3

Sharina tied the sash around the waist of the tunic she'd been wearing as a nightdress.

"Sharina! Go get the hermit!" Garric called as he stepped through the doorway sideways to keep the dangling legs of the person he carried from knocking on the doorposts. "This lady needs help!"

"I'll get him!" Sharina said. Her cape was upstairs, but the air's slight chill wasn't worth the delay. She'd be running most of the way to Nonnus' hut, though the last of the path twisting down to the hut at the creekside had to be walked with care even in full daylight.

"No, you can't go out at this hour, Sharina!" her mother cried. "And not dressed like that!"

"Take a light, Sharina!" Reise said, waggling the hemlock stem for emphasis. He couldn't raise it inside without searing the ceiling.

Sharina ignored both Lora and Reise. She didn't need a light any more than she did a cape...though she might have taken both if she hadn't known her parents would want her to do that. Sharina was through the front door and into the courtyard before either of them could stop her.

The double gates of the courtyard hadn't been closed in so long that high grass grew beneath the edges of both and one sagged away from its upper hinge. The part-moon was clear above her, but the sky was already too pale for stars to show.

The only real street in Barca's Hamlet followed the line of houses which backed up to the shallow bay. A flat stone bridge crossed the impoundment pool itself; it had been built at the same time as the mill. For the rest, the street was dirt, dust, or mud depending on the weather. After the huge storm of the previous day, water stood in the ruts that ages of traffic had pounded into the surface. Sharina splashed across the road with the ease of long practice and headed up one of the lesser paths out of the community.

Barca's Hamlet didn't have physical boundaries except for the coastline. Houses straggled in all directions, making it hard for a stranger to say where the hamlet ended and outlying farms began. There were tracts of pasture and forest attached in common to certain households, however, and those households made up what the folk of the region themselves thought of as Barca's Hamlet.

The path Sharina followed plunged almost immediately into common woodlands where hogs foraged for acorns and certain families had the right to cut deadwood for their fires. Only one person lived in the forest, and he in a sense was owned in common as well.

Instead of going himself, Garric had told Sharina to fetch the hermit Nonnus. Everyone knew that Sharina was the only person whom the hermit seemed to treat as a person rather than an event like springtime or the rain.

Sharina's honey-blond hair and gray eyes set her apart from everyone she knew, her parents included. Perhaps it was her looks that made her feel like an outsider among the locals despite her having lived in Barca's Hamlet for all but the first week of her life. The simple acceptance which Nonnus offered her was as reassuring as the feel of the bedclothes when she woke up from a dream of falling.

The path meandered on to join the drove road near Hafner's Ford, but almost no one came this way through the woods except to see Nonnus—which meant almost no one at all. Brambles waved from both sides, occasionally snagging Sharina's shift. She pulled free without slowing, because she knew a life might depend on her haste.

Nonnus acted as the community's healer. Granny Halla said he'd arrived from no one knew where some few years before Lora returned to Barca's Hamlet with a foreign husband and newborn twins.

"Thought he was a bandit, we did," Granny used to say, "but the bailiff back then was the same sort of puffball as Katchin is today. Nobody had enough backbone to interfere when the fellow grubbed himself a place by the creekside. When Trevin or-Cessal's son broke his leg—that's the boy who died of a fever the next year—the feller heard the squeals and set the bone neat as neat. That's how we learned he was a holy hermit. But he still looks like a bandit, if you ask me."

If you didn't ask Granny Halla something, she was likely to tell you anyway. To have told you, that is—Sharina had to remind herself that the old woman was dead five years this winter; found in her bed when the neighbors noticed no smoke rose from her chimney.

Even Sharina found it hard to think of Nonnus as a holy man, though he'd knelt so often at the shrine to the Lady which he'd carved in the bark of a tall pine that the ground was packed to the consistency of stone. Besides praying, Nonnus tended his garden, fished, and hunted. When folk asked for his help he gave it. He took produce or the occasional flitch of bacon in payment if someone offered it, but in truth he was as self-sufficient as the squirrels who provided much of his diet.

Priests of the Lady and her consort, the Shepherd, made a tithe circuit through the borough once a year. Nonnus didn't walk the way they did. He moved like a guard dog, always alert and as direct as the flight of the short, all-wood javelins with which he struck down his prey.

A pair of hardwood batons hung on a cord of plaited willow bark where the path to the hermit's hut branched from the common track. Sharina paused long enough to clatter the rods together. "Nonnus?" she called. "My brother's found a lady thrown up from the sea who needs your help!"

The last of the path was down a gully and up the steep other side. Sharina used her hands to slow her, then to tug herself up by the roots of a mighty beech growing on the opposite rim.

If you didn't ring the clacker when you came to see Nonnus, you found him waiting for you just the same. There was one difference: those who hadn't been polite enough to announce their arrival met the hermit with three javelins in his left hand and a fourth poised to throw in his right. No one in the hamlet even claimed to have sneaked up on Nonnus unseen.

The hermit came out of his low hut with a wicker basket of medicines in one hand and his staff in the other. "Broken bones, child?" he asked. His smile of greeting looked as though it had been carved in a briar root.

Nonnus was below middle height for a man—shorter than Sharina even—and had a waist the same diameter as his chest. There was some gray in his hair and more in his beard. Sharina supposed the hermit must be over forty years old, though there was nothing except the hair to suggest so great an age.

He twisted the strap of his basket around the end of the staff and dangled it over his shoulder. His square-cut tunic was of naturally black wool, woven as thick as a cloak and as harsh as horsehair to the touch.

"I don't know, Nonnus," Sharina said, gasping now that she had a moment to pause. "Garric just said she's been cast away."

Nonnus wore a belt of weatherproof willow bark like the rope that held the clackers. From it hung a long, heavy knife—the only metal tool he appeared to own—in a flapped and riveted sheath.

"Well, you know where my comfrey grows," he said as he plunged down the path ahead of her at an awkward, shuffling pace that nonetheless covered ground. "You can come back and dig enough roots to boil for a cast if we turn out to need them."

Nonnus planted annuals near his hut. Perennials and vegetables cropped in their second year—parsnips, turnips, and adult onions—grew in a separate plot beyond. Though he had only a sharp stick to cultivate his garden, the early growth showed a pattern as regular as a fish's scales.

"Nonnus?" Sharina called to the hermit's back as she hurried after him. His speed had nothing to do with haste; he simply never made a false move. "Where do suppose she came from? The castaway, I mean."

"Ah, child," the hermit said in a suddenly distant voice. "I don't suppose anything about other people. Not anything at all."

His solid black form strode down the path. And no one should suppose anything about me, his back said silently to Sharina, who bit her lip in embarrassment as she followed.