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caught her attention.
    “Got a beating, didn’t you?” It was young Arl; he asked the question almost shyly, keeping both hands out of sight behind his back. “I am sorry, really. Gurda is an old she-bear. My father would make it hard on her if she ever touched me! But I guess you have no one to protect you.” Slowly he moved nearer—walking alone, though the rest of the children stood behind him in a giggling row at the comer of the house.
    “I shouldn’t have teased you before,” he told her with boyish earnestness. “I have something for you... to make it up. Here, look. It is a bracelet.”
    Stopping a few paces from the crouching girl, he took out from behind his back something that glinted dully in the noon sun. The small band of scalloped and speckled beads turned and twisted, its baubles clicking together in his careful fingers.
    “They are seashells, look—from the Vilayet Sea, far away from here. The small creatures that live in them die, and then they wash up on the beaches. But they contain the magic of the southern lands. If you have a bone chill, or the ague, they will cure it.” He thrust the bracelet toward the girl. “Here, Tamsin, take it. It’s for you.”
    He held out the trinket toward her, patiently waiting. The young girl gazed on it with obvious fascination; she turned the face of her tightly clutched doll toward it as well, in an unthinking gesture.
    At length she straightened from her crouch, careless of the nervous giggles of the waiting children... and yet she hesitated, watching the charm. Then at last she came forward and reached out, her fingers closing on the dangling beads.
    “Now! Grab it!” His hand snaring hers in a taut grip, Arl lunged against her to seize her doll—but Tamsin twisted away from him, shrinking and cringing to escape his one-handed clutch.
    “Get it, throw it in the well!” the rest of the children cried as they swarmed around Tamsin. They darted at her, trying to pluck the toy from her stubborn grip. At last the small, mischievous boy-child Asa succeeded. He hurled the flailing effigy overhead to Arl, who bore it toward the stone-curbed well.
    “Aha, run, Arl! Keep it away from her!”
    “Drown it, the ugly thing!”
    “Maybe when we drop it in, she’ll finally talk to us!”
    Tamsin, by some miracle of acceleration, darted across the hard-packed earth to converge with the older boy as he reached the well. Seeing the taut, silent determination in her lunge, he tossed the doll out of reach, back to the elfin boy.
    “Now, throw it in!”
    As he spoke, the gourd doll whirled overhead, to bounce with a hissing rattle off the angular wooden crane of the well. The agile lad leaped up and seized it in mid-air. At the same moment, Tamsin spun and launched herself at the boy, both hands extended to clutch the doll. She collided with Asa and knocked him over backward; an instant later, boy and doll disappeared from sight over the high curb of the well.
    The children froze in their play. Mere instants later they were roused by raucous, frantic screams echoing from the mouth of the well.
    Running to the curb, they found the boy-child caught a mere arm’s reach below the rim. Through luck, the heavy wooden bucket had been left in its raised position, and the rickety crane had jammed tight instead of unwinding. The boy’s arm, caught in the vessel’s metal strap, appeared broken. Yet he lived and still bellowed loudly. Promptly Arl and the other children hauled him out, trying to calm his moans and cries.
    Tamsin, meanwhile, retrieved her doll, which had landed in the dry bucket. Plucking it out, disregarded by the others, she darted off around the house... only to run straight into the wet, smelly apron of Gurda, who was just leaving her fire to see what the tumult was about. “Here, now, my little hellion! What new mischief have you been stirring up? What happened, tell me—no, don’t try to pull away from me, or this gutting-fork will play a serenade on