There was a witch who had a garden. It was a vast garden, and very beautiful; and it was all the more beautiful for being set in the heart of an immense forest, heavy with ancient trees and tangled with vines. Around the witch’s garden the forest stretched far in every direction, and the ways through it were few, and no more than narrow footpaths.

In the garden were plants of all varieties; there were herbs at the witch’s front door and vegetables at her rear door; a hedge, shoulder-high for a tall man, made of many different shrubs lovingly trained and trimmed together, surrounded her entire plot, and there were bright patches of flowers scattered throughout. The witch, whatever else she might be capable of, had green fingers; in her garden many rare things flourished, nor did the lowliest weed raise its head unless she gave it leave.

There was a woodcutter who came to know the witch’s garden well by sight; and indeed, as it pleased his eyes, he found himself going out of his way to pass it in the morning as he began his long day with his axe over his arm, or in the evening as he made his way homeward. He had been making as many of his ways as he could pass near the garden for some months when he realized that he had worn a trail outside the witch’s hedge wide enough to swing his arms freely and let his feet find their own way without fear of clutching roots or loose stones. It was the widest trail anywhere in the forest.

The woodcutter had a wife and four daughters. The children were their parents’ greatest delight, and their only delight, for they were very poor. But the children were vigorous and healthy, and the elder two already helped their mother in the bread baking, by which she earned a little more money for the family, and in their small forest-shadowed village everyone bought bread from her. That bread was so good that her friends teased her, and said her husband stole herbs from the witch’s garden, that she might put it in her baking. But the teasing made her unhappy, for she said such jokes would bring bad luck.

And at last bad luck befell them. The youngest daughter fell sick, and the local leech, who was doctor to so small a village because he was not a good one, could do nothing for her. The fever ate up the little girl till there was no flesh left on her small bones, and when she opened her eyes, she did not recognize the faces of her sisters and mother as they bent over her.

“Is there nothing to do?” begged the woodcutter, and the doctor shook his head. The parents bowed their heads in despair, and the mother wept.

A gleam came into the leech’s eyes, and he licked his lips nervously. “There is one thing,” he said, and the man and his wife snapped their heads up to stare at him. “The witch’s garden …”

“The witch’s garden,” the wife whispered fearfully.

“Yes?” said the woodcutter.

“There is an herb that grows there that will break any fever,” said the doctor.

“How will I know it?” said the woodcutter.

The doctor picked up a burning twig from the fireplace, stubbed out the sparks, and drew black lines on the clean-swept hearth. “It looks so—” And he drew small three-lobed leaves. “Its color is pale, like the leaves of a weeping willow, and it is a small bushy plant, rising no higher than a man’s knee from the ground.”

Hope and fear chased themselves over the wife’s face, and she reached out to clasp her husband’s hand. “How will you come by the leaves?” she said to him.

“I will steal them,” the woodcutter said boldly.

The doctor stood up, and the woodcutter saw that he trembled. “If you … bring them home, boil two handsful in water, and give the girl as much of it as she will drink.” And he left hastily.

“Husband—”

He put his other hand over hers. “I pass the garden often. It will be an easy thing. Do not be anxious.”

On the next evening he waited later than his usual time for returning, that dusk might have overtaken him when he reached the witch’s garden. That morning he had passed the garden as well, and dawdled by the hedge, that he might mark where the thing he sought stood; but he dared not try his thievery then, for all that he was desperately worried about his youngest daughter.

He left his axe and his yoke for bearing the cut wood leaning against a tree, and slipped through the hedge. He was surprised that it did not seem to wish to deter his passage, but yielded as any leaves and branches might. He had thought at least a witch’s hedge would be full of thorns and brambles, but he was unscathed. The plant he needed was near at hand, and he was grateful that he need not walk far from the sheltering hedge. He fell to his knees to pluck two handsful of the life-giving leaves, and he nearly sobbed with relief.

“Why do you invade thus my garden, thief?” said a voice behind him, and the sob turned in his throat to a cry of terror.

He had never seen the witch. He knew of her existence because all who lived in the village knew that a witch lived in the garden that grew in the forest; and sometimes, when he passed by it, there was smoke drifting up from the chimney of the small house, and thus he knew someone lived there. He looked up, hopelessly, still on his knees, still clutching the precious leaves.

He saw a woman only a little past youth to look at her, for her hair was black and her face smooth but for lines of sorrow and solitude about the mouth. She wore a white apron over a brown skirt; her feet were bare, her sleeves rolled to the elbows, and her hands were muddy.

“I asked you, what do you do in my garden?”

He opened his mouth, but no words came out; and he shuddered till he had to lean his knuckles on the ground so that he would not topple over. She raised her arm, and pushed her damp hair away from her forehead with the back of one hand; but it seemed, as he watched her, that the hand, as it fell through the air again to lie at her side, flickered through some sign that briefly burned in the air; and he found he could talk.

“My daughter,” he gasped. “My youngest daughter is ill … she will die. I—I stole these”—and he raised his hands pleadingly, still holding the leaves which, crushed between his fingers, gave a sweet minty fragrance to the air between their faces—“that she might live.”

The witch stood silent for a moment, while he felt his heart beating in the palms of his hands. “There is a gate in the hedge. Why did you not come through it, and knock on my door, and ask for what you need?”

“Because I was afraid,” he murmured, and silence fell again.

“What ails the child?” the witch asked at last.

Hope flooded through him and made him tremble. “It is a wasting fever, and there is almost nothing of her left; often now she does not know us.”

The witch turned away from him, and walked several steps; and he staggered to his feet, thinking to flee; but his head swam, and when it was clear, the witch stood again before him. She held a dark green frond out to him; its long, sharp leaves nodded over her hand, and the smell of it made his eyes water.

“Those leaves you wished to steal would avail you and your daughter little. They make a pleasant taste, steeped in hot water, and they give a fresh smell to linens long in a cupboard. Take this as my gift to your poor child; steep this in boiling water, and give it to the child to drink. She will not like it, but it will cure her; and you say she will die else.”

The woodcutter looked in amazement at the harsh-smelling bough; and slowly he opened his fists, and the green leaves fell at his feet, and slowly he reached out for what the witch offered him. She was small of stature, he noticed suddenly, and slender, almost frail. She stooped as lithely as a maiden, and picked up the leaves he had dropped, and held them out to him.

“These too you shall keep, and boil as you meant to do, for your child will need a refreshing draught after what you must give her for her life’s sake.

“And you should at least have the benefit they can give you, for you shall pay a heavy toll for your thievery this night. Your wife carries your fifth child; in a little time, when your fourth daughter is well again, she shall tell you of it. In seven months she shall be brought to bed, and the baby will be big and strong. That child is mine; that child is the price you shall forfeit for this night’s lack of courtesy.”

“Ah, God,” cried the woodcutter, “do you barter the death of one child against the death of another?”

“No,” she said. “I give a life for a life. For your youngest child shall live; and the baby not yet born I shall raise kindly, for I”—she faltered—”I wish to teach someone my herb lore.

“Go now. Your daughter needs what you bring her.” And the woodcutter found himself at the threshold of his own front door, his hands full of leaves, and his axe and yoke still deep in the forest; nor did he remember the journey home.

The axe and yoke were in their accustomed place the next morning; the woodcutter seized them up and strode into the forest by a path he knew would not take him near the witch’s garden.

All four daughters were well and strong seven months later when their mother was brought to her fifth confinement. The birth was an easy one, and a fifth daughter kicked her way into the world; but the mother turned her face away, and the four sisters wept, especially the youngest. The midwife wrapped the baby up snugly in the birth clothes that had comforted four infants previously. The woodcutter picked up the child and went into the forest in the direction he had avoided for seven months. It had been in his heart since he had found himself on his doorstep with his hands full of leaves and unable to remember how he got there, that this journey was one he would not escape; so he held the child close to him, and went the shortest path he knew to the witch’s garden. For all of its seven months’ neglect, the way was as clear as when he had trodden it often.

This time he knocked upon the gate, and entered; the witch was standing before her front door. She raised her arms for the child, and the woodcutter laid her in them. The witch did not at first look at the baby, but rather up into the woodcutter’s face. “Go home to your wife, and the four daughters who love you, for they know you. And know this too: that in a year’s time your wife shall be brought to bed once again, and the child shall be a son.”

Then she bowed her head over the baby, and just before her black hair fell forward to hide her face, the woodcutter saw a look of love and gentleness touch the witch’s sad eyes and mouth. He remembered that look often, for he never again found the witch’s garden, though for many years he searched the woods where he knew it once had been, till he was no longer sure that he had ever seen it, and his family numbered four sons as well as four daughters.

Maugie named her new baby Erana. Erana was a cheerful baby and a merry child; she loved the garden that was her home; she loved Maugie, and she loved Maugie’s son, Touk. She called Maugie by her name, Maugie, and not Mother, for Maugie had been careful to tell her that she was not her real mother; and when little Erana had asked, “Then why do I live with you, Maugie?” Maugie had answered: “Because I always wanted a daughter.”

Touk and Erana were best friends. Erana’s earliest memory was of riding on his shoulders and pulling his long pointed ears, and drumming his furry chest with her small heels. Touk visited his mother’s garden every day, bringing her wild roots that would not grow even in her garden, and split wood for her fire. But he lived by the riverbank, or by the pool that an elbow of the river had made. As soon as Erana was old enough to walk more than a few steps by herself, Touk showed her the way to his bit of river, and she often visited him when she could not wait for him to come to the garden. Maugie never went beyond her hedge, and she sighed the first time small Erana went off alone. But Touk was at home in the wild woods, and taught Erana to be at home there too. She lost herself only twice, and both those times when she was very small; and both times Touk found her almost before she had time to realize she was lost. They did not tell Maugie about either of these two incidents, and Erana never lost herself in the forest again.

Touk often took a nap at noontime, stretched out full length in his pool and floating three-quarters submerged; he looked like an old mossy log, or at least he did till he opened his eyes, which were a vivid shade of turquoise, and went very oddly with his green skin. When Erana first visited him, she was light enough to sit on his chest as he floated, and paddle him about like the log he looked, while he crossed his hands on his breast and watched her with a glint of blue between almost-closed green eyelids. But she soon grew too heavy for this amusement, and he taught her instead to swim, and though she had none of his troll blood to help her, still, she was a pupil to make her master proud.

One day as she lay, wet and panting, on the shore, she said to him, “Why do you not have a house? You do not spend all your hours in the water, or with us in the garden.”

He grunted. He sat near her, but on a rough rocky patch that she had avoided in favor of a grassy mound. He drew his knees up to his chin and put his arms around them. There were spurs at his wrists and heels, like a fighting cock’s, and though he kept them closely trimmed, still he had to sit slightly pigeon-toed to avoid slashing the skin of his upper legs with the heel spurs, and he grasped his arms carefully well up near the elbow. The hair that grew on his head was as pale as young leaves, and inclined to be lank; but the tufts that grew on the tops of his shoulders and thickly across his chest, and the crest that grew down his backbone, were much darker, and curly.

“You think I should have a house, my friend?” he growled, for his voice was always a growl.

Erana thought about it. “I think you should want to have a house.”

“I’ll ponder it,” he said, and slid back into the pool and floated out toward the center. A long-necked bird drifted down and landed on his belly, and began plucking at the ragged edge of one short trouser leg.

“You should learn to mend, too,” Erana called to him. Erana loathed mending. The bird stopped pulling for a moment and glared at her. Then it reached down and raised a thread in its beak and wrenched it free with one great tug. It looked challengingly at Erana and then slowly flapped away, with the mud-colored thread trailing behind it.

“Then what would the birds build their nests with?” he said, and grinned. There was a gap between his two front teeth, and the eyeteeth curved well down over the lower lip.

Maugie taught her young protégé to cook and clean, and sew—and mend—and weed. But Erana had little gift for herb lore. She learned the names of things, painstakingly, and the by-rote rules of what mixtures did what and when; but her learning never caught fire, and the green things in the garden did not twine lovingly around her when she paused near them as they seemed to do for Maugie. She learned what she could, to please Maugie, for Erana felt sad that neither her true son nor her adopted daughter could understand the things Maugie might teach; and because she liked to know the ingredients of a poultice to apply to an injured wing, and what herbs, mixed in with chopped-up bugs and earthworms, would make orphaned fledglings thrive.

For Erana’s fifteenth birthday, Touk presented her with a stick. She looked at it, and then she looked at him. “I thought you might like to lay the first log of my new house,” he said, and she laughed.

“You have decided then?” she asked.

“Yes; in fact I began to want a house long since, but I have only lately begun to want to build one,” he said. “And then I thought I would put it off till your birthday, that you might make the beginning, as it was your idea first.”

She hesitated, turning the little smooth stick in her hand. “It is—is it truly your idea now, Touk? I was a child when I teased you about your house; I would never mean to hold you to a child’s nagging.”

The blue eyes glinted. “It is my idea now, my dear, and you can prove that you are my dearest friend by coming at once to place your beam where it belongs, so that I may begin.”

Birthdays required much eating, for all three of them liked to cook, and they were always ready for an excuse for a well-fed celebration; so it was late in the day of Erana’s fifteenth birthday that she and Touk made their way—slowly, for they were very full of food—to his riverbank. “There,” he said, pointing across the pool. Erana looked up at him questioningly, and then made her careful way around the water to the stand of trees he had indicated; he followed on her heels. She stopped, and he said over her shoulder, his breath stirring her hair, “You see nothing? Here—” And he took her hand, and led her up a short steep slope, and there was a little clearing beyond the trees, with a high mossy rock at its back, and the water glinting through the trees before it, and the trees all around, and birds in the trees. There were already one or two bird-houses hanging from suitable branches at the clearing’s edge, and bits of twig sticking out the round doorways to indicate tenants in residence.

“My house will lie—” And he dropped her hand to pace off its boundaries; when he halted, he stood before her again, his blue eyes anxious for her approval. She bent down to pick up four pebbles; and she went solemnly to the four corners he had marked, and pushed them into the earth. He stood, watching her, at what would be his front door; and last she laid the stick, her birthday present, just before his feet. “It will be a lovely house,” she said.

Touk’s house was two years in the building. Daily Erana told Maugie how the work went forward: how there were to be five rooms, two downstairs and three above; how the frame jointed together; how the floor was laid and the roof covered it. How Touk had great care over the smallest detail: how not only every board slotted like silk into its given place, but there were little carven grinning faces peering out from the corners of cupboards, and wooden leaves and vines that at first glance seemed no more than the shining grain of the exposed wood, coiling around the arches of doorways. Touk built two chimneys, but only one fireplace. The other chimney was so a bird might build its nest in it.

“You must come see it,” Erana said to her foster mother. “It is the grandest thing you ever imagined!” She could only say such things when Touk was not around, for Erana’s praise of his handiwork seemed to make him uncomfortable, and he blushed, which turned him an unbecoming shade of violet.

Maugie laughed. “I will come when it is finished, to sit by the first fire that is laid in the new fireplace.”

Touk often asked Erana how a thing should be done: the door here or there in a room, should the little face in this corner perhaps have its tongue sticking out for a change? Erana, early in the house building, began picking up the broken bits of trees that collected around Touk’s work, and borrowed a knife, and began to teach herself to whittle. In two years’ time she had grown clever enough at it that it was she who decorated the stairway, and made tall thin forest creatures of wood to stand upon each step and hold up the railing, which was itself a scaled snake with a benevolent look in his eye as he viewed the upper hallway, and a bird sitting on a nest in a curl of his tail instead of a newel post at the bottom of the staircase.

When Touk praised her work in turn, Erana flushed too, although her cheeks went pink instead of lavender; and she shook her head and said, “I admit I am pleased with it, but I could never have built the house. Where did you learn such craft?”

Touk scratched one furry shoulder with his nails, which curled clawlike over the tips of his fingers. “I practiced on my mother’s house. My father built it; but I’ve put so many patches on it, and I’ve stared at its beams so often, that wood looks and feels to me as familiar as water.”

Even mending seemed less horrible than usual, when the tears she stitched together were the honorable tears of house building. Maugie was never a very harsh taskmaster and, as the house fever grew, quietly excused Erana from her lessons on herb lore. Erana felt both relieved and guilty as she noticed, but when she tried halfheartedly to protest, Maugie said, “No, no, don’t worry about it. Time enough for such things when the house is finished.” Erana was vaguely surprised, for even after her foster mother had realized that her pupil had no gift for it, the lessons had continued, earnestly, patiently, and a trifle sorrowfully. But now Maugie seemed glad, even joyful, to excuse her. Perhaps she’s as relieved as I am, Erana thought, and took herself off to the riverbank again. She wished all the more that Maugie would come too, for she spent nearly all her days there, and it seemed unkind to leave her foster mother so much alone; but Maugie only smiled her oddly joyful smile, and hurried her on her way.

The day was chosen when the house was to be called complete; when Maugie would come to see the first fire laid—“And to congratulate the builder,” Erana said merrily. “You will drown him in congratulations when you see.”

“Builders,” said Touk. “And I doubt the drowning.”

Erana laughed. “Builder. And I don’t suppose you can be drowned. But I refuse to argue with you; your mother knows us well enough to know which of us to believe.”

Maugie smiled at them both.

Erana could barely contain her impatience to be gone as Maugie tucked the last items in the basket. This house feast would outdo all their previous attempts in that line, which was no small feat in itself; but Erana, for once in her life, was not particularly interested in food. Maugie gave them each their bundles to carry, picked up her basket, and looked around yet again for anything she might have forgotten. “We’ll close the windows first; it may rain,” she said meditatively; Erana made a strangled noise and dashed off to bang sashes shut.

But they were on their way at last. Maugie looked around with mild surprise at the world she had not seen for so long.

“Have you never been beyond your garden?” Erana said curiously. “Were you born in that house?”

“No. I grew up far away from here. My husband brought me to this place, and helped me plant the garden; he built the house.” Maugie looked sad, and Erana asked no more, though she had long wondered about Maugie’s husband and Touk’s father.

They emerged from the trees to the banks of Touk’s river pool. He had cut steps up the slope to his house, setting them among the trees that hid his house from the water’s edge, making a narrow twisting path of them, lined with flat rocks and edged with moss. Touk led the way.

The roof was steeply pitched, and two sharp gables struck out from it, with windows to light the second storey; the chimneys rose from each end of the house, and their mouths were shaped like wide-jawed dragons, their chins facing each other and their eyes rolling back toward the bird-houses hanging from the trees. And set all around the edges of the roof were narrow poles for more bird-houses, but Touk had not had time for these yet.

Touk smiled shyly at them. “It is magnificent,” said his mother, and Touk blushed a deep violet with pleasure.

“Next I will lay a path around the edge of the pool, so that my visitors need not pick their way through brambles and broken rock.” They turned back to look at the water, gleaming through the trees. Touk stood one step down, one hand on the young tree beside him, where he had retreated while he awaited his audience’s reaction; and Maugie stood near him. As they were, he was only a head taller than she, and Erana noticed for the first time, as the late afternoon sun shone in their faces, that there was a resemblance between them. Nothing in feature perhaps, except that their eyes were set slanting in their faces, but much in expression. The same little half-smiles curled the corners of both their mouths at the moment, though Maugie lacked Touk’s splendidly curved fangs.

“But I did not want to put off this day any longer, for today we can celebrate two things together.”

“A happy birthday, Erana,” said Maugie, and Erana blinked, startled.

“I had forgotten.”

“You are seventeen today,” Maugie said.

Erana repeated, “I had forgotten.” But when she met Touk’s turquoise eyes, suddenly the little smile left his face and some other emotion threatened to break through; but he dropped his eyes and turned his face away from her, and his hand trailed slowly down the bole of the tree. Erana was troubled and hurt, for he was her best friend, and she stared at his averted shoulder. Maugie looked from one to the other of them, and began to walk toward the house.

It was not as merry an occasion as it had been planned, for something was bothering Touk, and Erana hugged her hurt to herself and spoke only to Maugie. They had a silent, if vast, supper around the new-laid fire, sitting cross-legged on the floor, for Touk had not yet built any furniture. Maugie interrupted the silence occasionally to praise some detail she noticed, or ask some question about curtains or carpeting, which she had promised to provide. Her first gift to the new house already sat on the oak mantelpiece: a bowl of potpourri, which murmured through the sharper scents of the fire and the richer ones of the food.

Into a longer silence than most, Erana said abruptly, “This is a large house for only one man.”

The fire snapped and hissed; the empty room magnified the sound so that they were surrounded by fire. Touk said, “Troll. One troll.”

Erana said, “Your mother—”

“I am human, yes, but witch blood is not quite like other human blood,” said Maugie.

“And I am my father’s son anyway,” said Touk. He stretched one hand out to the fire, and spread his fingers; they were webbed. The firelight shone through the delicate mesh of capillaries.

“Your father?”

“My father was a troll of the north, who—”

“Who came south for the love of a human witch-woman,” said Maugie gravely.

Erana again did not ask a question, but the silence asked it for her. “He died thirty years ago; Touk was only four. Men found him, and … he came home to the garden to die.” Maugie paused. “Trolls are not easily caught; but these men were poachers, and trolls are fond of birds. He lost his temper.”

Touk shivered, and the curling hair down his spine erected and then lay flat again; Erana thought she would not wish to see him lose his temper. She said slowly, “And yet you stayed here.”

“It is my home,” Maugie said simply; “it is the place I was happy, and, remembering, I am happy again.”

“And I have never longed for the sight of my own kind,” said Touk, never raising his eyes from the fire. “I might have gone north, I suppose, when I was grown; but I would miss my river, and the birds of the north are not my friends.”

Erana said, “My family?”

“You are a woodcutter’s daughter,” Maugie said, so quietly that Erana had to lean toward her to hear her over the fire’s echoes. “I … did him a favor, but he, he had … behaved ill; and I demanded a price. My foster daughter, dearer than daughter, it was a trick and I acknowledge it.…”

She felt Maugie’s head turn toward her, but Touk stared steadfastly at the hearth. “You always wanted a daughter,” Erana said, her words as quiet as Maugie’s had been, and her own eyes fixed on Maugie’s son, who swallowed uncomfortably. “You wish that I should marry your son. This house he has built is for his wife.”

Maugie put out a hand. “Erana, love, surely you—”

Touk said, “No, Mother, she has not guessed; has never guessed. I have seen that it has never touched her mind, for I would have seen if it had. And I would not be the one who forced her to think of it.” Still he looked at the flames, and now, at last, Erana understood why he had not met her eyes that afternoon.

She stood up, looked blindly around her. “I—I must think.”

Maugie said miserably, “Your family—they live in the village at the edge of the forest, south and east of here. He is the woodcutter; she bakes bread for the villagers. They have four daughters and four sons.…”

Erana found her way to the door, and left them.

Her feet took her back to the witch’s garden, the home she had known for her entire life. She had wondered, fleetingly, once she understood that Maugie was not her mother, who her blood kin might be; but the question had never troubled her, for she was happy, loving and loved. It was twilight by the time she reached the garden; numbly she went to the house and fetched a shawl and a kerchief, and into the kerchief she put food, and then went back into the garden and plucked a variety of useful herbs, ones she understood, and tied the kerchief around them all. She walked out of the garden, and set her feet on a trail that no one had used since a woodcutter had followed it for the last time seventeen years before.

She walked for many days. She did not pause in the small village south and east of the witch’s garden; she did not even turn her head when she passed a cottage with loaves of fresh bread on shelves behind the front windows, and the warm smell of the bread assailed her in the street. She passed through many other small villages, but she kept walking. She did not know what she sought, and so she kept walking. When she ran out of food, she did a little simple doctoring to earn more, and then walked on. It was strange to her to see faces that were not Maugie’s or Touk’s, for these were the only faces she had ever seen, save those of the forest beasts and birds; and she was amazed at how eagerly her simple herbcraft was desired by these strangers. She found some herbs to replace the ones she used in the fields and forests she passed, but the finest of them were in the garden she had left behind.

The villages grew larger, and became towns. Now she heard often of the king, and occasionally she saw a grand coach pass, and was told that only those of noble blood rode in such. Once or twice she saw the faces of those who rode within, but the faces looked no more nor less different from any of the other human faces she saw, although they wore more jewels.

Erana at last made her way to the capital city, but the city gates bore black banners. She wondered at this, and inquired of the gate guard, who told her that it was because the king’s only son lay sick. And because the guard was bored, he told the small shabby pedestrian that the king had issued a proclamation that whosoever cured the prince should have the king’s daughter in marriage, and half the kingdom.

“What is the prince’s illness?” Erana asked, clutching her kerchief.

The guard shrugged. “A fever; a wasting fever. It has run many days now, and they say he cannot last much longer. There is no flesh left on his bones, and often he is delirious.”

“Thank you,” said Erana, and passed through the gates. She chose the widest thoroughfare, and when she had come some distance along it, she asked a passerby where the king’s house lay; the woman stared at her, but answered her courteously.

The royal gate too was draped in black. Erana stood before it, hesitating. Her courage nearly failed her, and she turned to go, when a voice asked her business. She might still have not heeded it, but it was a low, growly, kind voice, and it reminded her of another voice dear to her; and so she turned toward it. A guard in a silver uniform and a tall hat smiled gently at her; he had young daughters at home, and he would not wish any of them to look so lost and worn and weary. “Do not be frightened. Have you missed your way?”

“N-no,” faltered Erana. “I—I am afraid I meant to come to the king’s house, but now I am not so sure.”

“What is it the king or his guard may do for you?” rumbled the guard.

Erana blushed. “You will think it very presumptuous, but—but I heard of the prince’s illness, and I have some … small … skill in healing.” Her nervous fingers pulled her kerchief open, and she held it out toward the guard. The scent of the herbs from the witch’s garden rose into his face and made him feel young and happy and wise.

He shook his head to clear it. “I think perhaps you have more than small skill,” he said, “and I have orders to let all healers in. Go.” He pointed the way, and Erana bundled her kerchief together again clumsily and followed his gesture.

The king’s house was no mere house, but a castle. Erana had never seen anything like it before, taller than trees, wider than rivers; the weight of its stones frightened her, and she did not like walking up the great steps and under the vast stone archway to the door and the liveried man who stood beside it, nor standing in their gloom as she spoke her errand. The liveried man received her with more graciousness and less kindness than the silver guard had done, and he led her without explanation to a grand chamber where many people stood and whispered among themselves like a forest before a storm. Erana felt the stone ceiling hanging over her, and the stone floor jarred her feet. At the far end of the chamber was a dais with a tall chair on it, and in the chair sat a man.

“Your majesty,” said Erana’s guide, and bowed low; and Erana bowed as he had done, for she understood that one makes obeisance to a king, but did not know that women were expected to curtsey. “This … girl … claims to know something of leechcraft.”

The whispering in the chamber suddenly stilled, and the air quivered with the silence, like the forest just before the first lash of rain. The king bent his heavy gaze upon his visitor, but when Erana looked back at him, his face was expressionless.

“What do you know of fevers?” said the king; his voice was as heavy as his gaze, and as gloomy as the stones of his castle, and Erana’s shoulders bowed a little beneath it.

“Only a little, your majesty,” she said, “but an herb I carry”—and she raised her kerchief—“does the work for me.”

“If the prince dies after he suffers your tending,” said the king in a tone as expressionless as his face, “you will die with him.”

Erana stood still a moment, thinking, but her thoughts had been stiff and uncertain since the evening she had sat beside a first-laid fire in a new house, and the best they could do for her now was to say to her, “So?” Thus she answered: “Very well.”

The king raised one hand, and another man in livery stepped forward, his footsteps hollow in the thick silence. “Take her to where the prince lies, and see that she receives what she requires and … do not leave her alone with him.”

The man bowed, turned, and began to walk away; he had not once glanced at Erana. She hesitated, looking to the king for some sign; but he sat motionless, his gaze lifted from her and his face blank. Perhaps it is despair, she thought, almost hopefully: the despair of a father who sees his son dying. Then she turned to follow her new guide, who had halfway crossed the long hall while she stood wondering, and so she had to hasten after to catch him up. Over her soft footsteps she heard a low rustling laugh as the courtiers watched the country peasant run from their distinguished presence.

The guide never looked back. They came at last to a door at which he paused, and Erana paused panting behind him. He opened the door reluctantly. Still without looking around, he passed through it and stopped. Erana followed him, and went around him, to look into the room.

It was not a large room, but it was very high; and two tall windows let the sunlight in, and Erana blinked, for the corridors she had passed through had been grey, stone-shadowed. Against the wall opposite the windows was a bed, with a canopy, and curtains pulled back and tied to the four pillars at its four corners. A man sat beside the bed, three more sat a little distance from it, and a man lay in the bed. His hands lay over the coverlet, and the fingers twitched restlessly; his lips moved without sound, and his face on the pillow turned back and forth.

Erana’s guide said, “This is the latest … leech. She has seen the king, and he has given his leave.” The tone of his voice left no doubt of his view of this decision.

Erana straightened her spine, and held up her bundle in her two hands. She turned to her supercilious guide and said, “I will need hot water and cold water.” She gazed directly into his face as she spoke, while he looked over her head. He turned, nonetheless, and went out.

Erana approached the bed and looked down; the man sitting by it made no move to give her room, but sat stiffly where he was. The prince’s face was white to the lips, and there were hollows under his eyes and cheekbones; and then, as she watched, a red flush broke out, and sweat stained his cheeks and he moaned.

The guide returned, bearing two pitchers. He put them on the floor, and turned to go. Erana said, “Wait,” and he took two more steps before he halted, but he did halt, with his back to her as she knelt by the pitchers and felt the water within them. One was tepid; the other almost tepid. “This will not do,” Erana said angrily, and the man turned around, as if interested against his will that she dared protest. She picked up the pitchers and with one heave threw their contents over the man who had fetched them. He gasped, and his superior look disappeared, and his face grew mottled with rage. “I asked for hot water and cold water. You will bring it, as your king commanded you to obey me. With it you will bring me two bowls and two cups. Go swiftly and return more swiftly. Go now.” She turned away from him, and after a moment she heard him leave. His footsteps squelched.

He returned as quickly as she had asked; water still rolled off him and splashed to the floor as he moved. He carried two more pitchers; steam rose from the one, and dew beaded the other. Behind him a woman in a long skirt carried the bowls and cups.

“You will move away from the bed, please,” Erana said, and the man who had not made room for her paused just long enough to prove that he paused but not so long as to provoke any reaction, stood up, and walked to the window. She poured some hot water into one bowl, and added several dark green leaves that had once been long and spiky but had become bent and bruised during their journey from the witch’s garden; and she let them steep till the sharp smell of them hung like a green fog in the high-ceilinged room. She poured some of the infusion into a cup, and raised the prince’s head from the pillow, and held the cup under his nostrils. He breathed the vapor, coughed, sighed; and his eyes flickered open. “Drink this,” Erana whispered, and he bowed his head and drank.

She gave him a second cup some time later, and a third as twilight fell; and then, as night crept over them, she sat at his bedside and waited, and as she had nothing else to do, she listened to her thoughts; and her thoughts were of Touk and Maugie, and of the king’s sentence hanging over her head like the stone ceiling, resting on the prince’s every shallow breath.

All that night they watched, and candlelight gave the prince’s wan face a spurious look of health. But at dawn, when Erana stood stiffly and touched his forehead, it was cool. He turned a little away from her, and tucked one hand under his cheek, and lay quietly; and his breathing deepened and steadied into sleep.

Erana remained standing, staring dumbly down at her triumph. The door of the room opened, and her uncooperative guide of the day before entered, bearing on a tray two fresh pitchers of hot and cold water, and bread and cheese and jam and meat. Erana brewed a fresh minty drink with the cold water, and gave it to the prince with hands that nearly trembled. She said to the man who had been her guide, “The prince will sleep now, and needs only the tending that any patient nurse may give. May I rest?”

The man, whose eyes now dwelt upon her collarbone, bowed, and went out, and she followed him to a chamber not far from the prince’s. There was a bed in it, and she fell into it, clutching her herb bundle like a pillow, and fell fast asleep.

She continued to assist in the tending of the prince since it seemed to be expected of her, and since she gathered that she should be honored by the trust in her skill she had so hardly earned. Within a fortnight the prince was walking, slowly but confidently; and Erana began to wonder how long she was expected to wait upon him, and then she wondered what she might do with herself once she was freed of that waiting.

There was no one at the court she might ask her questions. For all that she had been their prince’s salvation, they treated her as distantly as they had from the beginning, albeit now with greater respect. She had received formal thanks from the king, whose joy at his son’s health regained made no more mark on his expression and the tone of his voice than fear of his son’s death had done. The queen had called Erana to her private sitting room to receive her thanks. The princess had been there too; she had curtseyed to Erana, but she had not smiled, any more than her parents had done.

And so Erana continued from day to day, waiting for an unknown summons; or perhaps for the courage to ask if she might take her leave.

A month after the prince arose from his sickbed he called his first Royal Address since his illness had struck him down. The day before the Address the royal heralds had galloped the royal horses through the streets of the king’s city, telling everyone who heard them that the prince would speak to his people on the morrow; and when at noon on the next day he stood in the balcony overlooking the courtyard Erana had crossed to enter the palace for the first time, a mob of expectant faces tipped up their chins to watch him.

Erana had been asked to attend the royal speech. She stood in the high-vaulted hall where she had first met the king, a little behind the courtiers who now backed the prince, holding his hands up to his people, on the balcony. The king and queen stood near her; the princess sat gracefully at her ease in a great wooden chair lined with cushions a little distance from the open balcony. It seemed to Erana, she thought with some puzzlement, that they glanced at her often, although with their usual impassive expressions; and there was tension in the air that reminded her of the first time she had entered this hall, to tell the king that she knew a little of herbs and fevers.

Erana clasped her hands together. She supposed her special presence had been asked that she might accept some sort of royal thanks in sight of the people; she, the forest girl, who was still shy of people in groups. The idea that she might have to expose herself to the collective gaze of an audience of hundreds made her very uncomfortable; her clasped hands felt cold. She thought, It will please these people if I fail to accept their thanks with dignity, and so I shall be dignified. I will look over the heads of the audience, and pretend they are flowers in a field.

She did not listen carefully to what the prince was saying. She noticed that the rank of courtiers surrounding the prince had parted, and the king stepped forward as if to join his son on the balcony. But he paused beside Erana, and seized her hands, and led or dragged her beside him; her hands were pinched inside his fingers, and he pulled at her awkwardly, so that she stumbled. They stood on the balcony together, and she blinked in the sunlight; she looked at the prince, and then turned her head back to look at the king, still holding her hands prisoned as if she might run away. She did not look down, at the faces beyond the balcony.

“I offered my daughter’s hand in marriage and half my kingdom to the leech who cured my son.” The king paused, and a murmur, half surprise and half laughter, wrinkled the warm noontide air. He looked down at Erana, and still his face was blank. “I wish now to adjust the prize and payment for the service done me and my people and my kingdom: my son’s hand in marriage to the leech who saved him, and beside him, the rule of all my kingdom.”

The prince reached across and disentangled one of her hands from his father’s grip, so that she stood stretched between them, like game on a pole brought home from the hunt. The people in the courtyard were shouting; the noise hurt her head, and she felt her knees sagging, and the pull on her hands, and then a hard grip on her upper arms to keep her standing; and then all went black.

She came to herself lying on a sofa. She could hear the movements of several people close beside her, but she was too tired and troubled to wish to open her eyes just yet on the world of the prince’s betrothed; and so she lay quietly.

“I think they might have given her some warning,” said one voice. “She does have thoughts of her own.”

A laugh. “Does she? What makes you so sure? A little nobody like this—I’m surprised they went through with it. She’s not the type to insist about anything. She creeps around like a mouse, and never speaks unless spoken to. Not always then.”

“She spoke up for herself to Roth.”

“Roth is a fool. He would not wear the king’s livery at all if his mother were not in waiting to the queen … And she’s certainly done nothing of the sort since. Give her a few copper coins and a new shawl … and a pat on the head … and send her on her way.”

“She did save the prince’s life.”

A snort. “I doubt it. Obviously the illness had run its course; she just happened to have poured some ridiculous quack remedy down his throat at the time.”

There was a pause, and then the first voice said, “It is a pity she’s so plain. One wants a queen to set a certain standard.…”

Erana shivered involuntarily, and the voice stopped abruptly. Then she moaned a little, as if only just coming to consciousness, and opened her eyes.

Two of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting bent over her. She recognized the owner of the second voice immediately from the sour look on her face. The kindlier face said to her, “Are you feeling a little better now? May we bring you anything?”

Erana sat up slowly. “Thank you. Would you assist me to my room, please?”

She easily persuaded them to leave her alone in her own room. At dinnertime a man came to inquire if she would attend the banquet in honor of the prince’s betrothal? She laughed a short laugh and said that she felt still a trifle overcome by the news of the prince’s betrothal, and desired to spend her evening resting quietly, and could someone perhaps please bring her a light supper?

Someone did, and she sat by the window watching the twilight fade into darkness, and the sounds of the banquet far away from her small room drifting up to her on the evening breeze. I have never spoken to the prince alone, she thought; I have never addressed him but as a servant who does what she may for his health and comfort; nor has he spoken to me but as a master who recognizes a servant who has her usefulness.

Dawn was not far distant when the betrothal party ended. She heard the last laughter, the final cheers, and silence. She sighed and stood up, and stretched, for she was stiff with sitting. Slowly she opened the chest where she kept her herb kerchief and the shabby clothes she had travelled in. She laid aside the court clothes she had never been comfortable in, for all that they were plain and simple compared with those the others wore, and dressed herself in the skirt and blouse that she and Maugie had made. She ran her fingers over the patches in the skirt that house building had caused. She hesitated, her bundle in hand, and then opened another, smaller chest, and took out a beautiful shawl, black, embroidered in red and gold, and with a long silk fringe. This she folded gently, and wrapped inside her kerchief.

Touk had taught her to walk quietly, that they might watch birds in their nests without disturbing them, and creep close to feeding deer. She slipped into the palace shadows, and then into the shadows of the trees that edged the courtyard; once she looked up, over her shoulder, to the empty balcony that opened off the great hall. The railings of the ornamental fence that towered grandly over the gate and guardhouse were set so far apart that she could squeeze between them, pulling her bundle after her.

She did not think they would be sorry to see her go; she could imagine the king’s majestic words: She has chosen to decline the honor we would do her, feeling herself unworthy; and having accepted our grateful thanks for her leechcraft, she has withdrawn once again to her peaceful country obscurity. Our best wishes go with her.… But still she walked quietly, in the shadows, and when dawn came, she hid under a hedge in a garden, and slept, as she had often done before. She woke up once, hearing the hoofs of the royal heralds rattle past; and she wondered what news they brought. She fell asleep again, and did not waken till twilight; and then she crept out and began walking again.

She knew where she was going this time, and so her journey back took less time than her journey away had done. Still she was many days on the road, and since she found that her last experience of them had made her shy of humankind, she walked after sunset and before dawn, and followed the stars across open fields instead of keeping to the roads, and raided gardens and orchards for her food, and did not offer her skills as a leech for an honest meal or bed.

The last night she walked into the dawn and past it, and the sun rose in the sky, and she was bone-weary and her feet hurt, and her small bundle weighed like rock. But here was her forest again, and she could not stop. She went past Maugie’s garden, although she saw the wisp of smoke lifting from the chimney, and followed the well-known track to Touk’s pool. She was too tired to be as quiet as she should be, and when she emerged from the trees, there was nothing visible but the water. She looked around and saw that Touk had laid the path around the shore of the pool that he had promised, and now smooth grey stones led the way to the steep steps before Touk’s front door.

As she stood at the water’s edge, her eyes blurred, and her hands, crossed over the bundle held to her breast, fell to her sides. Then there was a commotion in the pool, and Touk stood up, water streaming from him, and a strand of waterweed trailing over one pointed ear. Even the center of the pool for Touk was only thigh-deep, and he stood, riffling the water with his fingers, watching her.

“Will you marry me?” she said.

He smiled, his lovely, gap-toothed smile, and he blinked his turquoise eyes at her, and pulled the waterweed out of his long hair.

“I came back just to ask you that. If you say no, I will go away again.”

“No,” he said. “Don’t go away. My answer is yes.”

And he waded over to the edge of the pool and seized her in his wet arms and kissed her; and she threw her arms eagerly around his neck, and dropped her bundle. It opened in the water like a flower, and the herbs floated away across the surface, skittering like water bugs; and the embroidered silk shawl sank to the bottom.