Eydis watched the boy go from the fence, a dark speck crossing the white floor of the valley. Behind her, she could feel the wyrm watching her. The hook did not pull. It only rested there, a weight she had not had yesterday, like a child asleep against her chest.
She thought of her mother at this same fence, years ago, when Eydis was perhaps eight. Her mother had stood exactly here and said, *There's a thing I can't remember, and I can't remember what it is.* And she had laughed, as if it were a riddle.
Eydis had laughed too. She remembered that. She was almost sure she remembered that.
IV
She cut a tally stick from a length of ash and kept it in her belt.
On the first notch she cut the rune for *voice*, and next to it the rune that began her father's name. It was the only way she could think of to keep the shape of what was gone. You could not mourn a thing you did not know you had lost; she had watched her mother prove that, year after year, smiling at the holes in herself like a woman who has misplaced a spindle. Eydis meant to know. She meant to count.
The second night it took a horse.
She knew it had, in the morning, because she knew she had once had a mare called Fífa, a shaggy dun with one white sock, and she knew she had loved her. She could not remember riding her. Not once. Not the first time nor the hundredth. She went to the byre and stood a long while beside the old dun mare, who was twenty now and swaybacked, and the mare blew warm breath into her palm, and Eydis felt nothing but a stranger's fondness.
She cut the rune for *horse*.
The third night she woke and could not tell what it had taken. She lay in the dark and went through herself like a woman checking a storehouse after thieves, touching each shelf. Her wedding. Her father's drowning. Kari learning to swim in the warm outflow. The first iron she had ever forged. All there. And still the gap was in her, she could feel its edges, smooth and cool. It was not until midmorning, sitting by the hearth with Thorhalla, that she found it — her fingers moving through her own hair, unbraiding and rebraiding the left side where it had come loose.
"Who taught me this?" she said.
Thorhalla looked up from her carding. Something passed across the old woman's face and was put away again.
"Your mother," she said. "On this bench. You were five, maybe. You wanted it like hers, tight along the sides, and you cried because your fingers were too short, and she told you the braid would wait for your fingers to grow." The seeress set down her combs. "Your hands remember, child. Look at them."
Eydis looked. Her hands went on braiding, quick and sure, three strands over and under along her scalp, a pattern a woman she could see clearly in her mind had put there. She could not remember a single moment of being taught.
She cut a rune for *braid*, and her hands shook doing it, which was the first time they had.