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laundry day as well—also Kaari’s job. She liked laundry day; there was something infinitely satisfying about spreading the freshly washed things to dry, although she could do without carrying the baskets of wet clothing up from the edge of the river. Squinting a little against the later afternoon sun, Kaari arranged the wooden yoke over her shoulders, balanced the buckets on the hooks on either end of it and headed for the well at the center of the village. Her mother was too old to be burdened with this now, and her brothers were all at their own work, so that left her. Of course, for Kaari, every trip to the well took twice as long as it did for anyone except the most inveterate of gossips. Everyone had to stop and greet her, so that had to factor into the time she took. And even though it was the last thing she wanted to do on a day already overfilled with chores, she had to stop as well. It was, after all, the polite thing to do. And by now, her parents were more than used to it.
    Virtually everything she did that brought her out of the house took more time because of this. And it was all because of her runes. Sometimes she thought that if she heard one more person tell her, “You must be the luckiest girl in the world,” she was going to do something drastic. Scream, anyway. But of course, she never did, because she fundamentally had too sweet a temper. Having runes like hers—well, she suspected that you either had a sweet temper to begin with, or you got one in a hurry, because you had to.
    Or else you went to the bad…and that did not bear thinking about.
    When Kaari was born, her runes were read then and there, because there was a Wise Woman already in the village reading for several older children. It was unusual, but by no means unheard of, for an infant to be read, and since the woman was there, her parents must have thought, “What’s the harm?” And at that time, the Wise Woman had pulled a strange face, for three runes had turned up instead of the usual one or two. Hearth, as expected. Also Craft.
    But then came the third rune, one that her parents didn’t recognize, the one that the Wise Woman pursed her lips over. She told them not to worry about it, and went on her way, with only a single, slightly odd, admonition.
    “Don’t spoil her.”
    Not that they were likely to do anything of the sort. She might have been the baby of the family, but it was a very large family, with many hands reaching for, and many mouths clamoring for, anything that happened to be desirable. Her brothers only considered another sister to be another nuisance. Her sisters already had enough of babysitting to regard the arrival of yet another child with resignation. Kaari had been destined to go through childhood wearing the hand-me-downs of four sisters, mended and re-dyed, turned and turned again, or cut down from much larger garments. Her toys were those her siblings had outgrown. She slept packed in the bed with all four of her older sisters, either too warm in the middle, or hanging on for dear life to her sliver of bed on the edge.
    And yet, she had sailed through her childhood with no real difficulty. By nature sweet-tempered, by the gift of the gods a lovely child, the older she grew, the more everyone wanted her around and made a kind of pet out of her, even her siblings. If it was a lean season, people found ways of slipping her tidbits; if the season was bountiful, they still slipped her treats, but always the juiciest apple, the most succulent grape, the most perfect venison pasty. Older children took her with them on adventures or dressed her up like a kind of live doll; younger ones looked at her in awe. And no one thought twice about it.
    Not until Kaari came of age and the same Wise Woman read her runes again, did she discover what that third one was. Because it turned up again.
    Kaari could still see it, in her mind’s eye, the little brown stone, flat, speckled with white, and the strange rune she could