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Maddy, disappointed.
    “Treasure?” He laughed. “Aye, if you like. A treasure lost since the Elder Age. That’s why the goblins are here in such number. That’s why it carries such a charge. You can feel it, Maddy, can’t you?” he said. “It’s like living under a vulcano.”
    “What’s a vulcano?”
    “Never mind. Just watch it, Maddy. Just look out for anything strange. That Horse is only half asleep, and if it wakes up—”
    “I wish
I
could wake it,” said Maddy. “Don’t you?”
    One-Eye smiled and shook his head. It was a strange smile, at the same time cynical and rather sad. He pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders. “No,” he said. “I don’t think I do. That’s not a road I’d care to tread, not for all of Otter’s Ransom. Though there may come a time when I have no choice.”
    “But the treasure?” she said. “You could be rich—”
    “Maddy,” he sighed. “I could be dead.”
    “But surely—”
    “There are far worse things than goblins down there, and treasures rarely sleep alone.”
    “So?” she said. “I’m not afraid.”
    “I daresay you’re not,” said One-Eye in a dry voice. “But listen, Maddy. You’re seven years old. The Hill—and whatever lies underneath it—has been waiting for a long time. I’m sure it can wait a little longer.”
    “How much longer?”
    One-Eye laughed.
    “Next year?”
    “We’ll see. Learn your lessons, watch the Hill, and look out for me by Harvestmonth.”
    “Swear you’ll be back?”
    “On Odin’s name.”
    “And on yours?”
    He nodded. “Aye, girl. That too.”
             
    After that, the Outlander had returned to Malbry once a year—never before Beltane or later than Maddy’s birthday at the end of Harvestmonth—trading fabrics, salt, skins, sugar, salves, and news. His arrival was the high point of Maddy’s year; his departure, the beginning of a long darkness.
    Every time he asked her the same question.
    “What’s new in Malbry?”
    And every time she gave him the same accounts of the goblins and their mischief-making: of larders raided, cellars emptied, sheep stolen, milk soured. And every time he said: “Nothing more?” and when Maddy assured him that was all, he seemed to relax, as if some great burden had been lifted temporarily from his shoulders.
    And, of course, at each visit he taught her new skills.
    First she learned to read and write. She learned poems and songs and foreign tongues; medicines and plant lore and kennings and stories. She learned histories and folktales and sayings and legends; she studied maps and rivers, mountains and valleys, stones and clouds, and charts of the sky.
    Most importantly, she learned the runes. Their names, their values, their fingerings. How to carve them into fortune stones, to be scattered and read for a glimpse of the future, or bind them like stalks into a corn dolly; how to fashion them into an ash stick; how to whisper their verses into a cantrip, to skim them like jump stones, throw them like firecrackers, or cast their shadows with her fingers.
    She learned to use
Ár,
to ensure a good harvest—

    —and
T
ý
r,
to make a hunting spear find its mark—

    —and
Logr,
to find water underground.

    By the time she was ten years old, she knew all sixteen runes of the Elder Script, various bastard runes from foreign parts, and several hundred assorted kennings and cantrips. She knew that One-Eye traveled under the sign of
Raedo,
the Journeyman—though his rune was reversed and therefore unlucky, which meant that he had undergone many trials and misfortunes along the way.
    Maddy’s own runemark was neither broken nor reversed. But according to One-Eye, it was a bastard rune, not a rune of the Elder Script, which made it unpredictable. Bastard runes were tricky, he said. Some worked, but not well. Some worked not at all. And some tended to slip out of alignment, to tipple themselves in small, sly ways, to
warp,
like arrows that have been left in