His eyes were open, but he… he was not awake. He stared ahead, unmoving, unseeing, nothing—no sadness or gratitude or anger or fear or joy, no sign of anything Mop at all—flickering across his cheeks or brow. His arms and legs hung limp; to sit, he had to be propped against the wall. Sometimes Nessa would pass her palm gently over his eyes to close his lids, and for a time, he would appear to rest. But then later, he would sit, unstaring again, eyes fixed on empty space.

Nessa—at least before Rae—was calm. “Dry your eyes, daughter,” she’d soothe when she discovered Rae weeping in the dark. “Take heart. He will not leave you,” she’d promise, as she bustled about with her ointments and herbs. “Best you can do for him now is care for the sheep: He’ll see”—she nodded at him—“and being content about his flocks will let him rest more, so he’ll return to us sooner. Go on, child. Set them to pasture.” But when Rae reluctantly, yet dutifully, took the sheep into the fields, Nessa’s sobs echoed over the meadow. Where have you gone, airmonger? Come back! Come back to us.

One evening, not long after they had returned home, Rae went about her chores in a haze. She called in the sheep and bedded them down, she helped Ness prepare a meal that neither she nor Ness ate, she sat in the door wiping the pots, staring into the darkening fields. She felt Mop’s too-quiet presence behind her. A terrible sorrow—as cold and sharp and desolate as mountains—was filling her. She felt ill with its glittering emptiness. She wiped and stared and wiped and stared, and it was only as the stars began to form in the twilight that she realized, for a while, she had been staring at sheep still wandering the hills.

“Oh, Ness!” she exclaimed. “I’ve left some of the herd out.”

“Yes?” Nessa’s voice cracked. Rae turned. All day, Nessa had been keeping a brave face, reassuring Rae that Mop would be all right, but now Rae saw Nessa’s eyes red-rimmed, her face twisted with grief.

Rae’s stomach clenched. She had not thought she could feel worse, but seeing Nessa’s suffering, she could not bear it. “I’m going to bring them in,” she choked out, and before Nessa could say anything, she pushed the pots aside and ran toward the field.

“Rae—” she heard behind her. She kept running.

When Rae reached the hillside, she did not whistle for the sheep. Instead, she threw herself on the grass. While the ewes grazed around her, she hugged her knees to her chest and sobbed into her arms.

“It’s my fault!” she cried. “My fault!”

Whatever had happened to Mop had happened because he was hurrying her through the market. Though Ness blamed the guard who’d pushed him, Rae knew—she’d seen his strange face and heard his strange words. It had all happened before he’d fallen.

Under the pelt—she’d been too muddled and worried about the wolf to stop him. To stop the girl who let the guard take her. Yes, that, too… the girl with the billowing tunic, the one who had nodded at her, who seemed even to know her, had let the guard take her.