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watched till the small figure was out of sight amongthe trees, then took up the bundle of herbs she had gathered, and walked slowly home.
    She asked herself often, in the next few years, why she had not acted when she could—if it would not have been kinder to do so. She got no answer. But as she observed the children and Saaski growing up with them, it all seemed oddly familiar. She could have predicted that they would soon cease gaping and accept Saaski’s share in their common tasks. She knew they would never count her one of them, or include her in their games. A “strangeling”—that was well said. It was the same as their grandparents had decided, years ago, about Old Bess herself.
    *   *   *
    Several days after that first wood gathering, Saaski, squatting beside the hearth to turn Anwara’s loaves, asked suddenly, “What’s a changeling?”
    Abrupt silence. It lasted so long that she turned to see if Anwara had left the room. But there she sat, rigid as the churn beside her, clutching the plunger’s handle as if her hands had frozen to it.
    “Mumma?” said Saaski, half alarmed.
    Jerkily, the plunger began again its sloshing and thumping. “Now where did you hear that word?” asked Anwara, in a voice carefully careless.
    “Eh—one of the young ’uns . . . said it . . . ” Saaski shrugged the rest off. “What is it, then?” she muttered.
    “Just an old tale. Nothing to it, like as not.” Anwara paused, forced a smile. “Fairies’ prank, is what I’ve heard. The little imp-things put a stick of firewood or some such ina baby’s cradle and do a hoaxing charm—and nobody ever knows the difference!” Anwara sniffed contemptuously. “Likely story! Fancy a mumma not knowing her own child!”
    “Sounds witless,” said Saaski, staring. Whoever’d not know a stick of wood from a live baby, charm or not? If that was all, it was certain-sure she was no changeling. Stick of wood! Just more of the young ones’ plaguing. Passel of numps, they were.
    On the whole, after the first sting of anger and disappointment, she was more relieved than not to be an outcast, and found the children as alien as they found her. She thought their play stupid, their company tiresome. They could do nothing much and never tried, climbed trees like inchworms, scratching their legs and puffing with every hitch. Her own swift scampering caused stares and nudges that made her cautious. Being different made her uneasy, though she had forgotten why. By the time she was nine years old she had schooled herself to move as they moved—when anyone was watching. But it was like living in fetters.
    She escaped to the moor whenever she could, despite Anwara’s fears and Yanno’s stern warnings of its dangers. Sometimes, roaming there alone, or perched on a grassy hillock watching the sheep graze and listening for the curlew’s hollow cry, strange pictures stirred in her mind—a wisp of color, an echo of sounds—as if she had once known them in a dream. But the older she grew, the less she was able to bring the dream-pictures clearer, however hard she tried. And she had a wary feeling that she should not try—should not study the faint markings that traced a luminouspattern across the bog and ask herself what they were, but only be careful to stay off them. If now and then she heard the cries of birds she could not name, she hastily shut her ears, the back of her neck prickling, and hurried down to the village and her neglected tasks, preferring Anwara’s scolding to the bleak loneliness that crept over her at those sounds.
    It was no better in the cottage. She was lonely there, too—in the village, everywhere. She toughened herself to accept that life would always be so.
    And then, in the spring she was eleven, the tinker Bruman wandered through the village and up onto the moor in his hooded pony cart, with his three goats, his old dog Warrior, and his orphan boy Tam.

PART II

5
    Saaski had already had one encounter