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stone.
    Ring of Bright Water
may be the only book Letty ever read to her in full. In any case, it’s the one Edal envisions—bluespine, cover photo of a boy and his otter on a beach—when she calls up her mother in that rare, forgiving light.
    Letty’s face was prettiest in profile. Her hair slipped forward, every strand of it still dark, still young. She would tuck the hank behind her ear six, seven times before giving up and letting it hang. Edal longed to sweep it back with her fingers, maybe even hold it in place—her hand a pale, decorative comb—but a stone would never do such a thing.
    The story began with a man named Gavin sitting in his
kitchen-living room
and an otter sleeping like a baby among the sofa cushions nearby. They were in a house called Camusfeàrna, in a place Edal had never heard of called the Highlands. If it hadn’t been for the cover—a photograph and not a drawing—she might have thought the whole thing was made up.
    Her mother explained nothing, and she left nothing out. Countless words slipped Edal’s grasp and swam away, but they swam beautifully, some darting, others wagging long and languid lines.
Pinnacles
and
glacial corries. Filigree tracery
and
tide-wrack rubbish-heap. Clairvoyance
and
manna
and
quarry. Purloined
.
    Letty didn’t spare her the part where the hooded crows pecked the eyes out of a living lamb, nor did she skip the fatal rhubarb-leaf poisoning of the nanny goats. She read straight through the pneumonia that almost killed Jonnie the dog, and on to the cancer that got him in the end. Jonnie, whose
fleecy flank
Gavin had so often used as a pillow when the two of them went out together in the boat.
    Letty didn’t cry when such things happened, but when Jonnie lay down under the vet’s needle, she turned from thepage to look her daughter in the eye. “Everything dies, Edal. Everything and everyone.”
    It wasn’t news to Edal. She may have been only seven, but she’d already lost Nana and Grandpa Adam and, before them, the father she’d never met. Letty wouldn’t talk about the boy who’d gotten her in trouble, so Edal’s knowledge of him was patchy, stitched together from scraps her grandparents had let slip. He wasn’t a bad boy, just a little wild. He’d seen sense after a talk or two, agreed to make things legal and grow up fast. Too bad he didn’t do a little of that growing up before deciding to take his father’s Ski-Doo out on the lake. The ice was nowhere near ready to bear that kind of weight.
    So, no, Edal didn’t need reminding about death. All the same, she couldn’t help crying a little, but she did so silently, in order that she might not miss what came next. Jonnie’s end brought the end of a chapter. Gavin couldn’t imagine owning another dog—that corner of his heart had sealed over. He could, however, imagine owning something else.
    He found the first otter in another place with a made-up-sounding name: the Tigris marshes of Iraq. Edal fell in love with Chahala just as Gavin did—and who could blame them, when she had
more charm per cubic inch of her tiny body
than any other infant. Where a kitten would’ve mewed, Chahala chittered—a word Edal understood instantly via its sound. Gavin made a daughter of Chahala. He nursed her from a bottle, carried her inside his shirt, taught her to know her own name. When she was old enough, he fed her the flesh of two dead sparrows—sad, because Edal knew sparrows, could picture them puffed and twittering among the sunlit branches of the back hedge; but also exciting, becauseit meant Chahala was growing like any baby, trading milk for solid food.
    Then came the food that killed her. Digitalis was another deadly plant, and men in the Tigris marshes used it to poison fish—which, in turn, became poisonous themselves. Chahala lay on her back among the water flowers, looking as though she were sleeping. Her death ended another chapter, and when Edal lay in her small bed later that night, she felt