The View From the Cart: An imagined account of the life of St Cuthman in the Dark Ages

By Rebecca Tope

The story of a legendary saint from the Dark Ages, as told by his mother. The young Cuthman is instructed by God to take his crippled mother with him on a pilgrimage across southern England. He fashions a wooden cart for her, and together they spend some months on the rough and bumpy roads, meeting many adventures along the way. Cuthman is kept prisoner by a community of rapacious women, at one point. Further on, they are joined by a young boy, Hal, who later becomes of great importance to Cuthman. Finally, they arrive in a pagan settlement called Steyning, on the coast of Sussex. Here Cuthman builds his promised church, and performs miracles to ensure the conversion of the people. His mother watches it all from her seat in the cart, making her own contributions, and drawing her own conclusions at every stage. The struggle to convert the whole of Britain to Christianity is epitomised in this single tale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Praxis Books
• Release date: Nov 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780955951732

Rebecca Tope

Rebecca Tope is the author of three bestselling crime series, set in the Cotswolds, Lake District and West Country. She lives on a smallholding in rural Herefordshire, where she enjoys the silence and plants a lot of trees.

Book preview

RUNE

Chapter One

This story begins with a birth, as perhaps every story should. A tangled, tearing business it was, bone on bone, the struggle lasting from first light to first light; a whole day’s cycle lost in that frenzy of pain and terror. I felt sure that one or other of us must die - perhaps both. My man, poor Edd, crouched close by, chewing his lips, his face the colour of a mushroom. I threw at him everything I could lay hands on. A plate caught his ear, so blood dripped through his hair and onto his neck.

My own blood flowed fitfully. I saw myself, great lumpen object, legs twisting first one way, then another, as I knelt, squatted, rocked, all over the hut, desperate to expel the thing inside me, pushing down at myself, heaving, shouting at him to come out. Our first child had fled outside on her stout little legs, to huddle with the dogs, or so I supposed when I missed her, sometime in the day. She came back when the sun sank, and retreated to her corner with a hunk of bread. She always knew what was good for her, that little woman. In my few moments of clarity I caught sight of a sun-filled sky to the west, bare trees sinister against the deepening blue of late afternoon. I could smell smoke and the midden and the hot sharp stink of my own body.

No battle was harder fought than that birth. It reached its wild crisis in the darkest hours of the night. I felt the infant twist and push, breaking something inside, bringing pure agony for a few moments, but still refusing to be born. I clawed at myself, like an injured dog or rat, attacking my own pain.

Not until I was exhausted into making my peace did I feel a change. The child’s fight had ceased. It was as if it merely waited now for the strength to tackle the final stage of its entry into life. Lying curled like a cat on the filthy skins, my thumb in my mouth, sweat cold on my skin, I gave a great sigh and prepared for whatever might yet come - even death. ‘No more,’ I said aloud. ‘Let me die, then. I did all I could.’ The lamp guttered, making the huddled shape that was my daughter flicker and move in the shadows. Edd brought another light, using the last of our oil to better illumine my struggles. The blood on his face had dried, giving him a look of violence and reproach, both together. He put his hand on mine, and I felt how he was shaking.

Then something touched me. A warm thing, like a great hand, smoothing along the whole length of me. My breasts tingled, my legs lay straight and wide-parted. My frenzy was over and I could accept my fate. Almost I could see the loving thing that had come to me, as the angel came to Mary before she had her child. Almost I could hear it telling me that I had done everything any woman could. I had no strength now; even endurance was too much to ask.

For an age, nothing happened. I rested, despite the pain rooted so deep within me. The dark sky I had stared at for so long turned paler, as if a layer had been peeled away from it. My son came forth at last. First an arm, outstretched, packed close against his head, fist tightly clenched. I took hold of him by the shoulders none too gently, even though the anger and resistance had long since drained out of me. Another great clenching of my body finished the task, and the wet grey thing was born. Expecting it to be dead, I barely allowed myself to look. When it made no sound, I was sure, and laid myself back, weary and miserable, hot tears soaking my face. The pain inside me was still there, I noted dimly. When Wynn had been born, all discomfort vanished with her delivery. Something was badly different this time.

Edd crept closer, a bucket of glowing peat in his hand, from the banked fire he had been tending throughout my labours, knowing the child would need warmth. A bowl sat on the embers, full of warm water urgent for my washing. I knew he would not bear malice for the wound on his head. He and I had made the child; he must share the anguish of bringing it into life.

‘A lad,’ he said. I could hear the smile in his voice. ‘A fine little lad.’

I opened my eyes, but could see little in the dawn light. Edd had extinguished the lamp and the fire was smoking. Besides, my vision was never good. From childhood I had been conscious that other people saw more refined detail than I ever did. I tried to sit up to look, but was laid flat again by a sharp sting low in my back. I waited, certain that it would go away in a moment. The baby began to snuffle and mew in a pool of water between my legs. I had obligations. Once more, I pushed myself up. The pain flared like fire, many times worse than the birth pangs had been. I cried out, as much in fear as bodily hurt. ‘Help me!’ I shouted.

Unknowing, the child’s father plucked him up, awkward and glad, and tried to give him to me. ‘I can’t,’ I gasped. ‘Wrap him and lay him close to me. Bring new covers. And find Wynn, if you can.’ The child had gone out again at some unnoticed point, escaping from my trouble that she could not help or understand. Edd skittered about trying to obey me, worried now, not daring to ask for reasons. Every little while, I moved - first from side to side, then raising my head and shoulders. Each time the flames roared through me, consuming me. Only by remaining rigidly still, scarcely breathing, could I endure. Finally, I had to voice it.

‘I am crippled,’ I said. ‘Something is broken in my back. Better I had died than this.’ I recall little after those words. It seems I swooned from the pain, and then slipped into a sleep of pure extinction for an hour. When I woke, little Wynn’s hand was fluttering across my face, her eyes wide with curiosity.

‘Ah, Wynn,’ I murmured. ‘If only you were older.’ She was not yet two years in the world, but on that morning, she made a great leap into a new life.

Still suckled herself from time to time, she knew what the baby most needed. With a few deft gestures, she brought the infant’s mouth within reach of my nipple, without for a moment hurting me, and thus arranged his first vital sustenance.

The child lived and grew. My agony abated into a stiffness which only stabbed me if I tried to make a sudden move. My Imbolc babe watched the spring creep over the moors, his wits maturing with the year. The first primroses and early lambs provided his entertainment when his father took him out of the hut for some air.

Gradually, I forced myself to endure a sitting posture, propped with a board inside our south-facing wall, where some warmth came through on sunny days. I worked clumsily: unable to use a spindle properly, I devised a peculiar system of stretching the yarn across the hut, showing Wynn how to wind it up, as I twisted it from the fleece. Preparing food was simpler, so long as it was brought to me. Feeding the baby was easiest of all. Somehow his presence always soothed me; his eager mouth sucking so rhythmically eased my rigid back. Many a time I drifted away into a daytime dreaming, where I could run around the tors and take my due place in the outdoor work.

We were visited, of course. Spenna, my lifelong friend, could not conceal her shock at my disablement, when she arrived three days after the birth. Carefully, she examined the hurting place, stroking her fingertips over the skin, watching my expression with her sharp black eyes. ‘Tell me just what you did,’ she said. ‘You felt something break inside?’

‘Not break,’ I corrected. ‘Not quite that. But he twisted, and something stabbed me inside. Or, tore. He had his arm up - so - ‘ and I demonstrated. ‘That did the damage, I reckon.’

‘Should mend,’ she said, dubiously. ‘With time. Here - does this feel better?’ And she stroked again, humming softly, giving attention to the wound inside me. Spenna had five children herself, and I trusted her skill and experience.

Something warm welled up and I felt a sudden hope. But then I moved slightly, to ease myself away from a hard thing underneath my hip, and the old pain screamed through me, worse than before. ‘Aagh!’ I groaned. ‘No, Spenna. Let it be. ‘Tis too early. It needs time to heal.’

She moved back a little and nodded, trying to hide the concern on her face. ‘You could be right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come again, a sennight from now.’

But she left me alone for longer than that, as even good friends will when the distance between is a morning’s walk and her own life filled to overflowing. And I found I could carry on as I was, with Edd tending to my needs in much the same way as I took care of the baby’s soiling. Lifting my lower self was impossible. Edd rolled me over, little by little, to change my rags and pack soft quilting underneath me. My bed was raised only a hand’s breadth from the floor, forcing him to kneel beside me. We scarcely spoke in those days, both perhaps afraid of inviting the gods’ attention to me as I hovered between health and crippledom.

Instead, he brought me tokens and charms to help the healing. Twigs of yellow furze, the lambs’ tails from the hazel, and finally a sprig of sacred mistletoe, for which he had to search most of the day when he should have been sowing the corn. ‘I climbed the tree for it,’ he said proudly, ‘and used my teeth to cut it through. This will heal you, my lover.’ His gentleness touched me, and I chewed the bitter leaf almost as hopeful as he had been when he plucked it.

That night, I thought I detected some improvement. The child was restless, bleating tetchily to himself, as he lay between us. Somehow he rolled himself close against me, wedged in the crook of my arm as I lay face down. Every night I would painfully turn over onto my face, finding it the most comfortable position for sleep. But now the baby was seeking my breast, and I could feel the milk leaking into the bedding. Holding my breath, I pushed myself over onto my side, scooping the child to me, not wishing to wake Edd or Wynn. The expected pain did not come. The sucking baby sent me back to sleep, in a position which would have been impossible two days before.

But next morning I was stiff and ungainly again. Edd changed my rags, and we noted that there was no longer any bleeding or discharge from the birth. He brought me porridge and an apple from the store. It was wrinkled and brown but tasted sweet. I could tell Edd was waiting for me to announce an improvement. Mistletoe is powerful medicine; impossible that it should have no effect. Almost I opened my mouth to say ‘I did feel easier in the night. Perhaps the cure has begun.’ But something stopped me as I squinted up at him.

Instead, I stared down at my legs, thin and white, sticking out from me as if made of peeled elder rather than living flesh. We had not been sure whether their use was lost. Cautiously, I tried to move one foot, nodding to Edd to watch me.

Slowly, the foot inscribed a small circle. Edd smiled. ‘That shows!’ he cried. ‘You’ll soon walk the moors again.’

‘And be the shepherd, too?’ I was teasing him, knowing his distaste for shepherding work.

‘And be the shepherd,’ he agreed, his face all grin and good cheer.

I moved my foot again. The whole leg felt weak and reluctant, but there was no pain. I tried the other, with the same result. ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ I told him, as if conferring a great gift.

‘There!’ he said, as if everything was settled and right again.

That day, I pulled myself onto the pisspot, when Edd was out of the hut. Before that morning, he had lifted me on and off it, willing and strong, concerned for my helplessness. We had a length of sacking as screen, but when he tried to leave me alone, I wobbled and wrenched my back, crying out for him to stay with me.

Then I dragged myself halfway across the floor to add a stick to the fire, using my arms, my legs barely part of me yet.

Wynn trotted in and saw me, clapping her congratulation. I paused and reached out an arm to her, to draw her close for a quick embrace. She had made no complaint at the loss of the games we had played together, the solemn walks we had taken over the moors, up to the day before the baby had been born. Under her gaze, I struggled back to the bed, arranging myself against the backboard, reaching for my loom. The new babe needed clouts, and Wynn was growing so fast her smock scarcely covered her buttocks.

Spenna returned at last, her youngest tied on her back and another little thing holding her skirts, and scrutinised me carefully. Her black hair fell across her face, whipped by the March winds, her cheeks red and chapped. Having questioned me, she sighed deeply. ‘You be on the mend,’ she pronounced. ‘But it’ll take some work from you. It’s all stiffness now, from lying still so long. Your legs have forgot how to move.’

I bowed my head before her shrewd gaze and shuffled my feet. If I could simply have stood up and run outside, I would gladly have done so. But slow work, little by little, stretching sore limbs, testing the frail parts of my back, brought me no joy to contemplate.

‘I’ll try,’ I said. Then I turned to my baby. ‘See how big he is!’ I boasted. ‘He don’t care that I have no use in my legs.’

‘He will, if you make no progress,’ she warned me. She looked out of the open door at Wynn, squatting in the mud, shaping pies with cold little hands. ‘And so will she. It isn’t right for you to be leaving her to herself so much — or for her to be doing your work. She’ll hate you for it later, see if she don’t.’

‘Wynn will never hate me,’ I said. ‘She understands how it is.’ I needed no telling that I was cheating my little daughter, and Spenna, with her yowling scrapping brood was not the one to speak of it, wise as she may have been. Anyone who could give birth year after year and lose not a single one to accident or sickness undoubtedly possessed special powers; I would never deny that. But all our lives, she had told me more about myself than I wished to hear and I had developed a way of answering her that told her to be silent.

Easter began, as it always seems to, with steady drenching rain. God’s tears for his lost son, said Edd, until I reminded him that the lost Son lived again. ‘Tears for his pain on the Cross, then,’ Edd maintained. I let him have the last word for once. Church doctrine was not something I liked to argue on, then or afterwards.

The fowls had been laying well for a few weeks, so we had painted eggs, red from the powdery sandstone and a deep yellow from a vein of clay in the riverbank. When the rain eased off, Wynn took three and rolled them around in the barnyard, laughing and chirping with an unaccustomed delight. They had been hard-baked, and wouldn’t break, no matter what she did with them. One of the young dogs joined her game, until he crunched an egg hard enough to shatter it. Edd beat him with a leather strap, to show him that eggs were not for his taking.

I was able to squat with fair comfort by that time. The baby balanced beside me, leaning against my arm, and watched his sister. He’d begun to coo and gurgle, showing merriment and other passions. Edd came to us, and squatted square on, face to face. ‘‘Tis a cuthie little tacker,’ he remarked.

‘Cuthie?’ I looked down at the child, as yet unnamed. The word seemed to fit him, as he gazed so wisely up at his sire. A word for someone especially knowing, quick-witted, possessing a full understanding. ‘A little Cuthman, is he?’

It was not a name we’d heard before, and yet it came easily to our lips.

We decided to have him blessed by the priest in the brief quiet between the final days of the corn harvest and the killing of a sheep and a hog, gathering of apples, and the many other preparations for winter. The matter demanded much debate and trouble, before it was settled. A heavy boy Cuthie was by then, bouncing on his father’s arm, squealing with excitement at the antics of the dogs or the birds. My damaged back, much easier though it was by then, would not allow me to walk as far as the church. I was part sorry, part uncaring. I had sore girlhood memories of the dreary Sabbaths spent listening to the priest in the Church of St Brigid in the village; being pinched and sneered at by the other girls for my restlessness and my tendency to piss myself if not allowed outside for hours. But my little son had to be blessed and his soul promised to God, and the priest would note any failure in our obligation.

He was a good man, that priest, who called himself Brendan, as did many others. He replaced the sour fellow we’d had in my childhood days, and was a great improvement. There was a holiness to him, a glow about him which made him pleasing to be with. His talk was all of love and heaven and forgiveness of sins. He marked the festivals with conviction, and visited the sick and dying with a willing sympathy.

When he first heard of my difficulties, he had come to the hut and offered to give me some healing, some weeks after Edd had given me the mistletoe, and I already felt I was mending. As Spenna had done, he laid warm gentle hands on the place, and invoked his great and powerful God to help him heal me. This time, I remained utterly still afterwards, before testing the effects with caution. It was undoubtedly a little better for his ministrations. Day by day, after that, I could manage more movement, with less pain.

‘We should never have come so far from the village, if we had known this would happen,’ Edd said, as he watched me one day. ‘I wonder now that we were so foolish.’

‘Hush!’ I flashed back. ‘Never say that. We made our life as we wanted it. Who else can say that, amongst those dunderheads down there?’

He took my hand. ‘We were right then, to do as we did?’

‘We were,’ I laid my fingers on his rough cheek, where the beard was wispy. He and I were still at that time in a kind of amazement at our good fortune in having each other. We had been solitary and strange as children, both of us, and had only slowly drawn together, as we grew to maturity. One harvest time, we had somehow fallen into conversation over our bread and cider, and I shall never forget that day.

Edd had been staring up at the high moors, looming purple above us, the tors standing out like sleeping beasts. ‘I should like to live up there,’ he said, talking as much to himself as to me.

‘I should, too,’ I said boldly. ‘I should like to spend my days seeing none of these people, hearing none of their noise. I should like my own goats and sheep around me, with dogs and fowl and —

‘You mock me,’ he said severely. Then he sighed. I knew that mockery was his daily fare. A boy with a number of brothers and a powerful father, he stood out like a pigeon amongst a crowd of glossy crows. They pecked at him like crows, too, never letting him rest and dream his own dreams.

‘I do not,’ I denied. ‘It is the same for me as it is for you.’

He looked more closely at me then. We were neither of us handsome, our skin scratched from the corn stalks, and hair the dull brown that came after the first bright gold of babyhood. Some in the village had the wiry black hair of the people from further west, but mostly we were red-cheeked and mud-haired. Edd saw something in me and I in him. We looked deep into each other’s eyes — his a green-grey, the colour of lichen. When I told him that was their hue, a little while later, he said mine were like the moorland rivers, shining and brown with flecks of green where the weeds grew under the water.

And so it was that we discovered our own special way to be together and to enjoy each other. I had never dreamed that two people could want the same things, the way we did. We played with words, spurring each other to find images to make our ordinary lives more vivid. We were not clever like Edd’s brother Bran, who could remember more stories than all the other villagers together. We had no great feeling for music or dancing, and were neither of us fond of the sour-faced priest who dominated us before Brendan came, a man who claimed to have power over the fate of our souls.

There was no objection to our marriage, when the time came. Many said it was the hand of God at work, bringing two such like creatures together. There was greater complaint when we made it known that we would live high on the moors, and make our lives there, in solitude and hard work.

My mother, weak and with few months left to her, accused me of heartlessness. I was her last child, and owed her the duty of my help and care. I agreed, finally, to stay with her through that winter, which was only good sense, in any case. Edd and I would need to wait for spring before building our hut and marking out our land and scratching a living amongst the tors.

The day after we buried my mother, we had the priest marry us, then we took up our bundles, and the few creatures we could call our own, and set off to our new home. We walked for three days, circling and debating, before we found the spot.

‘No, my dear,’ I chided again. ‘We did not make any mistake at all.’

Chapter Two

There was no escaping the limits imposed by my weak back. Walking was still an ordeal for me. I could take steps only when bent forward, one hand pressing hard on the central place where the damage had occurred, the other holding the ash wood prop that Edd had sought out with great care, and shaped so it fitted my hand. It left me shuddering from the effort, feebleness overtaking me, as if I had stumbled and staggered the length and breadth of the moors. The pain rippled outwards, down to my knees and up to my breast. But it was better than being a perpetual cripple and I had a firm hope that one day I would be my old self.

When the blessing was at last decided on, we debated ways of conveying me to the church. Even if we’d had a pony or donkey, I was unsure whether I could safely balance on its back. A donkey-drawn cart would have bumped over the rough moorland beyond endurance. In any case, such luxuries were far beyond our means. Edd even suggested he carry me on his back.

‘Oh, yes,’ I sneered, ‘and who will carry the babe?’ Edd fell silent then, and we talked no more that day.

The next morning my mood was dark. The child must be blessed for the sake of his soul. The holy water, drawn from St Bride’s well, would wash him clean. The church stood on a sacred spot, where once a great oak had grown. My mother’s mother recalled to me, in my childish years, the day the tree had been taken down, for fear it would fall on the church in its old age. Before the winter, the child must be protected from the damnation which would befall him if he were to die unshriven.

There was another reason why it seemed urgent for him to be taken into God’s Family. Cuthman had brought injury and suffering to his mother, as he was being born. He had an ill omen upon him from that. There were days when I could scarcely abide him near me, for thinking of what he had done to me. These days had not grown fewer with time or with the easing of my pain. At first, the sweet newness of the babe had overcome my resentment, but as he grew so blithe and assured I came close to turning against him. I would do him no harm, and no-one knew that such black moods came on me now and then. I could not tell Edd that our son must be cleansed of the demon I glimpsed in him. Not then, at any rate.

And yet we still could see no way for me to be present at the baptism.

‘Go without me,’ I said, pretending to a greater bitterness than I truly felt. ‘It seems I am never again to leave this place.’ I turned my face away from Edd’s indecision. The way was steep to the church, with a ford across the river Ock and a stretch of bog to traverse. ‘Unless there be a miracle,’ I muttered to myself. If this great God so badly wanted Cuthman to join his flock, might he not ensure in his own way that the child’s mother be present?

Edd dressed the child, in a bleached embroidered linen gown which had been my mother’s. We had carefully laid it at the back of the hut in a dry press. Wynn had worn it for her baptism. I fingered it for a moment, as it hung over my man’s arm. It shamed me that I could not witness the holy ritual, but when I forced myself to stand and walk to the doorway, I could scarcely lift my feet from the ground. Shuffling through a bog, splashing into the icy river water, falling over the rocks on the cruel hill up to the church - all were unthinkable. I dashed away the tears and chivvied Edd into departing. He gave Wynn one hand, and Cuthman perched on his arm. I had not the heart to keep Wynn with me, although I felt terribly alone when they had gone.

And constantly, throughout the day, I glanced out, scanning the sky and the distant moors, waiting for something to happen which would transport me to the church. An angel, surely, would come to carry me? Once, the dogs all barked from the barn and I held my breath, sure that this at last was the miracle. Mutinous thoughts flitted through my mind — if we had been devoting the child to Morgana, or the great Mother, there would not be this shutting out of the one who had given birth to him. Faeries would come in swarms and waft me to the sacred forest grove where my son would be promised to Wicca and the earth spirits. Whispering to myself, I remembered the hints and secrets that women passed amongst themselves over their spinning, secrets which had to be kept away from the priest and the menfolk who embraced the Christian God so obediently.

The hut was untidy with loose straw. The corn had been threshed and the chaff and straw drifted everywhere. Although the Lammas festival was over and the corn dollies made, I took it into my head to make another, as a pastime. Carelessly, I gathered some good stalks, though none had the ears on them as they do for the real thing and they were mostly broken and short. This would be something different, then. With no real intent I stacked them, weaving others in and out to fix the uprights in place. It became a little wall, like the wattle hurdles we made for controlling the sheep. My fingers worked faster, some magic directing them, some greater magic holding the tiny sticks together. I made two more woven walls in the same way and stood them up, forming a miniature open-fronted hut. Scratching round for further straw, I quickly found the materials for a roof.

Standing it on the table, I moved back for a better view. I could scarcely credit that I had made it myself. It seemed perfect. No gaps to let the rain in, the sturdy little house stood foursquare. It merely needed a front wall with a door and a smoke hole under the eaves to be complete. And decoration, I thought. It called for some elaboration to make it purely my own.

I made the additions, losing myself in the amusement it provided. The decoration consisted of rowan berries from a cluster I had saved for a healing potion, threaded into the walls in intricate designs, as well as a variety of seedheads from grasses and weeds which grew around the house. A row of beechmast outlined the edges of the roof. A home for the faeries, I decided, glancing briefly over my shoulder, afraid that I might be inviting something into my hut that I might afterwards regret.

Hungry and tired, I realised that the sun was low on the sky, and Edd should be back with the children. The church was a good distance away, but I had expected them home before this. The priest would have arranged a small meal to celebrate the new Christian, there would have been dancing and a song or two - it would all take time, I supposed, and there would be no haste to return to the ratty bent thing that I had become.

Finally, they appeared down the tussocky path, weary and quiet. Edd’s arm remained locked for a few moments when he set the baby down, and I realised what a weight he’d carried so far. Wynn was pale, red juice on her face from the fruit she’d eaten. She was the first to notice my little straw house. Her face came alive and her hands reached out to it. ‘Oh!’ she cried, in real delight.

Edd turned to look. I saw surprise, admiration and then fear cross his face. ‘It’s a faery house!’ he hissed. ‘Destroy it! What would the priest think?’

My laugh was a little forced. ‘Nonsense!’ I said. ‘Just my little amusement during a long day. I’ll smash it, if you want me to.’

I raised my fist over the toy, but then lowered it again. Wynn had whimpered in protest, and the baby also seemed very taken with it. I found myself fiercely reluctant to break it.

‘I’ll put it outside,’ I said. ‘It’ll blow apart in a few days.’ Edd made no protest and I clumsily took it up and shuffled out and around to the back of the hut with it. There was a small place under a thorn bush which seemed the natural spot to place it. I set it lightly on the ground, and tried to straighten my back before going into the hut again.

Two things happened. For the first time in over seven months I stood unbent without pain. And something rushed past my head, with a whirring of wings like a little bird. Bewildered I turned my head from side to side and raised my arms to the sky. Then I lifted my feet one by one, disbelieving, my heart stopped from shock. I was cured.

With a loud cry of triumph, which echoed over the moors like the call of a seabird, I flew back to the hut to show myself.

Edd stared at me as I rushed in. ‘I am cured!’ I sang, a madwoman with my hair outflung.

Wynn ran to me, throwing her arms about my thighs. ‘I prayed for it!’ she boasted. ‘Just as Father Brendan said we should.’

‘Then I thank you,’ I laughed. ‘With all my soul.’

‘But the faery house really did it,’ she added, suddenly solemn. I lowered myself to be level with her face, the stiff muscles only mildly complaining.

‘We must not place our faith in faeries,’ I said, gently. ‘But perhaps