She cut a piece long enough to let the medal dangle between the tiny hillocks of her to-be breasts, slipping it beneath her sleeping shift. She went back to the window and stood a moment longer watching the moon. I have to go out, I can’t think in here. I have to plan how to work this. The other times she’d sneaked out, she’d pulled on a pair of old trousers she filched from the ragbag and a sleeveless tunic that was getting to be too small for her. Somehow, though, that didn’t feel appropriate this time. In spite of the danger and the beating she’d get if she were discovered, the disgrace she’d bring on kin and clan, she went like she was, her thin coltish body barely hidden by the fine white cloth she had woven herself on the family loom. She glided through the house silent as the earthsoul of a murdered child and out the postern gate, remembering the doubletwelve of soldiers quartered on the Vale folk only after she was irretrievably beyond the protection of the House walls. Like a startled, no a frightened, fawn she fled up the hillside to a small glade with a giant oak in the center of it, an oak that felt to her as always old as the stone bones of the mountain.

She drifted onto dew-soaked grass; her feet were aching with cold but she ignored that and danced slowly around the perimeter of the glade through the dappled moonlight, around and around, singing a wordless song that wavered through four notes no more, singing herself deeper into trance, around and around, gradually spiraling inward until she spread her arms and embraced the tree, circling it a last time,’ drinking in the dark dry smell of it, breasts, belly and thighs rubbing against its crumbly rough bark. When she finished the round, she folded liquidly down and curled her body between two great roots pushing-up through layers of dead and rotting leaves. With a small sigh, she closed her eyes and seemed to sleep.