"I don't know."

"Have you told me everything you remember about her?"

"What did it mean, Father? Do you know?"

"I might guess, I suppose-but I have no intention of guessing until you're willing to tell me everything you remember about it. Are you?"

"I'll think about it," he said, and lay down.

The sea was to his left, cliffs of wet black rock topped with dark and lofty trees to his right. At times he climbed over tumbled stones and fallen trunks. At others, he walked stony beaches with water lapping at his boots. He had gone a long way already and felt he had a long way to go still, although he could not have said how far, or where he was going. A single bird swooped and wheeled over the sea; once it cried hoarsely and he stopped to look up at it, touched by some memory to which he could not put a name.

At last he saw a house, small and primitive, with walls of big timbers and a steep roof of wooden shingles that were curling now, warping from the sea's salt spray and the Short Sun's heat. He made for it, aware that in some fashion he had left the beach, that he was wading, or perhaps walking inland. There was sand under his feet as he approached the house, sand mixed with chips of bark. He tried to rid his boots of it before he went inside, kicking the step gently with his left foot, then his right. He stepped inside…

And was home. The table at which they had eaten was there, armless chairs for Nettle and himself, stools for the boys. When Marrow and the rest arrived to ask him to go back to the Whorl, there would not be chairs enough for all of them, and someone would carry out the heavy wooden storage box that he had built for winter clothes, and someone else would sit on that.

But Marrow and the rest had not yet come to ask him to go. There was a child asleep in a basket now, the old wicker basket Nettle had woven for herself before they left the farm that had been their share of Blue, the land given them for coming because everyone had wanted land and livestock, even those like themselves who had less than no idea what to do with it. The sleeping child was Sinew. He knew it before he saw its face, before he saw the small silver ring the child wore, or the white stone in the ring.