Now more intent on those seven Greek symbols than on the Latin letters, I studied them closely, squinting at each and comparing the letters Anwen had inscribed on the cover with others scattered throughout the book.

“Tell me, Alf,” I said the next afternoon as I studied an inscription on a page in the middle of The Book of Seasons. “This fish.” I pointed to an elongated circle with two legs sticking out from the right side.

“’Tisn’t a fish, Meg; it’s alpha, the first letter in the name Atropos. You’ve seen it before.”

“It looks like alpha, but it has no line dividing it in half.”

“It is alpha. Alpha has no line through it.” He leaned forward and looked carefully at it, then opened the cover, and we both squinted at the first letter in the name Atropos.

“You’re right, Meg. This alpha looks like someone’s divided it in half.

It means something, I thought, that Anwen drew a line through this letter.

“What are you?” I asked, gazing steadily at that divided alpha until my vision began to blur. The room went small and silent. I turned my vision inward, and before me stood a queen.

Gowned in white, with gleaming black hair caught up in braids that looped over her shoulders and swirled down her back, she descended a path cut into the rocky face of the cliff I had seen in so many visions. She paused at the mouth of the cave I once had entered with my twin brother, then glided inside and raised her face to the cave’s jagged ceiling. A drop of water fell from the tip of a long, white spear. It landed in the center of a puddle of clear water that filled a basin atop a stone pillar that rose from the cave floor nearly to her hip.

She dipped her left hand into that shallow stone bowl and sipped, then smiled and faded into the sea mist as two young men trying to outrun a tempest dashed into the cave. The first, discovering a fissure in the rocks deep inside, slipped into a second chamber. His twin, drawn to that font, tipped his head as if hearing a siren’s song, then dipped his hand in the water and sipped.

“Meg!”

I came so suddenly out of the vision that I could feel my pulse pounding behind my eyes. Catching my breath, I looked up.

“You’re tired,” Alf said from the doorway. “You were asleep just now. It’s getting late. I’m going to bring the sheep in.”

I wanted to study, but looking into the workroom at the balls of yarn filling the basket beside my loom, I knew I would have to spend the rest of the evening weaving.

The workroom was in shadow, so I lit a candle.

“Thank you, Megge. I was just about to do that.” Brighida looked up from her spinning wheel and dropped another ball of yarn into a basket full of balls all the same shade of gray.

I looked at the bags of fleece at her side—white and black, none grey. “How is it that you can make every ball the same shade?”

“How is it that you can weave it into cobwebs?”

Dipping her hand first into the bag of white fleece and then into the bag of black, she commenced to spin a soft yarn the color of fog. Though light as smoke, it was strong, and I used it to weave cloth so fine and soft the wearer could scarcely feel it. Shifts, undergarments, even fine surcoats were fashioned from the cloth Brighida and I made together.

Goddess cloth, some in the village called it.

I thought once more of that black-haired queen. Or is she a goddess?

I set the candle on the hearth and took my place at the loom strung entirely with the whitest thread Brighida had ever spun. The length of cloth I was making would one day cover the altar in the church.

“White,” Dora had said as she ordered it. “The whitest of whites. And that fine weave only you seem able to create. It’s for the altar,” she said in a hushed voice.

“Won’t the priests object?” I had asked her.

She had waved a hand. “What are they to say? A cloth as fine as this? Who could object?”

“Surely the priests will object to ‘goddess cloth’ adorning their sacred table.”

She had laughed. “’Twas Prior Francis himself who coveted a length he saw in my shop. ‘It’s promised to the steward of Treveley manor,’ I had to tell him. And you would think he’d be angered, but he only smiled and asked me to speak to you about making the church an altar cloth.”

“It’s Brighida’s fine thread that makes this cloth what it is.”

“Coveted.” Dora nodded soberly. “They all covet it in the village. But it’s so dear.”

“Do you know what it costs Brighida to card the fleece, blend it, and spin it? And all with but one hand?”

Dora had raised her hands. “Oh, aye, Megge. I don’t begrudge our dear Brighida her due. How that dear girl does it I’ll never know. You know what it is to card wool, but have you ever spun?” She heaved out a sigh. “I have. Even with two good hands, I could never do the work Brighida does with but one.”

Recalling Dora’s words, I looked at Brighida now as I prepared to throw the shuttle. She had stopped spinning and was rubbing her hand up and down her leg as if trying to massage her knuckles.

“What is it?”

“It’s this—this—abundance.” She waved her arm toward the sacks of wool waiting be carded and spun, and I noticed the tremor in her hand. “We’ve a wealth of fine fleece, but too much, I fear, for a one-handed spinner.”

As I stared at that hand—scratched and calloused and trembling from fatigue—I caught glimmers of the smooth, pale hands of a young girl. Clever fingers, slender and nimble, separated long strands of something . . . not fleece . . . then plaited them into thin, supple thongs as long as her forearm.

“Brighida,” I said. “There’s a girl . . .”

Her hand went still. She inclined her head. “What girl?”

Show me, I ordered, and I searched with my dreamer’s eye for another glimpse of the girl I felt sure was meant to be an apprentice for Brighida.

But the girl I now saw, a young girl, her face tanned from the sun, had stubby hands as brown as a nut. This was not the same child. Her hair hung in plaits blurred from sleep. Or from neglect.

“I see her,” Brighida said. “She’s wearing a tunic frayed at the neck and arm holes, ragged at the hem. Too big for her.”

“She’s barefoot,” I said, “and walking the market road alone.”

“Not the market road.” Brighida shook her head and then rubbed her brow as she searched inside the very vision I was trying to see more clearly.

“A road, yes,” she said. “But not the market road. Not our market road. Look beyond her to the setting sun.”

I looked past the child, the huts she was walking toward, and all the way to the abrupt end of the earth.

“Can you see the cliffs?” Brighida asked.

I nodded.

You know them, don’t you, Megge of Bury Down?

Tearing my dreamer’s gaze from the horizon, from these cliffs of Kernow, I let it fall once more upon the girl. She was pulling pebbles out of a deep pocket at the side of her tunic, all nearly the same shade: the purple-grey hue of a thunderhead. After selecting two the size and shape of a chicken’s egg, and a flat one the size of her palm, she held them out to me in a grubby hand, her countenance calm as she stared into my dreamer’s eye.

Then, as if something had frightened her, she went suddenly rigid. She turned, breaking our gaze, and ran into a copse just beyond the last hut in a long row of mean dwellings alongside a newly mown field. She disappeared into the shadows.

“Megge.” Brighida gripped my arm. “Do you know what you’ve just done?”

“I didn’t do it!” I struggled to emerge from that waking dream. “I only saw the girl—”

“You shared your vision with me.” She released my arm but kept her eyes on mine. “Don’t you understand? You saw that girl and then you opened your dreamer’s eye to mine.” She smiled, and then laughed. “You have surpassed me as a seer. Not only did you see, but you brought me into your moment in spirit.” Her face went serious. “Not even my mother had that skill.”

“You’ve never shared a vision?”

She shook her head. “What were you doing just before you entered into spirit?”

“I was looking at your hand. You had said you were tired of working, that it was too much for a one-handed spinner.” I hated to say this part. “I pitied you.”

“And then?” she coaxed.

“And then I saw the hands of a little girl. Not the girl you saw. This one had slender fingers, pale skin—”

“You felt something for me, and the vision came to you.” Now she nodded. “To enter the ether, Megge, I must quiet my mind and cast a stone or a rune, or recite a summoning incantation.” She stared at me for another moment. “I must ask to be shown.”

I blinked.

“This happened before, in the grove,” she went on. “When Amareth was suffering, a vision came to you of her man dying in battle.” She shook her head as if astonished. “Your dreamer’s eye, it seems, is always open, always at the ready. And now, you can open that eye so others might see.”

“But we know only that we saw a girl walking on a cliffside road,” I said. “The sun had not yet set in that vision, but it is nighttime here, so we don’t know when she walked that road. Was it today? Yesterday? A year ago? And you did not see the other girl.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know, but when I looked at your hands and then at the nimble hands of a young girl, I believed she was the apprentice I’ve asked the Mentors to send you. But the girl you saw—”

“Wait. You asked the Mentors to send someone to help me?”

“Yes,” I said. “An apprentice. But—” I pictured once again the bedraggled child in that tattered dress, who had suddenly gone rigid and fled into the woods like prey.

. . . but the girl we just saw, I thought, is not meant to help us. We’re meant to help her.