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DEATH TEACHES WHAT it is to be alive.
—Mother Gwendolin, Cathuran monk
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GILLY SHOOK THE BRAIDED rug just outside the doorway, sending dust particles fluttering into the crisp winter air. From just beyond the kitchen garden outside their front door, she heard the uneven thuds of Thomlin’s boots on the frozen soil as he limped from the millhouse toward the wagon with a grain sack slung over one shoulder. When she’d set his leg, Mignon had told Thomlin he would suffer dull pains in cold weather, for the slivers of shinbone would knit together imperfectly. His shattered leg would always be slightly shorter than the other. Gilly remembered Mignon questioning Thomlin repeatedly while examining the leg and had found it hard to believe Gwen could have done it alone. According to her mother, the force it had taken to break the leg was like that of more than one full-grown man, and large ones at that. Gwen, whom Thomlin had said swung the plank then threw it away from her as if it were a twig, was just a wisp of a thing. But Thomlin stuck to his story and insisted Gwen had acted alone. How she had mustered the strength to do it remained a mystery.
On cold days such as this, Gilly imagined the once crushed bone in Thomlin’s shorter leg must have ached miserably. She could only imagine what he felt because her husband had never once complained about it, not even when asked. Nor had he let it stop him from doing anything that needed doing, including chasing after their children when they’d been young and full of the spritely mischief of their namesakes, Rolf and Gwen.
A cold chill blew past her at the thought of Gwen, and Gilly felt overwhelmed with sadness and a bone-chilling fear. She looked past the wagon in search of her children, who now were young adults.
Thomlin closed the wagon gate and came over to her, kissing her atop her head. “You look worried.”
“I don’t see the children.”
“They’re in the woods. Rolf was on about an elusive hare while he was slopping the pigs, and Gwen said she wanted to go with him so that maybe she could talk him out of shooting it.”
“I had the strangest feeling, Thomlin.”
“About what?” he asked, turning her toward him and cupping her face in his meaty hands. It was what he’d done all their years together to allay her worries.
Despite the wrinkles that had begun to expose his age, Gilly still saw in Thomlin’s face the sweet kindness of his youth. “Gwen.”
“She’s with her brother. You know she’s safe.”
“Not our Gwen.”
“Gwen Ahlgren?”
“Yes,” whispered Gilly, “she’s gone, Thomlin. I can feel it.” Thomlin pulled her close to him and held her. She took comfort in his embrace, but she wept silently.
The silence of her grief was broken by her daughter’s voice calling from the edge of the woods. “Mother! You won’t believe what we found!”
Gilly wiped her tears and stepped away from Thomlin as her daughter skidded to a stop in front of them, out of breath and followed by her younger but much larger brother.
“What did you see?”
Gwen grinned and uncupped her hands to reveal an uprooted plant, its roots intact in moist soil and at the tip of its stalk a frail violet. “It was the will o’ the wisps. They led us to it.”
“In daylight? Will o’ the wisps?” asked Thomlin.
“Yeah, Pa. That’s what I said.” Rolf chimed in. “But I tracked ’em all the way outta the woods and to the tree by the road at the old Ahlgren place, and that’s when Gwen saw it.”
Gilly looked at the violet and smiled, her heart mended by the message from her dearest friend: Gwendolin Ahlgren had finally come home.
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