For seven and seventy days and nights, a weird, wild man had been seen crouching on the shore.
All the people in the village atop the cliff avoided him and said that he was mad. The dogs would not go near him. The children refrained from pelting him with stones. Even the local priest refused to have anything to do with him, claiming that he was not of the parish and therefore it was not the responsibility of the parish priest to attempt to rid him of his demons.
Aengus hesitated in the doorway, wishing himself invisible, wishing himself small. He was not a coward, but he was a meek man at heart, and all he asked of life was that it be easy. The boldest thing he had ever done was to run away with the wife of the boldest man he knew. Even then, there had been days when he had wondered who had run away with whom.
Anson’s wife was a quiet, unimaginative young lady who scarcely ever surprised him. He often found her somewhat tedious, in fact, but now he told himself that if she were to make a habit of surprising him in this manner, he would rather have his quiet, unimaginative Wynna back.
“What do you call this?” he asked.
Lar slipped the strap off his shoulder and dropped his bag on the floor just in time to prevent dinner from being crushed against his body.
“Lar!” Omur squealed. “What did you bring? Fish again?”
“Murhi, quit your jumping,” Surr muttered.
Since the death of his mother, he had not bothered scolding his younger brothers for any but the worst mischief, so futile did it seem. But the bouncing was particularly annoying, and he wanted to take a nap.
“What are you doing up here all alone on the hill, Cat?” Lasrua asked. “You’re almost as high as the roof.”
“Only watching the clouds,” Cat said dreamily.
So far this year, May had been more of a gentle June, clear and cloudless, and warm and dry without being stifling. It had been a month of southerly winds, and to Lena, who lived just north of the river, it blew up cool and damp from the carr, and sweet with the smell of the bean fields along the way.
Sophie leapt up from the couch. Her smoldering anxiety had been replaced by a certainty that she had done wrong.
She had not known whether she was supposed to undress while waiting for him. She had not even known whether she could permit herself to go behind the curtain without him. She had not known, so she had done nothing. It was surely the wrong thing.
Olaf had guessed when he and Astrid had been told to wait in the hall that his brother had not come home unaccompanied. However, he could not guess who the visitors might be. The sound of a fussing baby and a whining toddler in the entry confused him, for who would bring a small baby on a visit to such an out-of-the-way house as his brother’s?
But Olaf feared they might have to wait a while to find out. The steward had already been thundering when Olaf and Astrid had come in from the court, and now he could hear the housekeeper shrieking her way down the front stairs.
“Sophie!”
If the idea had seemed crazy before, it seemed almost cruel now. Downstairs in his room, “Sophie” had been Sophie in the abstract, Sophie of his memories—Sophie of the red ringlets; Sophie of the pretty, powdered face.
“I baptize you in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the… and of the Other Thing.”
Chapters
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