A. 979. In this year was Æthelræd consecrated king at Kingston, on the Sunday, fourteen days after Easter…. That same year was seen a bloody cloud, oftentimes, in the likeness of fire; and it was mostly apparent at midnight, and so in various beams was coloured: when it began to dawn, then it glided away.

-- Excerpt from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Nothing like the clouds of colored fire had been seen over the village of Little Witchingham for ten years, and that was just fine with the villagers who lived there. Marauding bands of Danes on their east, the casually destructive movements of the Saxon armies to their west, and the ordinary concerns of bringing food from earth to table were quite enough for them, if you please, without the addition of bloody portents and unearthly lightning omens above their heads. But the lack of fire and lights in the æy for ten years did not, of course, mean that Little Witchingham had been entirely untouched by strange or mystical happenings.

The village and its surrounding farmland were divided more or less down the middle by the single road, little more than a wagon track, which ended in the yard of the squat stone chapel at the village’s northern limit. Those villagers who lived and worked along that track and to the west of it often found themselves making excuses to avoid crossing into the fields on the eastern side. They would, of course, say that they simply had no business over there. That the folk who lived in East Little Witchingham liked to be left to themselves, and who were they to tread loosely on other people’s wishes for privacy? Odd fellows, they might say if pressed. Perfectly fine people, of course, but… odd. Wore funny clothes. Used funny words, sometimes, when they thought they weren’t being heard. They were mostly of Danish blood on that side of the village, some might have pointed out, and naturally that would make a difference; but little quirks of culture and language could not account for everything.

They could not, for instance, explain the occasional flashes of light that could be seen through the trees along the edge of the easternmost barley plot, nor could they account for the numerous instances of people becoming inexplicably lost when trying to catch a stray sheep among the eastern fields. And although nobody ever believed him, the smithy’s boy Cerdic would swear to any who would listen that Hunlaf the woodcutter had a dog with two tails.

Whatever the reason for the strange happenings that tended to accompany the folk in the east of Little Witchingham, it was the general consensus of the rest of the village that they were not bad ‘uns, at any rate. They got on with life same as other folk, and helped out their neighbors when they could. Hunlaf the Woodcutter was the particular exception to their rule of avoidance; for whether his dog had one tail, or two, or twenty, he could mend a broken plough or carve a toy for a child with unnatural (and some said devilish) speed. Hunlaf was a big man in all directions – although surprisingly deft even with his massive hands – with wild locks of copper hair which he tried to placate by keeping them plaited; and he was never seen without his tall, stout ash stave on which were carved clusters of tiny inscrutable runes. Often during ploughing or harvest a handful of the village men could be seen carrying some broken farm implement from their western plots across the road to Hunlaf’s cottage, which was the only one of its fellows that was not hidden among the trees. The tool would be carried into his workshop and the door shut behind him, and his work was so utterly silent that none could ever figure how he did his repairs. But the silence was always broken for them by his daughter Helga, who would make friendly conversation with the farmers in the dooryard of her father’s shed while he worked. And as often as ploughs were dragged there with injuries even a toddler could have fixed, it was the opinion of the village mothers that it was really she who the farmers’ boys were most keen to visit.

Helga Hunlafsdottir was tall and fair – taller, in fact, than many of those keen farm boys by an inch or two. Her eyes were the transparent green of stained glass mounted in dark lead rings, and her golden hair hung nearly to her knees in a braid as thick as her forearm. Dressed as she usually was in her long cloak the color of oxlip blossoms, she looked like a valkyrja out of one of the Danes’ poems, and she could fix a man with a piercing stare to match if she thought he deserved it. The old women of Little Witchingham muttered amongst themselves that it was a shameful waste for a girl like that to be still unwed at nineteen, all her childbearing years slipping away unused, and there was a silent conspiracy among them to get her married off to one of their sons if they could. But although Helga was sweet and genial to all and had time for each of the village men’s flustered conversations, she had never shown real interest in any of them – and worse, her father seemed in no hurry to talk of dowry with any of them either. At first they assumed it was a divide of culture – that her father would naturally prefer to give her to one of his own Danish neighbors than a Saxon; but as he seemed to make no discernable gestures in that direction either, the speculation about why had only deepened.

“May’ap she think to join the church?” suggested a farmer’s wife one day over her churn, to the general nods of her neighbors. “Sweet girl, that. Make a good sister.”

“Or perhaps,” said the town’s priest, who happened to be passing the dooryard, “they might prefer the hammer of Thunor to the cross of Christ?” Everyone thought then of the runes carved on Hunlaf’s ash stave, and the women’s fingers leapt to their foreheads to cross the thought away.

“I allus thought it were because she had babbies already and no man’d take her,” said one old woman.

“I’d still take her,” piped her son from the safety of the other side of a hedge, and he had to dodge the empty bucket she tossed at him. The first woman scoffed.

“Oh, never! Those aren’t hers – those is orphans what she keeps sometime when she finds ‘em what needs her. She just send one up t’ Norwic back at Candlemas, to be in service on the bishop.”

“Aye, that’s too many to be all hers,” the old woman conceded.

“And she do be dreadful good at herbs and helping the sick ‘uns and all.” To this there was more general nodding and agreement, for it was widely known in both Little and Greater Witchingham that Helga Hunlafsdottir could spend five minutes in the forest and ten at her table and have ready in hand a concoction that would cure most things that ailed one.

“Know why, that?” interjected Cerdic the smithy’s boy, and like always, the villagers humored him. “She’s a witch, that be why.” Everyone nodded sagely and suppressed their giggles, and Cerdic puffed up as he always did when disbelieved. “I sawr that dog!” he protested. “That have two tails, it do. That in’t natural.”

“Nor be yer face, boy,” said the old woman, “but we don’t call ye witch for all.” And as was usual at this point, the conversation descended into the other farm boys trying to capture Cerdic to look for a witch’s mark on his very grubby person, and no more was said of Helga - that day at least. The villagers’ laughing voices fluttered up into the gentle spring breeze and were carried across the road, out over the eastern barley fields where they mingled with the trilling of songbirds, the hum of spring insects, the water-like shushing of moving treetops, and – in the far distance – the squeals and laughter of children in the field beyond Hunlaf the Woodcutter’s cottage.

*   *   *

“Harald! Drop that this instant, that is NOT food!”

In the grass at the edge of Hunlaf’s dooryard, the boy called Harald grinned wickedly and moved the squirming lizard in his fist closer to his mouth. Helga Hunlafsdottir drew herself to her full height in the cottage doorway and narrowed her glass-green eyes. “Harald….”

The boy’s resolve wobbled under her firm gaze, and the lizard took its chance to wriggle free of his chubby fingers. It scurried away into the thick spring grass to celebrate its good fortune with its fellows. Helga swept her oxlip yellow cloak back from her arms and scooped Harald up from the dirt where he had been playing. It cheered her to feel the weight he had gained – when she had found him and his sister Hnossa a month past, he had been thin and weak, having lived on berries in the forest for days after the destruction of his village by a Saxon army. The children had been orphaned, their whole settlement burned, and the older sister had done the best she could to feed the both of them as they wandered aimlessly looking for the next village. All this Helga had learned in pieces from Hnossa; Harald still hadn’t spoken, but that didn’t worry her terribly at the moment. Children often chose silence as a response to the uncontrollable world they lived in. He would, perhaps, speak again in his own time; and if he didn’t, what then? A man didn’t need to speak to make his way in life, and besides – his sister could chatter plenty enough for both of them.

“If you are hungry,” Helga said to him softly, giving the boy a gentle squeeze, “please try to confine your diet to things that are already killed and waiting for you in the kitchen, hmm? Or perhaps some nice bread? Mm? Can you say bread?” She shifted him to her hip and mimed the breaking of bread. Harald stuck out his little pink tongue in response and made a noise at her. “Right,” she surrendered, and carried him into the cottage.

Inside the little house was cool, dark, and dry. The air smelt of new bread and the herbs that hung from the thatch ceiling over a long table which stood under the single window. Helga put Harald down on the rush floor mat and went to the table, pulling toward her a partial loaf of bread wrapped loosely in a white cloth. Her hand rested on the loaf for a moment as she glanced out the window, ensuring that she was not observed, and then at Harald (who was looking not at her but at the corner of the mat he was now trying to chew). She then picked up not the bread knife but instead a long, slender stick of pear wood which had been lying in a cut groove at the back of the table.

“Skera,” she whispered, and touched the stick to the loaf of bread. A thin slice lopped itself off the end of the loaf and fell over onto the surface of the table. Helga slipped the pear rod back into its groove and draped the cloth back over the loaf. Turning to Harald, she bent down and held out the bread to him. He took it with both dirty hands. “Better than lizards?” she asked him, expecting no response.

“Awm,” he grunted, shoving the bread into his mouth. Helga sighed. She supposed while she was at it, she might as well feed the other one too – if she could find her.

“Harald, have you seen your sister lately?”

Chew, chew, chew.

“You could …point in a general direction…?”

Chew, chew, chew.

“Alright. Enjoy your bread. Do NOT eat the rug. I’ll be right back.” Helga pushed herself upright again and stepped back out into the dooryard. It was only the two children staying there at the moment – she’d cared for as many as six at a time in the past – but between Harald trying to eat everything that held still (and some things that did not) and his sister Hnossa always running off and getting into mischief, two was quite full capacity, thank you very much. The sister was older, almost nine, and although she at least knew the difference between a meal and wildlife, she had a particular proclivity for getting into trouble while trying to chase said wildlife. Helga thought for a moment and then went back inside to retrieve the stick of pear wood. Once in the dooryard again, she placed the stick on a bare spot of dirt and bent over it. “Leita,” she said quietly.

The stick lay quite still for a few seconds, as one might expect a stick to do. Then it did something very unexpected and un-stick-like; it quivered gently, stirring up loose soil beneath it, and then it spun in place three times before coming sharply to a halt, its tapered nose pointing at an angle into the meadow beyond the dooryard. Helga nodded as though this were just what she’d expected to happen. She picked up the stick, slipped it into an inner pocket of her cloak, and started walking into the tall grass in the direction it had pointed.

*   *   *

There was a grand spreading oak at the end of the far meadow just before the cultivated land of Little Witchingham gave way to wild forest, and it was here that the spinning stick had directed Helga, if vaguely. She was still far distant from the tree, but when she shielded her eyes from the sun she could just make out the shape of the little girl sprawled out in the cool grass beneath it, head bent low to the ground and feet jutting up into the air behind her. Helga sighed in relief. She had half expected to find the girl buried up to her waist in a badger’s sett or stuck up a tree with a wasp nest. Lying on the ground watching insects was infinitely more manageable. Helga picked up her skirt to stop it dragging on the vegetation and trudged on, stirring up disgruntled young grasshoppers and jarring clouds of fragrance out of the abundant wildflowers. She moved as softly as she could; Hnossa had snuck up behind Hunlaf two days ago and nearly caused him to light his beard on fire, and on her way through the field Helga had decided to even the score by grabbing the little girl’s feet and tickling before she realized anyone was behind her.

As she grew closer, Helga began to hear faint whispers of the sort little girls make when they are imparting great girlhood secrets to a bosom companion. Helga smiled; the little one was telling her troubles to butterflies today. Well, let her; butterflies were excellent secret-keepers, and they held no judgments nor offered opinions. The best kind of friend, Helga thought absently. She was approaching the shade of the tree now, and she tucked her skirt hem up into her girdle to free her hands and slipped out of her shoes. She would have to be utterly silent if she wanted to surprise such an observant child. Helga tiptoed up until she could hear snatches of the girl’s whispers.

“…ssssaaa, ssskæ. Ssssimii hifffu?”

Helga stopped abruptly, her hands still in the ready-to-tickle position. Her skin went cold in spite of the warm sunshine. The words coming from Hnossa’s mouth were not any that Helga recognized, and her voice itself sounded… odd. Incongruous. There was an echoic quality to it that made it sound as though it came not from the little girl’s throat but from some Other Place. But it was not the unfamiliar language or the tone of Hnossa’s speech that froze Helga in her tracks; rather, it was what she was speaking to. Coiled in front of the little girl’s face, its head raised up level with her eyes and swaying gently in the breeze, was a large banded serpent. Helga nearly cried out, until she realized that it was not an adder but a harmless grass snake. Its quick little tongue was flashing in and out of its mouth as though it meant to answer the child’s apparent question. Perhaps it did answer her; for after a few moments of what seemed like silence to Helga, the girl continued in her strange hiss.

“Sssssia gassssi nafassss hhhhorem—”

Hnossa stopped in mid-word as the snake flicked its tongue again, this time bobbing its head in a way that was quite unnatural for a snake. As though it had spoken and interrupted her, Hnossa’s little brows drew together. “Sssjehhh dsssoduuxsss?” The snake bobbed its head more deliberately, and Hnossa rolled over to face Helga, startled.

“Fru Helga!” she cried, this time in her normal voice, and Helga let her still-frozen hands drop down to her sides. The snake melted silently back into the grass, apparently deciding that two humans was one too many. Hnossa glanced back at it, seeming disappointed, and Helga cleared her throat uncertainly.

“I… I was feeding your brother, and…thought you might be hungry too.” The little girl shrugged her shoulders in a way that said she would never turn away food, but she would rather still be conversing with the snake. Helga tucked her skirt under her legs and sat down beside Hnossa, who was picking nervously at the petals of nearby flowers. “Did you make a friend?” she asked diplomatically after a few moments of silence.

“He said his name was Æssmoghhu.”

“Did he?” Helga asked genially to mask her astonishment. The little girl nodded, picking petals off a cowslip.

“Didn’t you hear him, Fru Helga?”

“No, I didn’t,” Helga said quietly. She chose her next words cautiously, careful of the girl’s reaction. “Hnossa, when Æssmoghhu spoke to you, did you hear his voice out here, in the air… or inside your mind?” She tapped gently at Hnossa’s forehead.

The little girl thought about that, her brows and nose wrinkling, and Helga noticed that her downy eyebrows were as pale as milk in the spring sunlight. “His mouth didn’t move, did it, Fru Helga?” Hnossa said after some time, pulling the petals from another flower one at a time before looking up at her guardian. Helga shook her head.

“No.” She regarded the little girl thoughtfully, the full import of what she had witnessed now beginning to dawn upon her. She had heard of people being able to speak with serpents, but only in stories, or in second- or third-hand accounts. Her father’s father Thorfridh had once told her about a seiðmaðr from his grandfather’s village who could do it, but that was long ago and far away. It was a rare thing – and it never occurred in isolation from …other abilities. Helga picked a harebell and tucked it gently behind the little girl’s ear. “Hnossa, do you speak to snakes often, or was this the first time?”

Hnossa shrugged again, but then she followed it with an answer. “When I was little like Harald, there was an adder in the firewood pile. It wanted to bite Father, but I told it to go away and it listened.” Helga smiled at her and pressed further.

“And what did you say to your friend today?”

“That was aloud,” said Hnossa. “You didn’t hear me?” Helga took a deep breath before answering her.

“I… heard you speaking to him. But I couldn’t understand the words you said.”

“But…,” began Hnossa, then she stopped. She took a moment to ponder, and then blurted, “But I was saying ordinary words, Fru Helga! He was surprised that I could hear him, and I told him yes, I would speak to him. And I asked him his name – and then I asked him how I could hear him when other people couldn’t. I think he was going to explain, but then he told me there was a person coming, and I said, What person? That was you, and then he went away.” She picked another flower and twirled it between her fingers thoughtfully. “Why couldn’t you understand me?”

“Because,” Helga explained slowly, “you weren’t using a language that I know.”

“But I don’t know any other languages, Fru Helga, just this one!”

“In your mind, it must sound like our language,” Helga nodded. “But out loud, you were speaking the tongue of the serpents.”

“How?” Hnossa cried, a look of consternation settling over her face. “How can I speak what I don’t know?”

“My grandfather called it the Ormrmal – Serpent Speech,” Helga replied. She reached over and pulled the little girl into her lap. “The Saxons call it Snacan-tunge. There are other names for it in other places. It works in your mind – people who have it can hear and understand serpents and can speak back to them in their own language, even though it may sound to them like they are speaking their ordinary tongue. It is very uncommon. You are the first person I have ever met who can do it.” She tapped the little girl on the nose and gave her a reassuring smile, because she still looked worried. Hnossa gazed up at her seriously.

“Is it bad?”

“Of course not,” Helga said immediately. “You kept your father safe from a bite, and you made a friend today. Those aren’t bad things.”

“But you were afraid when you heard me,” Hnossa said matter-of-factly. Helga sighed.

“I was… very surprised. I have never known anyone who could do it, and it sounds… a little unnerving to people who can’t understand the words. It is a tongue full of whispers.”

This seemed to placate the girl, and the two of them sat in silence for several warm, comfortable minutes. The bright green leaves above them made hushing and puffing sounds in the breeze, and they both watched a fat, dozy bumblebee make its way through several flowers in front of them before floating off to somewhere less inhabited. After what she felt was long enough, Helga brushed her fingers through Hnossa’s milk-pale hair and asked what she really wanted to know.

“Hnossa,” she began, “are there any other things you can do that other people can’t? Maybe things you never showed anybody because you were worried about what people would say?”

The little girl didn’t answer right away. Instead, she reached down and plucked a harebell stem on which only the topmost flower was open. The milky blue petals matched her eyes almost exactly, and each unopened bud below it was a deep starry purple. Hnossa stared at the flowers almost dreamily until Helga thought she simply wasn’t going to answer at all. Then, as Helga watched, the bud nearest the open flower began to swell as though it were taking a breath; it pulsed momentarily like a small beating heart, and then it opened. Below it, like a chain reaction down the stem, every other closed bud swelled and then blossomed in succession.

“Harald claps for me when I do that one,” Hnossa whispered, and Helga could feel her little body trembling with effort – and with pride. Suddenly, she twisted sharply in Helga’s lap and faced her. “Please don’t tell anyone!” It was another whisper, but a whisper made loud and sibilant by fear. Hnossa’s petal-blue eyes were large with mortification. “Please,” she repeated. “I don’t want to go into the river.”

Helga felt a little piece of her heart break at those words; she squeezed the little girl against her bodice and kissed her lightly on the forehead. “No, nobody’s going into the river,” she whispered into the child’s hair, wondering how many witch-drownings the girl had witnessed before the age of nine. The fear in Hnossa’s voice made her feel sick in her stomach, and it made her next decision easier. Helga kissed the girl’s head again and then moved her off her lap; she held the bony little shoulders at arm’s length and met her eyes reassuringly. “Would you like to know a secret, Hnossa?” she smiled, and the little girl nodded. Helga looked around to be sure nobody was approaching them through the barley fields or from the forest; then she reached into her cloak and slipped out the long, straight piece of pear wood. She held it up at Hnossa’s eye level, and the little girl ran her gaze along its polished length, lingering for a moment on the etched figures and runes that formed a kind of grip at one end.

“What—” Hnossa began, but Helga hushed her gently. She picked up one of the flower stems from which Hnossa had plucked all the petals and bade her hold it out at arm’s length; then she drew the tip of her wand – for that is what it was – in a small circle around the bare stem.

“Bœta,” Helga murmured. Hnossa gasped. As if drawn by a soft magnetism, a cloud of petals picked themselves up from the grass where they had lain and began to swirl around the empty stem. Then one by one, they reattached themselves to their former places until the flower in the little girl’s hand was whole and bobbing in the breeze with the weight of petals.

Helga turned her gaze from the flower to the child’s face. The smile blazing back at her was brighter than spring sunshine.

*   *   *

Hunlaf the Woodcutter returned from his day’s trip to Norwic in the gloaming hour and was greeted by an owl whose repeated calls from the nearby woods seemed to chide him for coming home so late. He had gone to the town that morning to check up on the orphan boy who they’d placed in the care of St. Mary’s church months before, and he had told Helga he’d be back by dinner, but ah! There had been new potion ingredients at the market, all the way from Brittany, so she could forgive him the couple of hours. The sky was the soft color of new-churned cream with blackberries in, and he took a couple of deep, snorty breaths of the wild spring night air before setting off down the field row toward his cottage. It was his custom to apparate under the big oak, far from the prying eyes of the úgaldr in the village, and walk the rest of the distance home. On a night like this one, it was no trouble – quite the opposite, in fact, a pleasant stroll.

“You can leave the stalking, Sœtr,” Hunlaf said amicably in the direction of the thickening barley to his right, where a rhythmic rustling had been gaining speed alongside him. “You’re no good at it, and besides, I was the one who dropped you in there after we apparated.” The rhythmic steps halted momentarily, were replaced by a second of frenzied shuffling, and then suddenly a small white dog with a brown head shot up out of the barley as though fired from a bow. His jump took him two feet into the air, his paws tucked neatly under him in the same way a deer tucks its hooves when it jumps a log. Hunlaf chuckled at him as he landed on the track at his master’s feet, immediately coiling his body down against the dirt again to prepare for another powerful jump. “Are you a crup or a hart, my friend?” the big man laughed, and the crup barked sharply in answer, banging his thick forked tail rapidly against the packed dirt path. “Come on, then,” Hunlaf beckoned, poking Sœtr in the muscular hind leg with his staff. “We’ve brought Helga a package of new ingredients from the town and we’ll see what she makes of them, all right?”

Sœtr the crup pounced straight up into the air with the force of a Norman longbow, his folded ears coming level with Hunlaf’s broad chest before gravity took over again; this was followed by two sharp staccato barks.

“Yes, I’m sure there’ll be something off the fire for you to chew on, you miserable eater of worlds,” Hunlaf chortled, walking on down the track. “I should have named you Sköll. You do nothing but swallow all my household goods, and you mock me while you do it.”

Sœtr trotted along ahead of his master, a self-satisfied grin stretching his muzzle and his forked tail quivering perpendicular to the ground.

“I wish you would swallow your tail instead like the Great Serpent,” Hunlaf went on as the thatched roof of his cottage came into view. “Then perhaps I wouldn’t have to worry about you running amok around the úgaldr and giving us away. You know, one day they are going to finally believe that witless smith-boy when he prattles about your tails, and then you’ll be sorry, because I’ll feed you to them while Helga and I escape. Hmm.” He hid his grin behind layers of copper beard, and Sœtr (who never believed any of his master’s threats) charged on ahead toward the cottage, barking uproariously.

Helga was standing in the dooryard of the cottage waiting for them, and Hunlaf raised one bushy red eyebrow in surprise.

“My daughter always goes to sleep with the sun,” he said genially. “You can’t be her.” He tapped his staff sharply against some charred logs in a stone-lined depression in the soil, and a merry little fire sprang up where he had touched; Sœtr barked at it and hopped around as though he would like to bite the flames, and Hunlaf shooed him away. “Go on, you. Go thrash some poor rabbit to death and save me the trouble of feeding you out of the kitchen. Go on. And stop that barking, you’ll wake those children and Loki under the ground, too!” He watched as the crup pounced away into the dark trees behind the cottage, then turned back to his daughter. Helga was smiling, but she almost never stayed up past sunset, and he saw now that her wand was in plain sight in her hand. A second unusual thing for her. Hunlaf leaned his staff against the wall of the cottage and eased himself down onto the polished tree stump he kept there for a stool. “Now,” he grunted, waving for Helga to sit on the upturned basket beside him. “What’s got my daughter awake past her bed-time, hmm? Other than the fact that I was two hours late.”

Helga lowered herself onto the basket and took a few moments before answering him. “I found Hnossa under the oak tree this afternoon,” she began.

“Antagonizing something with sharp claws?” Hunlaf asked, unlacing the cloth that wrapped his calves.

“She was speaking to a grass snake.”

“Oh?” Hunlaf said automatically as he coiled the leather thongs around his hand. When Helga didn’t go on, he looked up at her. Her expression drove home her meaning. “Oh,” he repeated, slowly laying aside his leg wraps and their thongs and interlacing his fingers on his ample stomach. “It’s like that, is it?”

“I’d never heard the Ormrmal before. It’s so….” She trailed off.

“Unsettling,” her father supplied, and she nodded. “I take it that’s not the only thing she can do?”

“When I prodded her, she blossomed a harebell bud for me,” Helga said pensively. “And then she was so afraid she started shaking. She begged me not to put her in the river.”

Hunlaf winced. “And naturally, you had to give her a little demonstration to show her she was in safe hands.”

“We can’t find a home for them elsewhere now,” Helga said softly. “Someone has to teach her how to use her magic, or she’ll be like that boy Grandmother told me about from her parents’ village.”

“You mean the one who held in his magic like holding his breath until he exploded, sunk two ships, and nearly killed half the villagers? Yes, someone will have to teach her.” Hunlaf stretched his feet toward the fire and flexed his ankles. “Is the boy magic as well?”

“I don’t think so,” said Helga, turning her wand over in her hands. “I asked her if anyone else in her family could do any of these things, and she said she had never seen it.”

Hunlaf sighed. “Úgaldr-born and now orphaned, with no wizarding family. Which means she knows nothing except what she’s been able to teach herself. No wand, no names for any of the things she can do.”

“She’ll learn quickly,” Helga replied, her smile returning somewhat. “She’s bright. And now that she has a name for what she’s been doing, I think she’ll be eager to learn everything she can.” They fell into a comfortable silence. The night breeze bent the fire to one side and then the other; it whiffled up inside the hood of Helga’s cloak, billowing it up around her hair and filling it with the scent of corn roses. Presently, Hunlaf groaned and stretched, then hauled himself up off the stump and reached for his staff.

“Well, come on then, daughter. Let’s get some sleep. We have a lot to do tomorrow.” He stretched his shoulder blades, said “Sœtr, kom!” and then tapped his staff sharply on the ground, eliciting a little puff of purplish light from the dirt beneath it. Helga could hear the sounds of the crup crashing through the undergrowth toward them as she got up from her seat. She pointed her wand at the fire.

“Sløkk,” she murmured, and the fire disappeared in a puff of smoke. “Why so much to do tomorrow?” she asked as Sœtr skidded into the dooryard, looking disappointed that he’d missed the fire. Her father shooed the crup inside the cottage.

“Because,” he said to her over his shoulder, “you have to spend the morning with the little one in the forest hunting bowtruckles and finding some wood for her wand – and I have to spend the afternoon carving it.”