Brighida picked up her mother’s slim vial of scented water. Wearing an odd expression, tenderness warring with hurt, she pulled out the rolled-cloth stopper, sprinkled a few drops on the pallet that had been her mother’s, then replaced the stopper and slipped the vial into her pocket.

As we walked up the path to the cottage in the gathering dusk, I broached the questions for which I still had no answer.

“Why did Michael Gough not come for the books last night? Could it be they no longer interest him?” Even I could hear the childish hope in my voice. “Or that they no longer interest the unstill spirit, and so it no longer goads him? What changed, Cousin? What made him seek . . . something other than the books?”

“Megge. Stop. What happened last night had naught to do with the books or the unstill spirit. The blacksmith was taking revenge on my mother. He was serving his own purposes. And perhaps he did not seek out the books simply because he was ill.” The frustration in her voice subsided. “Do you recall the cough that first brought Lowenna to us?”

I winced as I recalled the gob of yellow phlegm that had flown out of her mouth when Mother had ordered her to cough.

“Well, the blacksmith’s cough was nearly as bad.” Her impatience returned. “But I’ve other matters on my mind now. Please stop asking me these questions.”

When we reached the cottage door, she said, “Lowenna will have tended my mother’s body. But you and I have a final service to provide to her spirit before . . .” She stopped, her hand on the latch. Head bowed, she breathed slowly for a moment. “Before we take her to the grove in the morning. So tonight, we’ve work to do. While I make preparations in the cottage, perhaps you can go for some dried oak and a rowan branch.”

Brighida went inside while I walked up the herder’s hill to the tiny hut Alf and Mister Gynneys had built to store drying wood after Michael and his men had burned Mother’s hut to the ground—with Mother inside.

I found a short rowan branch, then split an oak log into four long, slim pieces and walked back to the cottage, the wood piled in my doubled apron. Brighida’s back was to the door, her head bent over her task at the sideboard. A sheet hung over the entrance to the workroom.

“Is Lowenna still with her?”

“She must have gone home. She saw to Mother with great care. Bathed and swaddled her.”

I set the wood down next to the hearth and reached for the edge of the sheet.

“You needn’t go in. Her spirit is no longer there. It is with us now as we prepare to bring her peace.” She nodded toward the hearth. “Lowenna left us a kettle of stew. Eat.”

I had no appetite. Nor, it seemed, did she, for both bowls Lowenna had left out for us were still clean. Shoulders hunched, she pressed down with her pestle, crushing something very small in a tiny bowl. The Book of Time lay open on the table alongside a lighted taper and three tidy piles of dust: yellow, green, and brown.

“Tonight’s rite, the final rite the women of Bury Down perform for our dead, is one of rebirth, of releasing the old. Tonight we take up my mother’s unfinished work. We free her from her cares and her . . . burden.”

“I know what her cares were—seeing to our wellbeing and to that of the women she tended. But what was her burden?”

Pain crossed Brighida’s countenance. She looked away. “Please move the kettle so I can lay the fire.”

I swung the kettle away from the peat, and she laid the wood atop the embers, rowan over oak.

I struggled out of my dirty apron and hung it on the peg alongside the ratty old cloak Morwen had once worn. Though she had been gone for so long now, I still could not bring myself to move it. Just looking at it comforted me.

“What must we do?”

“Take these.” She handed me three bowls, deep blue, each the size of my cupped palm. I ran my finger over the smooth surfaces.

“Fill each with one of these.” She pointed to the neat piles on the table and then emptied the white dust she had just ground into a bowl the color of blood.

“Why is that one different?” I asked as I filled the blue bowls: one with flower dust the color of saffron, one with leaf dust the deep green of late summer, and one with what looked like delicate twigs snapped into tiny pieces.

Brighida tapped a finger on the rim of each bowl. “Flower, leaves, and stems of the horned poppy. They bring rest to the traveler’s spirit. And this, of course,” she picked up the red bowl filled with white dust, “is hyacinth flower.”

As the scent rose from that dish, it conjured Claris’s loving presence.

Fear gripped me. Would this ceremony, intended to give her spirit rest, take from me the comfort I had always felt when she was near?

Brighida touched my arm. “Not even death could take her from us. This ceremony simply breaks her bonds to the living world. Her unfinished work we will now take upon ourselves.”

“What work of hers remains unfinished?”

“My mother’s charge was to teach me all I needed to know in order to fulfill my own charge. And to do that, there is much I do not yet know that I must now come to on my own.”

“And what is your charge?”

She smiled. “To help you fulfill yours.”

“But already I’ve taken up my book. What more must I—” And then I remembered what Morwen had told me I must one day do. “It is for me to unite the books,” I said.

“Perhaps,” Brighida said. “But that is not your charge in this life.”

What else can it be?

She must have read the question on my face, for she did not wait for me to ask. “It is your charge to free us from the tyranny that has gripped us since the dawn of time.”

“What?” I shouted. “Free us from tyranny?” In my mind’s eye I saw men fighting battles with axe and spear. “But that is the work of kings.”

“No, Megge.” She shook her head. “That is the work of the Lady of Bury Down, for the tyranny I speak of, which has forever plagued us, is the power of the unstill spirit to usurp the will of those in the living world. This tyranny has claimed the lives of both our mothers and of countless others. It has claimed even your own, when you lived as Murga. Ending it is your charge in this life.”

Before I could speak, she took my right hand and touched the tip of my forefinger to the dust in the red bowl. One by one, she dipped each of the others into one of the blue bowls I had set upon the table until one fingertip was saffron, one green, and one covered with specks of brown.

“Fulfilling this charge,” Brighida said, “shall imbue you with the knowledge and wisdom, and the power and courage, to serve forevermore as Lady of Bury Down.”

She gently opened the fist I had clenched and brought my fingertips together so the white, yellow, green, and brown powders mingled. “Take a breath.”

I inhaled sharply. The dust, bitter on my tongue, rasped in my throat and lodged deep in my chest. My eyes slowly drifted closed, and my vision filled with the faces of those I had loved: Mother, Claris, Morwen, Aleydis, and others I knew only through Morwen’s tales—my great-grandmother Gytha; her husband, Adaem; their daughter, Natalje; her husband, Arjen.

One face was missing. Now I tasted fear.

“Murga.” I searched Brighida’s face. “I don’t see her. Has she abandoned me?”

Brighida shook her head. “She’s part of you now.”

And through Murga’s rheumy eye I saw her hilltop settlement—Bury Down hillfort in ancient times—its beehive huts clustered within a high stone circle, its men and women toiling in fields under a blazing sun. And then day became night, and constellations began to spin as my spirit soared over rivers and moors, beyond burial cairns and standing stones, and ever deeper into the past until finally I reached ragged cliffs at whose feet churned a blue-green sea.

“You know them, don’t you, Megge of Bury Down?” asked a voice that was silk over silk. “These cliffs of Kernow.”

I could not see the woman who spoke, but I knew that voice. And I knew those cliffs.

“Once, they had been your home,” she said as if coaxing me to remember.

I felt her beckon and yearned to go to her. To those cliffs. To that crashing sea.

My chest filled with longing and a glimmer of recognition—not of person but of spirit—and I bowed my head. “Lady.”

When finally I had returned to our cottage—and our time—I opened my eyes. Brighida had lit her mother’s green candle and stood it alongside the stub of the taper that had been burning throughout this rite. The rising smoke from the two flames swirled and met in the space between the candles, then rose in one strong column. She spoke quietly.

“It is done, Mother. You’re free.”