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shout to her playmates, “Irena tialohadji!”—Irena has come back!
    Irene hugged and swung the child till she squealed, and the troop of four little ones all shrieked in their sweet, thin voices to be hugged and swung, dancing about her till Palizot looked out of the courtyard to see what the commotion was, and came forward wiping her hands on her apron, calm, saying, “Come in, come in, Irena. You’ve come a long way, you’ll be tired.” So she had welcomed Irene the first time she ever came to Mountain Town, fourteen years old, hungry,
dirty, tired, frightened. She had not known the language then but she had understood what Palizot said to her: Come in, child, come home.
    The fire was burning in the big hearth of the inn. An excellent perfume of onion, cabbage, and spices pervaded the rooms. Everything was as it had been, as it ought to be, with a couple of improvements to be admired: the floors were covered with a reddish straw matting, instead of sand scattered on the bare wood. “That’s nice, it’s warmer,” Irene said, and Palizot, pleased but judicious, “I don’t know yet how it will wear. Let’s have some light in here beside the fire. Sofir! Irena has come! Will you stay a while with us, levadja?”
    Child, the word meant, dear child; they added the ‘adja’ onto names too, making them endearments. It pleased her deeply when Palizot called her that. She nodded, having already resolved to spend twelve days here, overnight on the other side of the gate. She was trying to arrange the words for a question, and they did not come at once, for it had been months since she spoke the language. “Palizot. Tell me. Since I was here—has anyone come, on the south road?”
    “No one has come on any road,” Palizot said, a strange answer, her voice calm and grave. Then Sofir came up from the cellars with cobwebs in his thick black hair, a baritone man the same size from chest to hip so you could have made round sections of him like a treetrunk; he hugged Irene, shook both her hands, rumbling joyfully, “A long while, Irenadja, a long while, but you’ve come!”
    They gave her her favorite room, and she helped Sofir
carry up wood for the hearthfire there. He laid and lit the fire at once to warm and air the room, which felt as if it had not been used for a long time. There were no other guests staying at the inn. In itself that was nothing unusual, but she began to notice other indications that few travelers and little trade had been coming to the inn. The big pewter beer cans hung in a row along the wall had not been taken down and used lately, from the look of them, for a boisterous tradesmen’s evening or to welcome a party of cloth buyers up from the plains. She went to see what beasts were in the inn stable, but there were none, the stalls and mangers empty. Despite Sofir’s excellent cooking the food at supper was coarse, and there was none of his fine wheat bread with it, only the stiff dark porridge made of the grains they grew here on the mountain. About Sofir and Palizot there was some air of trouble or constraint, but they said nothing directly about the lack of business, and Irene found she could not ask them. With them she was “the child” still, welcomed and cherished because she had no part in their adversities and cares. So it had always been heart’s holiday for her with them; and she did not know how to change that if she wanted to. As always, then, they talked of nothing important, the important thing being their love.
    After supper a few townsfolk came in to spend the evening. Sofir tended bar in the big front room for the men. The women joined Palizot by the fire in the snug room off the kitchen. They drank the local beer and chatted; old Kadit
knocked back a quarter pint or so of apple brandy. Irene had a very small mug of the beer, which was powerful stuff, and helped Palizot sew patchwork. She detested sewing, but this work with Palizot was an old pleasure, one of the things she