Chapter 2
Vae heard the knocking at the door. Since Shahar had been sent north she often heard sounds in the house at night, and she had taught herself to ignore them, mostly.
But the hammering on the shop entrance below was not to be ignored as being born of winter solitude or wartime fears. It was real, and urgent, and she didn’t want to know who it was.
Her son was in the hallway outside her room, though; he had already pulled on trousers and the warm vest she had made him when the snows began. He looked sleepy and young, but he always looked young to her.
“Shall I go see?” he said bravely.
“Wait,” Vae said. She rose, herself, and pulled on a woolen robe over her night attire. It was cold in the house, and long past the middle of the night. Her man was away, and she was alone in the chill of winter with a fourteen-year-old child and a rapping, more and more insistent, at her door.
Vae lit a candle and followed Finn down the stairs.
“Wait,” slie said again in the shop, and lit two more candles, despite the waste. One did not open the door on a winter night without some light by which to see who came. When the candles had caught, she saw that Finn had taken the iron rod from the upstairs fire. She nodded, and he opened the door.
In the drifted snow outside stood two strangers, a man, and a tall woman he supported with an arm about her shoulders. Finn lowered his weapon; they were unarmed. Coming nearer, and holding her candle high, Vae saw two things: that the woman wasn’t a stranger after all, and that she was far gone with child.
“From the ta’kiena?” said Vae. “The third time.”
The woman nodded. Her eyes turned to Finn and then back to his mother. “He is still here,” she said. “I am glad.”
Finn said nothing; he was so young it could break Vae’s heart. The man in the doorway stirred. “We need help,” he said. “We are fleeing the Wolflord from our world. I am Pwyll, this is Jennifer. We crossed here last spring with Loren.”
Vae nodded, wishing Shahar were there instead of in the windy cold of North Keep with his grandfather’s spear. He was a craftsman, not a soldier; what did her husband know of war?
“Come in,” she said, and stepped back. Finn closed and bolted the door behind them. “I am Vae. My man is away. What help can I offer you?”
“The crossing brought me early to my time,” the woman called Jennifer said, and Vae saw from her face that it was true.
“Make a fire,” she said to Finn. “In my room upstairs.” She turned to the man. “You help him. Boil water on the fire. Finn will show you where the clean linen is. Quickly, both of you.”
They left, taking the stairs two at a time.
Alone in the candlelit shop, among the unspun wool and the finished craftings, she and the other woman gazed at each other.
“Why me?” said Vae.
The other’s eyes were clouded with pain. “Because,” she said, “I need a mother who knows how to love her child.”
Vae had been fast asleep only moments before; the woman in the room with her was so fair she might have been a creature from the dreamworld, save for her eyes.
“I don’t understand,” said Vae.
“I will have to leave him,” the woman said. “Could you give your heart to another son when Finn takes the Longest Road?”
In daylight she might have struck or cursed anyone who said so flatly the thing that twisted through her like a blade. But this was night and half a dream, and the other woman was crying.
Vae was a simple woman, a worker in wool and cloth with her man. She had a son who for no reason she could understand had been called three times to the Road when the children played the prophecy game, the ta’kiena, and then a fourth time before the Mountain went up to signal war. And now there was this.