“Yes?” Mop leaned forward. “Have my songs what, my daughter?”

“Have your songs ever… made anything true?”

Ness made a hmmm-ing sound, but Mop was quiet for a moment.

“Well,” he said after a time. “Yes. In the sense that all songs—if I shape them well enough”—he smiled at Rae—“are true. Reveal truths. And sometimes, like that old sow and her bear cubs, while I’m licking their formlessness into shape, I’ll find they show me a truth I didn’t know. Something I held inside, but never said, even to myself. Or perhaps something outside me, too, something I only sensed about the hills or fields or sky, but came to know when I sang.”

Ness hmm-ed again, a gentler noise. “Airmonger,” she said softly.

“A truth you didn’t know?” Rae repeated.

“Mm.” Mop nodded. “Ness calls me airmonger, but she’s as much one as I—oh, yes, don’t shake your head at me, my love.” Patting Nessa’s knee, he raised his brows at Rae. “Think how your mother knows the name of every blossom and bit of green on our hill. Think of those tender, feathery blooms she finds, the ones with the wide white crowns, how much they all look alike! Even in flower. But she knows their different names—wild carrot, pignut, hemlock—and with those names, knows one is medicine, one is food, and one a terrible poison. What power there is in that naming!”

“Pff. That!” Nessa flapped her hand. “The land cares for us only as much as we care to know it. Nature has all we need if only we pay attention; this hillside would soon see us starve if I didn’t know the names of all those bits of green.”

“You see”—Mop smiled—“though she denies it, your mother knows. Words shape our world—they shape how we move through it. They are all our truths. Songs, perhaps, especially so.” He glanced up from the leather he was oiling. “Why, daughter? Did your song show you some truth—?” Mop broke off, his expression suddenly strange.

“No!” Cheeks burning, Rae shook her head. “No,” she repeated, trying to sound calm. “Just… did your songs bring me to you? Is that how…” She recited her parents’ refrain: “The mountains and wind and birds gave me to you?”

“Oh, now. Well, do songs have such magic as that in them? And so much? If they did, perhaps you’d have come to us sooner. For surely—Ness, remind me—I must have had many songs in my youth that, even if I was singing about sheep and shady beech trees, were really about how we were waiting for a daughter with hair as wild as the meadow and”—leaning, he tapped her nose—“cheeks freckled with the day.”

“But you did find me,” Rae said. “In the mountains.”

“Eventually,” Mop admitted. “Yes. Fate had you come to us the day you were meant to, and not a moment before. Nature lets no branch leaf out of season.”

“What if you hadn’t found me?”

Mop was silent. Ness frowned. “I don’t like to think of that,” she said, her voice unusually sharp. “A babe, left to the wilderness. No. What fate would play with a child? Never mind words and magic and meant to. Choices were made. And it was Mop’s good shepherding that had him scouring the hills in search of some lost sheep that brought him to you. And now,” she said, rising, lifting her brows at Mop, “perhaps it’s best if we—good shepherds that we are—choose to end our day so we can be up with the dawn. Come, come. Rae, ready yourself for bed now, please.”