I felt different now, awed by duty and drawn to those rugged cliffs and the woman with the silken voice.

Brighida stacked the blue dishes, set all three into the red bowl, and carried them to the hearth. She held them out to me, then inclined her head toward the fire. “We’re nearly done.”

One by one I emptied them into the fire. As the dust touched the heat, it sent up colorful sparks and spicy scent. When I emptied the red bowl, the hyacinth dust, still fragrant, filled the room with Claris’s essence, making it feel as if she were still with us.

“How is it,” I asked, “that you and your mother have a scent that conjures your very spirit while my mother and I have none?”

Brighida swung the kettle of stew back over the fire and picked up her long spoon. “You believe you have no essence of your own?” She stirred the stew. “And that your mother had none? Close your eyes.”

I closed them.

“Think of your mother in her healer’s hut. See her at her work.”

I saw her squatting next to a low fire in a pit just outside that hut, her back to me as she stirred something in a small crock.

“What do you smell?”

It’s not a smell, I thought smacking my lips, but a taste. I rolled my tongue over the taste of metal and heard Mother say as she lifted a cooling ball of silver metal from her crucible, Tin, to bring you courage. To bring about dreams. Into molten tin she had stirred zinc, for spiritual revelation. And bismuth, to ease the transition from the physical to the spiritual world. Just as I had done that long-ago day, I once more tasted a tang as, with my dreamer’s eye, I watched her blend the metals that made the stone now hanging at my throat.

“Metal,” I said.

“That’s right. She made your stone just as she made the fine metal strips we use to create healing images.”

“But what of me?” I sniffed my hands, my shoulders, my tunic. “What is my essence?”

Brighida laughed. “You don’t smell it?”

“Smell what?”

Her face went soft. “Of course you don’t. Likely you lost the scent long ago. You stopped noticing it.”

I brought my sleeve to my face and inhaled deeply. “What scent?”

“Why, sheep, of course. You smell of your sheep. Of their pen. You’re a herder, after all.”

“But I was once a great seer.”

“Whatever else you are—and might once have been, and might one day become—in this life, I shall never catch the scent of sheep without conjuring your spirit.”

Brighida stirred the stew and lifted the spoon to her lips. “It needs salt.”

She had moved from sacred rite to cooking stew in but a moment. Or was her day but one long rite?

I shook a palmful of salt from the crock on the sideboard and held it out to her. She took a large pinch and scattered it over the stew. She stirred it, then tasted it. “Better.” Over her shoulder, she twitched her head toward a bowl sitting on the table. “Put the rest in that bowl.”

I opened my hand over the bowl and brushed the salt into it. Brighida leaned over and murmured over it.

“Now set it outside.”

“Set it aside?” I picked it up, wondering where to put it, and set it down on the sideboard.

“Not there.” She pointed to the door. “Outside. Set it on the ground just outside the door.”

“Outside? Why?”

“It will protect you.”

“Protect me?” I fingered the silver stone at the base of my throat. “From what?”

“From disturbances from the ether.”

I picked up the salt and moved toward the cottage door. Through the open half came the rhythmic rasp of saws cutting through wood. Hugh and Martyn, I thought, at work on Claris’s casket.

I looked into the sky. She’s free now. Free to rest and prepare to return to the living world, I thought. But will she come back alone? Or will she always return with her twin?

Without turning away from the night sky, I asked, “Since Mother and Claris were twins in this life, are they eternal companions as well?”

“What do you mean, Megge? We are all eternal companions.”

“No—they were different. They were as one in the womb. Were they also one in spirit? Had one spirit been divided in two in the womb?” I turned to her now. “My mother was brusque while yours was patient and kind. Mine healed the body while yours healed the mind and spirit. Two women, one healer. They completed each other. What one lacked, the other possessed. When one died, the other soon did as well.”

“Yes, twins are different. You said it very well. One spirit divided in two.”

“So, if twins become separated, does each feel that he or she is somehow . . . lacking? Does each seek the other?”

“I suppose they must.”

I shook my head. How was that it I did not know the nature of our lives and our traveling companions? Perhaps it was simply as Natalje and Claris had said: We are all one.

But did we include the unstill spirit?

A cloud bank moved in, and the last trace of light along the horizon went out. The clouds gathered and grew upward until a tower loomed over our cottage. The skin at the back of my neck pricked.

I took a deep breath and demanded, “What would you have of me?” Then, still holding the bowl of salt, I stepped outside to face the spirit.

A breeze came up, warm and soft as a sigh, and the thunderhead drifted into the night.

“Set it down,” Brighida called.

I searched the deepening skies as the cloud dispersed.

“The salt,” she insisted while pointing at the bowl in my hand. “Set the bowl outside the door and come back in. It’s gone. The spirit is gone. Surely you feel that.”

I bent and set the bowl on the ground just outside the door. Coming inside, I closed the lower half of the door and watched the sky as the stars came out.

“It’s time you knew, Cousin.” She set two full bowls of stew on the table and motioned for me to eat. “The unstill spirit is ever with you.”

“Ever with me?” Ravenous now, I shoveled spoonfuls into my mouth. “Do you mean in my dreams? Those dreams of—”

“Your violet-eyed giant.” She smiled. “You always believed it a dream when you met the unstill spirit as you slept. But those were not dreams. They were moments in spirit. We—our mothers, Morwen, Aleydis, and I—kept the spirit from you when we could. But it found you when we were not able to protect you. For who can truly protect the dreamer?” She sipped the heady broth. “But we stilled its voice to your waking ear.”

“You did? How?”

“My mother taught me from the day I accepted my book how to hear the unspoken, see the unseen, and speak in the silent language of the books. You saw me always at study, or so you believed. But I was often at work quieting the ether and engaging the unstill spirit so it could not frighten you.”

And yet that voice so often had found me. Murderer.

“I know it was the unstill spirit whose voice frightened me whenever I touched The Book of Seasons. I always heard that voice whisper, ‘Murderer.’ But when else has it been near?”

“Do you recall the time you came upon me, apparently hard at my work, and I said, ‘My milk is gone,’ and you suddenly felt weak, as if you would faint?”

I nodded.

“We both had entered a moment in spirit; the unstill spirit had ensnared us both. Only Morwen had the strength to break the spell. She feigned a cough, but in truth had said, ‘Be gone.’

“Later that day, when I told my mother what had happened, she taught me the secret of salt: that it can keep at bay unwanted voices from the ether.”

“I saw you whisper over that bowl of salt before you gave it to me. What did you say?”

“A simple incantation. ‘Unstill spirit, be gone.’”

“That’s what you said in your sleep this afternoon. ‘Be gone.’”

She smiled.

“Even in your sleep you are doing the work of a seer,” I said. “Why, though, does he taunt me? What does he want of me?”

“You still call the unstill spirit he. But the spirit is neither he nor she. Only in the living world does the spirit—any spirit, Megge—abide for a time as woman or man. Why does it taunt you? That is for you to learn. We’ve long believed it seeks our power. But only Murga ever truly knew.”

“Will I understand this when finally I unite the books?”

Brighida set down her spoon. “Listen with care, Megge. Yes, it your destiny to unite them. If you so choose. But understand this: there is more to the unstill spirit than any of us knows. Our mothers were charged with bringing us to accept our books. But they were also charged with keeping you from uniting them until you had learned who the unstill spirit was, what it wanted, and what would happen if the books came together. And would happen if they did not. You must be very sure you can accept the consequences before you decide whether or not to unite those books.”

Resting her hand on the table, she pushed to her feet. I followed her outside and down the path to the lodge as hammer blows continued to ring out. Would either of us sleep tonight knowing what we must do on the morrow?

The half-moon shadows beneath her eyes spoke of fatigue, but she stopped and raised her forefinger.

“There will be signs when the unstill spirit is ready to reveal itself to you. My mother has told me that I will know when the time is at hand, when what must happen has begun.”

“What does that mean?”

Her smile was a weary one. She shrugged. “It means that I will simply know. I will see the signs and know what we must do. Trust me.”