessa shook her head. “Or if we need to find a few stray carrots in the garden to add to it.”

Later that evening, as the sun sank below the hills and the sheep sounded their final bleats into the coming darkness, Rae curled on her mattress while Nessa pulled a blanket tight over her shoulders.

“A song?” Rae took Nessa’s hand.

Leaning, Nessa kissed the top of her head. “You don’t want to hear my voice,” she said. “Wait for Mop.”

“But he’s with the sheep.”

“When he comes in, I’ll tell him you’d like a song.”

“What if I’m asleep?”

“He’ll still sing to you. I promise.”

Though Rae tried to stay awake, watching Nessa ready herself for bed, watching the coals glow and cast shadows about the room, she fell asleep before Mop returned. Still, as he knelt beside her, she woke enough to hear his quiet melody.

“All the water now is still for you

and all the windy murmuring has ceased,

though all the fields and trees are bursting,

and all the wood in leaf.”

And Rae, warm under her blanket, the song shaping the dark around her, slipped again into dreaming: She felt herself warm in the dark of the earth, and the dark all about her was furred and breathing. As she dreamed, she felt her hand empty, and she reached, searching, finding only the darkness, soft and furred and humid and breathing.

XIII

HEARTH

Wolf pups grow quickly. The wolf-babe grew quickly.

Scent—there was always scent. The rough smell of earth and root and rock and dog. Damp fur and wolf milk. Marrow and meat. Berry and branch and blood and bone.

Sound came next—all whimpering and mewling. Sometimes a throaty growl. Rmmm. Rommm. A wet-whiskered pushing, a sharp and gentle-toothed nibbling with the rommm.

Sight came last—the darkness of the cave, the darkness of the pups, their shadowy, wriggling, mewling bodies, and then light—the opening to the outside. The forms of rocks and stones and trees. Shadow and cloud and sun.

It did not take the wolf-babe long to find his feet. Rommm, he was wandering, wobbling four-footed, in the spongy moss outside the cave; rommm, he was nipped when he wandered too far. Here was the smell of wide air and light and wind carrying a thousand thousand other scents. What were they? He wanted to eat these scents. He wanted to roll in these scents. Bloom and decay, invisible footprint and damp droppings, flesh and feathers and fur. Smelling and listening, he could hear the smells forming: the tree shaking loose its warm leafy scent, the mouse rustling its fur through twiggy debris. Wandering farther and farther, he could, nose in the air, sense the whole landscape take shape around him: wood and stream and sharp mountaintop—he could find his way always again to the den. Rommm.