There was an old farmer who married a young wife. He had been married once before, in his own youth, but his wife had died of a fever after they had been together only a year. In his grief the farmer forgot about all other human creatures and set himself only to his farm; and because there was both strength and fire in him, his farm bloomed and blossomed, and he himself did not know that his heart held its winter about it.

But all winters end, and the farmer’s heart was secretly warm within its winter, and one day it melted: at the sight of a young girl at the town well. The girl was nothing like his first wife; it was not memories she aroused, but something new. Some green spring woke in him in a moment, and yet he had had no warning of it. He thought that he felt no different than he had for twenty years; that the coldness under his breastbone was an old scar, with nothing living and stirring beneath it; that some things only came once in a man’s life.

And yet it was not the girl herself that had first caught his eye, but her horse. He was driving in to market as he did at this time every week, from spring through autumn, and his road lay past the town well, where there were very often people. Sometimes there were people he knew, and he would speak to them as he passed; for he seldom paused. But this day the well was almost deserted, and his eye swept over it and made to go on, but for the curve of a chestnut neck and the prance of chestnut forelegs. A beautiful young mare, he thought, looking at her appreciatively, with a sparkle to her and a kind eye. And then his eye was distracted, and then caught firmly, by a long chestnut braid of human hair falling over a human shoulder, as the girl bent to reach her brimming bucket. And she glanced up at the sound of the farmer’s wagon wheels, and their eyes met, and she smiled.

He could not think of anything but how he would see her again. He was a polite man, and he knew nothing of this girl; he knew he should not have stopped or spoken, but he did both. He had enough sense remaining to him not to ask bluntly and immediately what her name was and where she lived; but he was unaccustomed to making conversation at any time, the use of speech was reserved for weather, crops, prices, and occasionally health; and he was confused and distressed by his own wish to speak to this girl he knew nothing of, but that she was as beautiful in her way as her mare, and had as kind an eye. Awkwardly he offered what he might have said to an acquaintance he had no immediate business with, that it was a fine morning, wasn’t it, preventing himself with some difficulty from jumping down from his wagon and helping her with her water bucket, which she needed no help with. She fastened it to a knot on her saddle-skirt with a deftness of long practice that he knew he could not have matched, even had he been able to recognize how it fastened at all; and he watched her take down the long thin-lidded bucket from the other side of the saddle and dip it in its turn. He was dumbly grateful for the extra moments of her company, but desire to make a good impression and frustration at his inability to think of a way to do so made his hands close anxiously on his own reins, till the placid beast between the shafts of his wagon put its ears back and shook its head to remind him of its existence.

She agreed that it was a fine morning, but went on, easily, as if conversation with tongue-tied old men were pleasant and natural and ordinary, almost as if she were as glad of him as he was of her, that the land here was so much different from the mountains to which she was accustomed that all weathers seemed to lie differently against her skin; that a really fine day here in the lowlands seemed to go on forever because you could see so far away. The farmer, bemused by such richness of response to his gruff opening, grasped at an opportunity as it sailed by and said that he had not seen her before. No; she was recently come with her parents and younger brothers and sisters; but they had been travelling for some time, and everyone liked this town, and her father had been offered work almost at once, and so they thought they would stay for a time.

The farmer breathed a sigh. “I will look for you next market day,” he said, daring greatly, and then added nervously, “If I may.”

“Thank you,” she said, and without any sign of awareness that she was saying something bold or over-friendly, added straightforwardly: “I will like recognizing a face in the crowds here. I am not used to so large a town.”

The farmer worked no less hard than usual over the next weeks, but it was a fortunate thing that he had farmed so long and well that his hands and back and feet and eyes knew what to do with little help from his brain, for all he could think of was the girl he had met at the town well, and of the next time he would see her. He held to his own standards, blindly, like clinging to a rock in a storm; he had gone to town once a week for the last twenty years, and he went on going into town once a week. But he could not have stayed away, that one day each week, had his house been on fire as he set his horse trotting down the road toward the next meeting with the girl he had seen at the well.

Her name was Coral, and she had four brothers and sisters, and a mother and father; but he barely noticed these. He did notice that he was not the only man who had noticed Coral, and that often when he found her, she was talking to young men who smiled at her as he could not, with the confidence of youth and charm, and swaggered when they walked. This made him wild, in his stiff and quiet way, but there was nothing he had any right to say or do about whom she chose to talk to; and he knew this, and held his peace. And she always had time for him, time to talk to him; the young men vanished when she turned to him, and he did not know if this was a good thing or a bad.

Usually they met at the well, as they had the first time; at first he did not think about this, beyond straining his eyes looking for her as soon as he could begin to differentiate the smaller hump of well from the bigger humps of buildings on the road into town. But on the fourth week he was a little delayed in setting out by a loose horseshoe, and his wagon-horse was too sober an animal to respond favorably to any nonsense about hurrying once they were on their way. And when they pulled up by the well, each a bit cross and breathless with resisting the other’s will, the farmer realized that Coral was not merely there, as if perhaps she too had been delayed, but appeared to be still there, fiddling unconvincingly with a harness strap, her color a little heightened, and for the first time she seemed not completely at her ease with him. Almost she succeeded in sounding casual when she told him that after she fetched water on market days, and took the buckets home, she went on to the market itself, where she would spend most of the rest of the morning.

This made the farmer thoughtful. He was not late again at the well for the next several weeks, but having let a week go by, to maintain the pretense of casualness, a fortnight after Coral told him about her market-day mornings, he left the stall he shared with several other local farmers when it was his turn for a break, and went purposefully looking for her. His stall was away from the central marketplace, because at this time of year it specialized in the sort of produce only other farmers were much interested in. He found her easily in the bustling square where all the townsfolk were; he found her as if she were the only thing his eyes could rest on in all the hurry and hubbub. And that she was glancing around herself, over each shoulder, restlessly, even hopefully, might only have been that she was not pleased with the greens that were heaped up in the stall before her, and was wondering if better might be had nearby.

His own lack of imagination shocked him: How could he not have thought of doing this before? She had mentioned that she did much of the shopping for her family, that her mother was not good at it at all, although the sister next to her in age showed some promise and her brother Rack was the deadliest person she’d ever seen in pursuit of a bargain. Why had she lingered at the well, hoping to meet an old man with little conversation and no imagination?

The week after that he met the sister next in age, Moira, and Rack, who looked at him measuringly; but it was only Coral’s opinion that mattered to him, and he greeted them politely but without much attention. The week after that he found her alone again, bending over Met’s lettuces; Met, hovering in the back of the stall, was watching her with the expression of a hawk watching a young rabbit. Without thinking about it—and so giving him the opportunity to talk himself out of it—he walked up to her and put his hand gently but inexorably under her elbow and led her away. “Even your brother Rack would have a little trouble with Met,” he explained; “the best of Met’s energy has always gone into arguing, not into farming.”

“Thank you,” she said, looking into his eyes, her forearm resting warmly but without weight against the palm of his hand. “I did not think I liked what I was seeing and hearing, but I had not yet made up my mind. I find the people here much as I find the weather: like and unlike what I am used to, and I am not always sure I am reading the signs aright.” And she smiled at him.

On the tenth week he asked her to marry him.

He had not meant to ask; it was not in his conscious mind to ask. But he missed her so, those long weeks on the farm, with no one to talk to but his horses and cows and chickens and sheep, and Turney the dog, and Med and Thwan, who were good workers—he would not have had anyone who was not—but who were perhaps even less talkative than he was himself. He had not realized, before he met Coral, that he missed conversation with other human beings. He would have said he did not miss conversations with other human beings; he only missed Coral.

He was appalled at what he had done when he heard in his own ears what his tongue had betrayed him by saying; but he was struck dumb with it, and so there was time for Coral to say, “Yes, Pos, please, I should like to marry you.”

His mouth fell open; he shut it again. After a moment he reached out and clumsily took her hand, and she put her other hand on top of his. She looked at him, smiling a little, but the smile was hesitant. “If you did not mean it, I will let you off,” she said after a moment, when he remained mute. “It is only that I—I would like to marry you. I have been hoping you would ask me.”

He kissed her then, so that conversation was not necessary, for he thought he still could not speak; but that first touch of her lips against his made the possibility of speech flee even further. But he thought, deep in his heart, of all the long days and evenings at the farm, working side by side, when they could talk or not as they wished; when he might be able to kiss her for no reason at all, familiarly, because he wanted to, because she was his wife, because she was there. And he smiled as he kissed her, and kissed her again.

She stopped him as he would have kissed her a third time and said, “Wait. One thing you must know. I have no dowry; there are five of us, you know, and I’m the eldest; I know there’s none to spare now; by the time Elana grows up perhaps there will be a little to be squeezed out, although I don’t know, there may be a sixth and a seventh by then. My father earns little, and this will not change, there are only so many hours in a day, and he gets tired, and my mother … well, never mind. Moly is mine—that is my mare—and I will bring her—that is, I hope you will let me bring her; she is a dear friend, I could not bear to sell her—but she is a riding horse, and I am afraid you will think she is a silly creature to have on a farm.”

“I do not care about your dowry,” said Pos then, finding his tongue in his need to reassure his beloved. “I love you, and that is what I care about, and my farm is big enough to support a wife—it is a family farm, it has been my family’s farm through four generations. The house has rooms enough inside, and land enough outside; it goes to waste, with me alone. Of course Moly is welcome too.” And then he said, from the fullness of his heart, “Thank you.”

Coral sighed, and put her head on his shoulder, and then he drew her to one side where they could sit on a hay bale that was part of the rough partitions between stall and stall in the market, where they could talk quietly and ignore the world and be happy, and Pos thought he had never known anything like the contentment of Coral’s side pressed against his, that no two people had ever fit together so comfortably as she in the curve of his arm. They stayed this way till it was time for him to go; she told him she would give the news to her family in her own way. “When … will I see you again?” he said, stammering a little, trying not to sound pathetic; would she hold him to their weekly visits, even now?

But she smiled at him, smiled a long warm smile the like of which he had never seen on her face before, and answered, “How I have wished that your market days came oftener than once a week! And how embarrassed I have been for thinking so, you with your farm to tend, and an honest hardworking man as you are! You may see me again as soon as you like. Tomorrow?”

And so for one week he came to the town three times. On the first visit he asked her to marry him, and on the second he was congratulated (noisily) by her family, and met her parents for the first time, a small faded father with deep lines in his face, a charming but vague mother. He noticed without noticing—for he could think of nothing clearly but his Coral—that it seemed to be Coral and the next-oldest girl, Moira, and the younger son, Rack, who knew where things were in the small drab house at the edge of town, who made the guest comfortable and laid the table for a meal. The elder son, Del, looked as faded and vague as his parents, but the baby, Elana, was as bright and sharp as her sisters. All this passed through his mind without lodging there, and he gave himself up to the celebration that grew so lively that even Del and the father laughed and moved a little more quickly.

And on his third visit to town that week he and Coral were married, and he took her home to his farm, which she had never seen, though it was near the town; and behind the wagon, in which Coral’s small bundle of belongings rode, trotted Moly, the chestnut mare.

Coral was a good worker; she worked as hard as Pos did himself, and seemed to think of no other life, and Pos was happier than he had ever imagined. He had long thought that happiness had nothing to do with him, and what had to do with him was work. He had thought he had been satisfied with work; and he had been, for his heart had been held in its winter, and he had imagined nothing else, certainly not the transformation that happiness brings, so that the very definitions of work and satisfaction are changed. Waking in the morning and finding Coral next to him gave him a shock of joy each day, and he got out of bed smiling, he who had been slow and grumbling in the mornings for the long years of his solitude.

He told her this—for he found that he could tell her almost anything, that things that he had failed to find words for even to explain to himself fell into place and sense when he opened his mouth to Coral—and she teased him, saying it was only because he had never learned to eat a proper breakfast. By the time he came downstairs these mornings, shaved and dressed, she, her hair still pillow-mussed and her night-clothes still on, had made what she considered a proper breakfast: porridge with beans or lentils in it, pancakes from potatoes left of last night’s supper or chopped hash from last night’s roast. He washed up as she dressed, and they went into the fields together.

They had gone into the fields together, naturally, without a word said on either side, from the first morning. Pos thought nothing but of the pleasure of her company, and willingly helped her in the evenings sweep the floor and get supper. He was a tidy man, and had kept house for himself for twenty years, since his mother died of grief after his father’s early death; without thinking of it, perhaps he remembered his parents, knew that he had wanted a wife again because he wanted a companion. He would have missed her if she had stayed in the house all day, as he had missed her when she was in town all week; and they worked side by side in the fields as they did laundry side by side one morning a week in the house. He did not measure her help in terms of how many rows she hoed, or whether the shelves of the house were more or less dusty than they had been before two people lived there again, but only in the deliciousness of joined lives. He could think of his first wife again for the first time since he had lost her; and he remembered her sadly, both for the life she had not lived to spend and for the life they would have had together, for she was a tenderer creature than Coral, and there had never been any possibility of her working as he worked.

So the months passed, and the seed went into the ground and began to come up first as tiny green pinpricks and then as stout green stalks, and calves and chicks and lambs were born and ran around as young things do, and Turney shepherded everyone carefully and soberly whether they wanted to be shepherded or not. And Pos discovered that there were, in fact, two holes in the close weave of his happiness.

He saw the first as a result of overhearing a conversation between Med and Thwan.

He had merely assumed some increase in his plans for his farm with Coral’s coming, and had never thought of or suggested to Med and Thwan any end of the work they did for him. When he found out what Coral could do and wanted to do, he would know how to plan properly for next year; this year would come as it came. That this was unlike him he knew, but his joy in his new wife made him misjudge just how out of character it was, and how it might look to the men who had worked with him for over a decade. If he thought about their reaction to Coral at all, he dismissed it by thinking that she was none of their business, and further, he did not believe either of them to be spiteful.

“—don’t like it,” Med was saying.

“We can hope for the best till we know the worst,” Thwan replied, shortly, as if he wished the conversation at an end.

“She only married him to get away from her family, know this,” Med went on, with a curious passion in his voice. “Five of them and a shiftless mother, and the father works only as much as he must. She’ll weary of farm life soon enough.”

“We don’t know that,” said Thwan. “She’s a good worker.”

“She is now,” said Med. “She’s only just come, thinking to be happy with her bargain.”

“She’s that pretty,” said Thwan. “She need not have married Pos. She might have had half the young men in town.”

“None of the young men have holdings half so grand as Pos’s farm,” said Med. “She’s a wandering gnast’s daughter; the young men who make up to her are not likely to offer anything near as good as marriage and land. Her family’s moved on already, did you know that? Her father didn’t even finish his last job. Unloaded her and got out of town. They’ll have left debts that Pos’ll have to pay. You wait and see.”

“Stop it,” said Thwan.

“And her out in the fields every day, so he can see her, looking over her shoulder to be sure he’s watching, seeing what a good wife he’s got, showing off, getting her hands dirty, as if that makes her a farmer,” said Med, as if he couldn’t stop.

“She need not be like her family, and that be no part of the reason why she took Pos, and fond of him she is, I believe,” said Thwan, “and the sweat runs down her face as it does ours, and I’ve seen blisters on her hands. That’s the last of it, Med, I say, and I will listen to no more.”

Pos had come into the barn to speak to Thwan, but had stopped upon hearing their voices, the old reflex of silence coming back to him unthinking; or perhaps it was surprise at surprising them at so unusual an occupation as conversation; or perhaps it was only courtesy, not to interrupt what did not include him. At Thwan’s final statement he turned and left, without letting them know of his presence, telling himself that it was that he wished not to embarrass them, Med particularly, who was only being loyal to a master (Pos told himself) he also considered a friend, telling himself that he would not think further about what they had said.

But he did think of it; he could not help himself. When he reached out, in the early morning, to stroke Coral’s cheek to wake her—for it was always he who opened his eyes first—he saw his old gnarled hand against her smooth young skin, and sometimes he could not bear it, and drew back without touching her, and spoke her name instead. These moments did not—had not—lingered in his memory, or so he believed, because always she turned, still half asleep, and put an arm around his neck to pull his face down to hers that she might kiss him; that was what he remembered. But those moments he had chosen to forget rushed back to him upon Med’s words, those moments in the early morning and many others, for suddenly there were many others, and he stood still again, having broken his promise not to think about what he had heard before he even had left the barn, and drew his breath as if it hurt him.

The second thing had not troubled him until the first gave him the opportunity his fears had been seeking to break out of their dungeons and torment him.

His farm had been his father’s farm, and his father’s, and his before him. His family seemed to have farming in its blood, for the farm had done well for four generations, from that first great-grandfather who knew where to take up the first spadeful of earth to begin a farm; and each son had been as eager as the father to tend the good land. Each generation had pushed the wild country back a little, claiming a little more pasture and cropland from wilderness, though each generation knew the wilderness was there, just beyond their last fences, leaning over the last furrowed rows, short-lived thorn and bramble and the shadows of oaks hundreds of years old. This did not trouble the farmers; the wild land was the wild land, and they had their farm, and one was one and the other was the other.

Pos’s farm was roughly a square. The land here was almost flat, and since there was plenty of water, there was no reason to follow one line over another, and so as each farmer laid out his extra field, he tended to measure from the center, where the farmhouse and barns were (the house was a little nearer one edge of the square, where what had become the road to what had become the town was). The fields were not perfectly regular; there was a little contour to the ground that was worth following. But the lines were still quite recognizably close to straight.

Except for one corner. There was a squiggle in one corner, a hummock-shaped squiggle, a big hummock, with roots, like a big tree, and the roots ran into the carefully tended farm fields, like an underground ripple. This hummock was low itself, though visible enough in a terrain almost flat, and it was covered with low scrubby underbrush; and behind it was a tiny concavity of valley, a cup within its ring. Altogether the hummock, its roots, and its valley were perhaps the size of one good generous pasture for a modest herd of cows.

This hummock refused to be cultivated. Pos had never tried, because his father and grandfather had told him it was not worth it; nothing would grow there but weeds and wildflowers. They and their father and grandfather had tried clearing and planting it, and for one season it remained barren, while the sowed seed refused to sprout, and the second season saw the wilderness return. Trees never grew there, and the scrub never took over, the way scrub usually did on neglected meadows; chiefly what the hummock was was a haven for wildflowers.

There were wildflowers everywhere, of course, for the ground was rich and the summers long and warm. Buttercups sprang up in the little deer-browsed meadows scattered among the trees in the long level spaces beyond the farm, buttercups and daisies, the big yellow and white and yellow and brown daisies, and the tiny pale pink and white ones; and cow parsley and poppies and meadowsweet and forget-me-nots and violets and heartsease, and dandelions, dandelions could grow anywhere. All these seeded the wind and sank their tiny stubborn roots on Pos’s farm as well, where they were furrowed under or plucked up. Poppies occasionally sprang up behind the deep cut of the plough blade. But in general the wildflowers stayed beyond the confines of the farm and looked on politely, with the thorn and scrub and grasses and saplings and big old trees, and there was some of one and some of another, and the ordinary balance of uncultivated land stretched untroublingly before the eye.

The hillock was drowned in buttercups. The occasional daisy grew there, too, and nothing would keep out dandelions; but it was the buttercups that reigned, sun-bright from early May till the end of September, their tangled stems thick as weaving. Pos had always had a faint nagging feeling about the hillock; there was something not right about it, that great hot swath of yellow, it didn’t look natural, it unsettled the eye, his eye. He felt there was something he ought to do about it—something besides the straightforward razing and planting that his forebears had proved did not work—but he had plenty to occupy him in the rest of his farm, and so he left it alone, carrying the small nagging feeling with him the best he could.

But Coral loved the little wild hillock. The first buttercups of the year were coming out when he brought his bride to the farm; they caught her eye at once, and immediately she named it Buttercup Hill. “But they are not buttercups, you know,” she said, the first time she walked there. He had taken her all around the farm, showing her everything, even the corners of the barns where old tools lay, broken since his grandfather’s day and never thrown out, because as soon as something is thrown out, there is some bit of it that might have been salvaged and used. He took her all around his fields, even to the edge of the small wild hillock.

He had not wanted to go any farther; he preferred to keep his feet on farmland. But the story of it intrigued her, and she would go, and he had gone with her because he had to, or lose the pleasure of her arm through his, and he was not willing to do that unnecessarily, even for a moment. He thought he could bear it for a moment or two, for the sake of keeping her at his side.

But she looked at the ground curiously as they walked up the little slope, and pawed as a horse might at the little yellow flowers that were already blooming thick and plentiful despite the earliness of the season. And then she bent and plucked one of them up. “These aren’t buttercups, whatever your great-great-grandfather called them. Buttercups don’t grow like this, for one thing—their stems mostly run around underground, not on top in a mat—and the flowers are the wrong shape, although I give you that they’re the right size and color, and at a distance you wouldn’t guess.” She frowned at the flower she held, but in a friendly fashion, and spun its stem in her fingers. “I have no idea what they are, though. I know wildflowers pretty well, but these are new to me. Your lowlands are a strange country, dear Pos.”

And she loved Buttercup Hill all the more as the riot of yellow gained strength in the summer heat. Pos said to her once that he did not like the unbroken fury of yellow upon that hill, and she laughed at him, and called him Old Grumbler. She said that she would make him a yellow shirt—just that buttercup yellow, to smite his dull eye—and he would wear it (she said, she would make him wear it if she had to), and he would learn about brightness and color, and that not everything had to be brown and green and grow in rows, and he would be so astonished that he would have to give up grumbling. He had laughed with her, and said that he would merely find something else to grumble about, old habits died hard. Yes, yes, she said, she was sure he could find other things to grumble about, why didn’t he begin to make a list so that she could get started quickly, thinking of ways to foil everything on it, it would give them something to do during the long winter evenings, grumbling and foiling. And that summer evening ended in making love, as many of their evenings did. But Pos’s small nagging feeling about Buttercup Hill grew no less persistent.

There was one thing he and Coral did not do together, and that was her afternoon ride. She did not have time for it every day, but she had Moly to exercise, and she loved her young mare too, and so most days she found time. Sometimes she worked so quickly—so as not to feel she was not doing her share, she said—that Pos remonstrated with her, telling her she did not need to exhaust herself, that he did not begrudge her an hour for her horse. She teased him about this too, saying that they should buy him a riding horse, that he could come with her; but he used those hours to poke into corners, in the house, the barns, the fields, to see if there was anything he had overlooked that should not be overlooked, and heard what she was saying as teasing only. He could sit on a horse, but riding gave him no particular pleasure; none of his family had ever been riders; there was no need for a farmer to be a horse rider.

Coral was out riding the afternoon that he overheard the conversation between Med and Thwan.

Coral almost always rode to Buttercup Hill and—she said—had a good gallop around the valley before turning for home, Moly trotting politely along the neat paths through the farm fields.

It was as if Med’s words shone a great bright light in the corner of Pos’s mind where he had banished (he thought) what was only a small nagging feeling. And the new light threw shadows from thoughts he had not known were there at all; he had done more banishing than he let himself remember. Did Coral not like farm life? Had he always suspected this? Did she like the hillock for its wildness—not because it was a good place to gallop her mare but because the farm fields constricted her, made her restless? He had seen no sign of it—he thought. But—he believed in her sense of honor as he could not quite believe in her love for him. It was reasonable—reasonable—that she should want to escape from her chaotic family, her vague parents, and their dingy lives; it was more than reasonable that she should prefer an offer of marriage to an offer of dalliance.

That did not mean that she loved him. That she wanted him and his farm.

He could bear that, he thought, carefully, coldly. But he did not think he could bear to lose her.

What could he offer her but stability? Stability was little enough to a young and beautiful woman; little enough after the first satisfied flush of having achieved a clever thing has worn off. He was not a wealthy man, and almost everything he earned he put back into his farm; no other way had ever occurred to him, it was what his family had always done. He remembered their conversation about the yellow shirt Coral had said she would make him; remembered it with pain, now, remembered how that evening had ended as if he had already lost her. His house—their house—was as plain as he was; where there were carpets on the floor they were there for warmth, not beauty; where there were cushions on the chairs they were there for comfort only, the patterns so faded he could not see them, and so old he could not remember them. The chairs themselves were square and functional—and plain—like the rooms, like the house, like the farm, like himself.

It was that same afternoon that she said to him, “I have noticed a curious thing: Moly’s shoes turn yellow—yellow as buttercups—when we’re riding through Buttercup Hill. And horseshoe-colored again as soon as we leave.”

He had not meant to go to meet her; his feet had taken him toward her without his conscious volition; he wanted the nearness of her, the fact of her warmth and her self, the comfort of her existence in his trouble—for all that his trouble was about her, about losing the having of her. He had looked up to the clatter of hoofs and seen her coming toward him, the mare’s mane and her braid blowing back in the wind of their motion. She stopped beside him and said, “Come up behind me. You can put your foot in the stirrup—I’ll kick this one loose.” He shook his head, still deep in unhappy reflections, the sight of her only making them more acute.

“Oh, Pos, one of your moods of gloom? Have you been out with your measuring stick—when you could be out galloping with the wind in your face—have you discovered the wheat is half a finger’s breadth shorter than it should be at this season? Let me distract you. I have noticed a curious thing—” And she told him.

“At first I thought I was imagining it—of course. It was a trick of the light, or pollen, or something; or even some odd characteristic of your lowland blacksmiths’ metal. But today I dismounted and picked Moly’s feet up and looked at her shoes—and they were yellow. Yellow as gold. It even felt different, those yellow horseshoes, when I touched them. Softer. And,” she went on as if the end of her tale was as interesting as the beginning, “do you know, the flower stems of your funny not-buttercups are so dense you really don’t touch the earth itself at all now? I should have been worried about Moly’s getting her feet caught, I think, earlier in the year, but I certainly don’t have to now.”

At the word gold Pos did look up at her, and when she came to the end of her story, she leaned down and grasped his hair, close to the scalp, and tipped his head farther back. “I cannot have a conversation with you down there and me up here. If you will not come up, I will have to get down, and then Moly will feel cheated. As will I, if you don’t say something soon.”

He could not stop himself smiling at her then, looking into her face smiling at him; he loved her so, and her presence felt like—like sunlight, and himself some slip of a seedling. “There, that’s better,” she said.

“If I get up behind you, Moly will feel worse than cheated,” he said. “I am no lightweight.”

“It will be good for her,” said Coral, and pulled her foot free of the stirrup. “She has not enough challenges in her life. It is why I want to teach you to ride too; Moly would like another horse to run with. Have you seen her cavorting around your old plough horses, biting their withers, trying to get them to play with her?”

He, sitting behind her, having hauled himself awkwardly up to sit gingerly across Moly’s loins, put his arms around his wife’s slim waist, and thought, And I am the oldest plough horse of all.

Harvest was approaching. The wheat was better than waist-high, and the thatching straw crop was as high as Thwan’s shoulder, and Thwan was half a head taller than Pos. It was a good year, and Pos should have been happy, but a shadow had fallen on him, and he could not walk out of it. Coral still rode her mare most afternoons over Buttercup Hill; once he asked her if Moly’s shoes still turned gold, and Coral said, after a little pause, that they did. “I had almost forgotten—the noticing and then telling you. It seems as ordinary as—as the sun going behind a cloud, so a great bleak shadow sweeps over you. It’s astonishing but at the same time ordinary. It’s like that. And it goes away, like that.”

But the shadow did not leave Pos, and he began to brood about Buttercup Hill; he thought, angrily, that there was no reason—no proper reason—that a small irregular bit of land should so resist farming. He’d have the weeds down next spring, and cut the ground up well. Ploughing methods had improved since his father’s day, and the shape of the blade he used was slightly different. Pos’s father and grandfather had probably only not put enough effort into clearing out the buttercup roots; buttercup roots ran everywhere, once they’d had their own way for a few seasons. He and Thwan and Med would dig and plough every last clinging rootlet out, and next year Buttercup Hill would be buttercups no longer.

But simultaneously with this thought was another, about Coral’s story. It was nonsense, of course … but what if it wasn’t? He’d always known that the kind of old tale that gets told around a fireside in the winter, especially late winter when everyone is restless for spring, is a product of nothing more than that restlessness—that and sometimes a need to keep a child quiet. He had known that even when he was the child, something about the tone of his mother’s or father’s voice; and one or two of those tales had been about Buttercup Hill. He didn’t remember them very well; he’d never had children to tell them to, and he had never had much interest in things that weren’t true. But the shadow whispered to him, telling him that he had gotten many things wrong in his life and that this was one of them.…

He tried to remember the last time he had walked on Buttercup Hill; he wasn’t sure he ever had, except for that once, briefly, when his feet touched the bottom of the slope, to keep Coral’s arm in his. His father had given up on the problem of its existence years before he was old enough to notice, and he had learned to leave it alone as he had learned to plough and plant and harvest: by doing it. Avoiding it was as ordinary and familiar to him as was the weight of a horse collar in his hand.

One afternoon he arranged to be at that end of the farm when Coral went riding, and he wandered up to the crest of the little hill after her. He thought his feet tingled as he stepped on the buttercups and their hill, and his knees went almost rubbery, but he kept on walking.

The valley was not large, and he saw Moly, Coral bent over her neck, running flat out, graceful as a deer; but the valley came to an end, and she swerved, and Coral drew her up, and in another moment they were trotting up to meet Pos. The whole had taken no more than a few minutes, and Moly had not sweated, though her nostrils showed red as she breathed. “Would you like a try?” said Coral. “Moly has lovely gaits, and a canter is much easier to sit than a trot.”

He shook his head, stroking Moly’s warm shoulder absently; then he ran his hand down her leg and picked up that hoof. Moly balanced a bit awkwardly, three-legged with a person on her back, and eager as she was for more running; but she was far too well-mannered to protest, and let the hoof lie weightlessly in Pos’s big hands. The shoe was yellow—yellow as gold. When Pos touched it, it felt different, not the hard proud absoluteness of cold iron. When he set the foot down and looked up at his wife, she was looking down at him with an expression he had not seen before, and he wondered what the expression on his own face was.

“It’s just a shadow over the sun,” she said.

“No doubt,” he replied.

But two nights later he slipped out to the barn where the horses were kept, leaving Coral asleep. There was a three-quarters moon in a clear sky; the wheat fields were silver. He drew a long breath; he had been forgetting how much he loved even the smell of his land. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that there was love behind work; it should not be so easy. He was lucky to love his work, and he should make himself remember this if he was so lazy as to forget. He let his eyes wander over the fields, so different from those same fields by daylight. It was going to be a good harvest, better than almost any harvest he could remember. They could afford a new wagon—he and Thwan both were tired of nailing bits back on the old one—and the roof of the lower barn needed replacing, at least the half of it that faced north. His well-organized mind began to make lists, happy in the details of farming, happy in the luck of having been born to work that he loved.

He was luckier yet to have the wife he loved. But the best harvest the farm could produce would not buy her the jewels her beauty deserved, the silks in bright colors she should have to wear, the lofty rooms in the grand house her husband should have been able to offer her. He turned away from the prospect of his moonlit land and went into the barn.

There was a faint sleepy whicker from friendly Moly, who was, Coral had often said, a lapdog grown too large. The big draft horses were silent, knowing the proper schedule, knowing that it was not time for either food or work. Turney came pattering into the barn, having no notion of protecting his territory from invaders but only hoping that the sound of movement might indicate something he could herd. He waved his tail once or twice at Pos in a puzzled fashion and pattered away again.

Pos went into Bel’s stall and put a hand on his shoulder; the horse’s enormous head came around, but when he saw the bridle in Pos’s hand, he flattened his ears and turned his head away again. Pos put his hand over his nose and gently drew him back, feeling the huge neck muscles not quite resisting. Bel was an old horse, well-trained and good-natured too, and he knew it wasn’t really worth arguing with human beings. He opened his mouth for the bit with a long sigh.

Pos had chosen Bel because he had the largest feet. He had thought of taking all four workhorses, but decided against it, for reasons he did not quite look at, just as he did not quite look at what he was doing at all.

Pos had to stand on a bucket to scramble up on Bel’s broad back; the horse’s ears cocked back at this bizarre behavior, but he had made his minor protest in the stall and was now merely bemused. They walked slowly to Buttercup Hill, slowly up it. As Bel’s feet first touched the carpet of buttercups, he raised his big head and looked around; Pos briefly had the sensation that he considered prancing. Certainly Pos had not seen him look so interested in anything but his grain bucket in many years.

He turned the horse’s head back toward the barn, and as they began the downhill slope, Bel’s nose dropped to its usual place, as if he were wearing a collar and pulling a plough. Before they reached the bottom, Pos dismounted and picked one of Bel’s feet up. In the moonlight it was difficult to say for sure, for his shoes looked as silvery as the landscape; but under Pos’s fingers they tingled, and Pos was sure he saw what he hoped to see. He fumbled for the blacksmith’s bar and pincers he had brought with him.

Bel, more bemused than ever, stepped very carefully down the familiar path to the barn, anxious about his naked feet. Pos slung the heavy satchel of horseshoes down in a corner by the door, and gave Bel a quiet half-portion of grain, to make up for the interruption of his sleep—and Moly a handful of that, since she was awake and lively, putting her nose over her door and trying to seize Pos’s sleeve with her lips. She ate the grain happily enough, but she still looked after Pos as if she believed she had been left out of an adventure. The other horses stirred in their drowse, thinking they heard the sound of grain being chewed, but believing they dreamed, for they knew the schedule just as Bel did.

Pos crept back to his sleeping wife, trying to feel pleased with himself and failing; even the moonlight on his beautiful crops did not cheer him, nor the cool rich earth smell in his nostrils. When he eased himself slowly back into bed, Coral turned toward him and murmured, “You’re cold. Where have you been?”

“There was a noise in the stock barn,” he said, after a moment.

“Moly having adventures in her sleep,” said Coral; “you needn’t worry, you know, Moly would kick up such a row trying to get any thieves to take notice of her that they’d have little chance to do any mischief. Besides stealing her, I suppose,” she added.

“It might have been a bear,” said Pos.

“Mmm,” said Coral, asleep again.

Pos overslept the next morning, something that had never happened before. It was Coral’s cry of shock and terror that awoke him. She was out of bed, standing by the window, and as he sat up, and then stumbled to his feet to go to her, he saw her raise her hands from the windowsill as if she would ward something off, and back away. “The gods have cursed us!” she cried. “What have we done? What have we done? Oh, why did I marry you if it was only to bring you ruin?”

He knew, then, and half expected what he would see when he looked out of the window.

The house and barns stood in a sea of buttercups. Gone were the fields of wheat standing ready for harvest; gone were the neat paths, the fences around the pastures, the smaller tidy blocks of the vegetable garden. He saw a cow blundering unhappily through a tangle of buttercups where the thatching straw had once grown; automatically he recognized her, Flora, always the first one through the gate into fresh pasture, or the first one to find a weak place in the fencing and break through. Behind her at some little distance were Tansy and Nup; the three of them always grazed together, Tansy and Nup following where Flora led. The soft brown and cream of the cows’ hair looked dim and weak against the blaze of yellow, as if the cows themselves would be overcome by buttercups, and crumble to pale ash. Pos saw nothing else moving.

Ruined, he thought. More years than are left in my life to regain what I’ve lost for us both. And he knew that the horseshoes beside the barn door were iron again.

“My darling,” said Coral, weeping, “my love, I will go away, back up to the Hills; it is I who caused this. There is a bane on my family, laid on my father’s father. He thought to escape it by leaving the mountains, and I thought to escape it by marrying you; almost I did not believe in it, a fey thing, a tale for children, for I was the eldest, and it had not fallen to me, or to Moira after me, but then Del, as he grew up—no, no, I saw it immediately, when he was just a baby—Moira and I, we both knew, as Rack does, but I would not believe, I would make it not so, not for me, it was only a tale, an excuse for recklessness and waste, I believed loving you was enough, that the bane would not follow after a choice honestly made.…”

He barely heard her at first, for all he cared about was her distress. He would have to tell her in a moment, tell her that it was he that had ruined them, he and his greed, his dishonest greed, but for the moment he wanted her in his arms, to feel for the last time that his arms were of some use to her, some comfort.

“I could not believe that I was evil, only by having been born into the family that I was; I refused to believe in bad blood, in that kind of wickedness. I believed that you can make what you will of your life; oh, no, I did not really believe that, I did think I was doomed as my family was doomed; till I met you, and fell in love with you, that first day, I think, when I looked up from the well and you were there in that old shabby wagon with your beautiful glossy horse, you were like that yourself, old shabby clothes, but such a good face, and I knew from the way you held the reins that I trusted you—that the horse trusted you—and it was only later that I realized that I loved you. I could not believe my luck when you asked me to marry you; I’m only a girl, and knew nothing of farming, knew nothing of anything except feeding seven people on two potatoes, and horses, I knew horses, I knew that Moly was worth saving when her mother died, although the owner couldn’t be bothered.

“Oh, my love,” she said, almost incoherent with weeping, “I hate to leave you, but it must have been me; whatever lives in Buttercup Hill recognized me; perhaps if I leave, they will give you your farm back.…” She was clinging to him as she never had clung, like ivy on an oak; he had been proud of her independence, that independence choosing to be his companion, to work in his fields with him so that they became their fields; and yet this had been part of what made him uneasy—part of what made him willing to listen to Med. He damned himself now, now that it was too late, for foolishness. He deserved to lose her. But she would not go thinking it was her fault.

“Hush,” he said. “It is not your fault. It is not. It is mine. No”—as she began again to speak—“you do not know. I will tell you.” But he did not speak at once, and cradled her head against his shoulder in his old knotted hand, and he did not realize that he himself was weeping till he saw the tears fall upon her hair.

“It is I,” he said at last, his voice deep with misery, “ah! I hate to tell you. It is true, you must go away, but not to save me, to save yourself.” He thought, I can give her a proper dowry if I sell Dor and Thunder; I can get along with Bel and Ark only, for I will have to let Med and Thwan go, of course. With her beauty she will be able to find another husband; and with some money she will be able to find one who will respect her.…

“Tell me,” she said, and drew her head away, and looked up at him. “Tell me,” she said, passionately.

“I cannot, if you look at me like that,” he said, closing his eyes, and now he felt the hot tears on his cheeks. He felt her move, and her hands on his face, and her lips against his chin. “I love you,” she said. “I am glad”—she said fiercely—“if this is not my fault, for then I need not leave you after all.”

That gave him the strength to tell her, and as he had told her nothing before, he told her all now, for he could not decide what to tell and what to hold back. So he began with Med, and of how Med’s words had made him look at what he had turned away from before, that he was an old man, too old for her, and dull, a farmer, with little enough to offer her, except that her own family—here, finally, he stumbled over his words—had so much less. And he thought that perhaps if he had money enough to buy her things—the sorts of things beautiful women should have—perhaps that would be enough, that she would find it enough reason to stay with him.… He stopped himself just before he told her he could not bear to lose her, because he was going to send her away, for he had nothing at all to offer her now.

She was silent for a time after he had spoken, but she did not draw away as he expected. Her hands had gone around his neck while he spoke, and her head was again in the curve between his collarbone and jaw. At last she sighed and stepped back, and he dropped his hands instantly, but she just as quickly took them in her own, and looked into his face with her clear eyes and smiled. “It is very bad,” she said, “but not so bad as I expected—feared. For I do not have to leave you after all. I wish—I wish we had talked of this six months ago, for you are an escape for me, and I have never not known this, nor ignored that you are my father’s age. But I was too afraid to tell you everything about me—and you have known that I did not tell you everything, and that is how this began.

“No,” she said, as he would have spoken. “No. I will not listen, for I know now what you would say, and I will not have it. We are both at fault, and we will work together to mend that fault; and after this we will tell each other—not everything, for who can tell everything even if they wished? Who can tell everything, even to oneself? Not I. But I have known there were important things I was not telling you, and we will make a vow, now, to tell each other everything we know to be important. And”—she laughed, a little, a poor sound compared with her usual laughter, but a laugh nonetheless—“and we will trust our own judgment about importance, for we have had a very hard lesson.”

She clasped their hands together tightly and said, “Promise. Promise me now, as I promise you, to tell you—tell you as much of everything as I can, and I will look into all the shadows that I can for things that need to be told, and perhaps I will even learn to ask you to help me to look for shadows. And there will be no shame between us about this, about what is important, about what shadows we fear—about those very things we most fear to tell each other. Promise.” And she shook their clasped hands.

“Coral—”

“Promise.”

And so he promised.

And then they went downstairs together, and ate a hasty breakfast, and went out to see what could be done, and to decide where to start.

Med went willingly. Pos, looking into his eyes before Med dropped his, saw something there that made him—for all the disaster around him—glad for the excuse to let him go, never having had any notion before this that such an excuse was wanted.

But Thwan would not leave. “I’ve known about Buttercup Hill,” he said, easily giving it the friendly name Coral had used in better times. “My father’s father told stories of it too, Pos. It’s a danger we live by, like a river that may flood. I can afford to work for no wages for a little while. I don’t want much but work to do.” He paused, but Pos was thinking of likening Buttercup Hill to a river. Rivers did not only destroy, when they ran beyond their banks. Thwan went on, slowly: “Good work to do. And I’m too old to be finding another master. Even if one would have me, I’m used to doing things … the way of this farm.” He paused again. “I don’t think what lives in Buttercup Hill means you to starve, and starving is the only thing that frightens me.”

Pos looked at his old friend half in dismay and half in delight. He had not told him why the buttercups had flooded the farm; only Coral need know that. He would find something for Thwan to do at the other end of the farm while he hammered Bel’s shoes back on; Thwan would not ask for an explanation, but Pos would know he was not offering one. That easily he accepted Thwan’s refusal. He had not, then, the strength to argue, there was too much else his strength was needed for more; but while he did not know it, losing that first argument with Coral had turned him to a new shape. The littleness of the change was such that it would be a long time before he knew of it. But what it meant, now, was that he could let his wife and his farmhand overrule his decision and he lose no face or authority and gain no shame from it. He did not think of this at all. He thought of starving, and of the buttercups where the vegetable garden had been; of whether cows could give milk when their only forage was buttercups. And so Thwan stayed.

And they did not starve, the three of them, because for the first deadly hard weeks Coral went out in the mornings with panniers behind Moly’s saddle into the wild land beyond the farm, and gathered berries and other fruit, and dug roots and cut succulent young leaves, and brought them home, for she had had long years of feeding a larger family on almost nothing. She refused to accept any praise for this; it was harvest time in the wild too, and there was plenty to eat, and no cleverness necessary in the gathering of it. She taught Pos, who had never known, and Thwan, who had forgotten, how to set snares; and they ate rabbit and hare and ootag. Sometimes Thwan ate with them in the evenings, which he had not done before; it seemed easier, that way, to share equally, when there was only just enough. The noon meal was as it had always been, something on the back of the stove, set there to cook when Pos, and later Pos and Coral, came outdoors in the morning; except on the hottest days, when it was bread and cheese. But previously the noon meal had been eaten out of doors, under a tree, on the porch, in a corner of a field; and all three of them noticed that Thwan was now the only one who seemed still to prefer this. Both Pos and Coral spoke to him about it, but he only smiled, and they saw in the smile that he did not stay away from the house from shyness.

But for worry, they were all as healthy and strong as they had ever been.

Strength they needed, and stamina. The first thing they did was look out the fencing for the animals, and it was not as bad as they had expected, for the fencing was still there, under the wild weave of buttercups. It was only that—mysteriously—all the gates had been opened on the night that Pos had pulled Bel’s shoes off after walking on Buttercup Hill.

More mysteriously, the beasts all ate buttercups with apparent relish. (Even Turney, who did not know that his three human beings were careful to leave something on their plates for the dog’s bowl when they would have liked to eat the last scrap themselves, was seen gravely nipping the heads off buttercups, and swallowing them enthusiastically.) The cows’ milk had never been so thick and rich and abundant as in the first buttercup weeks, for all that their calves were half grown and they should be beginning to dry up toward winter. Even the sheep’s udders swelled, though this was at first unnoticed since unexpected, invisible under their thick curling fleeces (thicker than usual, thought Pos; must be coming up a bad winter). The horses seemed tireless, however many times they went up and down the fields pulling Pos’s heaviest blade, for the buttercup roots went deep (a rare crop of poppies we’ll have next year, thought Pos).

“In case you’d like to know,” said Coral, “this proves that they aren’t buttercups. Real buttercups are poisonous.” (Slow-acting, thought Pos. Cumulative. The stock will all die suddenly, any time now.)

Pos taught Coral to make cheese, and after they’d had a few weeks to ripen, risked taking a few cheeses they hoped were surplus to market day in town; and these fetched prices better than their previous cheeses ever had, after Coral brought enough over from their lunch the first time to offer small sample tastes (wasteful, thought Pos). And then the three cows that had been barren in the spring dropped unsuspected calves at the very end of summer, and the calves were bigger and stronger than any Pos had seen in all his years of farming, although the mothers had found the births easy. These calves grew so quickly that Coral said to Pos that she felt that if she ever had time to stand still for a quarter hour and watch, she would see them expand. “We could ask Thwan to eat his lunch next to the cow pasture,” she suggested with a grin, “and ask if he sees anything.”

Pos shook his head. “Something not right about them,” he said. “Something grows too quickly in the beginning, gets spindly before the end, doesn’t grow together right.”

When Pos took all the calves to the big harvest fair in late autumn, the youngest ones were almost as well-grown as the oldest. It was one of the youngest that fetched the best price of all, and the farmer who bought her exclaimed over the heavy straight bones and clean lines of her, how square and sturdy she was built.

Several people remarked on the slight golden cast of the coats and hoofs and eyes of those last three calves, just as other people remarked that they could pick out one of Buttercup Farm’s new cheeses because it glowed as it lay among other, more ordinary fare, just as their sheep’s wool, which had only looked like any wool on the sheep’s backs, proved to have a faint golden tint when it was washed and spun.

Winter was a lean time nonetheless, for they had had little harvest. The wheat and straw crops were ruined, though there were vegetables left under the buttercup vines as there had been fence posts and rails under them, and so they did not starve; but they had none left over to sell, and before spring they began to wish they had sold fewer cheeses, though they had spent every penny they earned on stores for the winter, for the beasts as well as themselves, and for seed for the spring. There was nothing over even to mend the old wagon, which was at its creakiest and most fragile in cold weather.

It was a hard winter (though not as hard as Pos predicted). Snow fell, and no one had any good winter crops, and what little grew was tough and dry and frostbitten. But when the spring came and the horses drew the plough through the fresh-cut furrows one last time before setting seed, the plough seemed to fly through the earth, although its blade glinted gold rather than silver, and Bel’s and Ark’s flaxen manes were almost yellow. And the buttercups still twined over all the fencing, even the stair rails up to the porch around the house, and showed flowers early, as soon as the snow melted, before most other leaves were even thinking about putting in an appearance. (Pos said that the buttercups hid mending that needed to be done, and that Flora would be finding the weak places for them.)

The cows all delivered their calves safely, and none was barren, and the sheep delivered their lambs, which were mostly twins, but the grass rose up thickly enough to support any amount of milk for any number of babies, and cheese-making besides. The cheeses this year were as yellow as they had been the autumn before, and the new babies again touched with gold; and then bright chestnut Moly threw a foal, though she had not been bred that they knew, and the farm horses were all mares and geldings. The foal was as golden as a new penny, and as fleet as a bird, with legs even longer than its dam’s as it grew up, and they called it Feyling, and when it was four years old, Coral rode it at the harvest fair races, and it won the gold cup.

But by then Coral was pregnant with their second child, and Merry was two and a half, and Pos had not wanted Coral to ride in the race, but she had only laughed and said that she was glad she was no more than three months along, for she did not want to weigh enough to slow Feyling down. “Not that anything could,” she added, and Pos knew that there was no point in arguing with her.

Their farm had been called Buttercup Farm from that first grim but surprising autumn, and while they had taken no joy from the name initially, they let it stand, not wishing to disturb what it was they had involuntarily set in motion, or set free, or roused, whatever it was that, as Thwan had said, did not in fact wish them to starve, and when anyone asked if they were from Buttercup Farm, they said with only a momentary pause, “Yes.” The momentary pause had disappeared by the time the year had come around to harvest again, and Thwan had come to Pos, much embarrassed, and said that he wished to marry too, and Pos had said with real feeling that he did not wish to lose him but would try to put together the money he was certainly owed, that they might make a beginning toward their own farm. And Thwan said, after a pause, in his slow way, that all they really wanted was enough to build a little house, on the edge of Buttercup Farm, if Pos and Coral would allow it, and he go on working as he had done for so long, and perhaps there would be work for his wife too; she was raised on a farm. They had met over Buttercup Farm cheeses, because people had begun to come in from the next counties to buy them, and she knew something about cheeses.

A year after Thwan married Nai, they increased their cow and sheep herds by almost a half, to keep up with the demand for their cheeses; but there they stopped it, for they were happy with their work, and the size of their farm, and each other, and they tried not to make too many plans for Merry, and for Thwan and Nai’s Orly, and for the baby Coral was carrying when Feyling won the gold cup. But when they built the house for Thwan to bring Nai home to, they shook buttercup pollen over it, and the vines obligingly grew up their porch railings the next year too, but politely left room for Nai’s pansies. And when Pos and Coral repainted their house, white as it had always been, they stripped the black shutters down to bare wood so they could repaint them a pale yellow, as they painted the railings around the porch the same color, and it gleamed against the darker buttercups. They had never had time, that first year, to uproot the vines that grew around their house, although Pos at least had wished to; but neither of them now would think of it (although Coral took cuttings from Nai, and planted pansies), and the vines just around the house went on bearing flowers nine or ten months of the year, an occasional yellow spangle showing even when all else was dry and brown and cold.

After Feyling won the gold cup, he was much in demand at stud, though no one knew who his father was, and no one was greedy or stupid enough to claim a stolen stud fee. And Pos learned to ride, first on the good-natured Moly and later on the less patient Feyling, and so Coral took her husband with her now on her afternoon rides, when there was time and peace for them again. But they did not ride on Buttercup Hill.

After Dhwa was born, and that spring was more glorious even than the last four springtimes had been, the four of them, Pos and Coral and Merry and Dhwa went, one night under a full moon, to walk on Buttercup Hill. They had not set foot there since Bel had walked shoeless over it; but over the years they no longer felt a chill as they passed it, and began to seek it out with their eyes, and feel as if it were a friendly presence, and to be pleased when their work took them near it.

They walked up to the little crest, Dhwa in Coral’s arms and Merry set down to toddle around her father’s feet, the children’s hair no less yellow than the untouched tangle of buttercups in the hollow before them, golden even in the moonlight. There was a tiny breeze, and a wonderful smell of green growing things, and a distant whiff of clean barn and animals and their fodder. Pos and Coral gave long sighs, and leaned against each other, carefully, for Dhwa was asleep. Pos it was who at last spoke aloud what they were both thinking.

“Thank you,” he said.