“Hmph. Well.” Alder Owl lifted her shoulders, as if solemnity was a shawl she could shrug away. “Tomorrow always comes early. Time to put the fire to bed.”
“I’ll get the garden things,” Moon said. She tossed her cloak on and went out the stillroom door into the night.
Her namesake was up, and waxing. Alder Owl would have good light, if she needed to travel by night. But it would be cold traveling; frost dusted the leaves and vines and flagstone paths like talcum. Moon shivered and sighed. “What’s the point of having an able-bodied young apprentice, if you’re not going to put all that ableness to use?” she muttered to the shifting air. The cold carried all her S’s off into the dark.
She pinched a bloom from the yellow chrysanthemum, and a stalk of merry-man’s wort from its sheltered bed. When she came back into the house she found that Alder Owl had already fed the fire and settled the logs with the poker, and fetched a bowl of water. Moon dropped the flowers into it.
“Comforter, guard against the winter dark,” Alder Owl said to the fire, as always, as if she were addressing an old friend. She stirred the water with her fingers as she spoke. “Helpmeet, nourisher of flesh and heart, bide and watch, and let no errant spark leap up until the sun should take thy part.”
Firelight brushed across the seamed landscape of Alder Owl’s face, flashed yellow in her sharp, dark eyes, turned the white in her hair to ivory. Tomorrow night, Moon thought, she won’t be here. Just me. She could believe it only with the front of her mind, where all untested things were kept. The rest of her, mind and lungs and soles of feet, denied it.
Alder Owl flicked the water from her hand onto the hearth, and the line of drops steamed. Then she handed the bowl to Moon, and Moon fed the flowers to the fire.
After a respectful silence, Moon said, “It’s water.” It was the continuation of an old argument. “And the logs were trees that grew out of the earth and fed on water, and the fire itself feeds on those and air. That’s all four elements. You can’t separate them.”
“It’s the hour for fire, and it’s fire that we honor. At the appropriate hours we honor the other three, and if you say things like that in public, no educated person in the village will speak to you.” Alder Owl took the bowl out of Moon’s hands and gathered her fingers in a strong, wet clasp. “My weed, my stalk of yarrow. You’re not a child anymore. When I leave, you’ll be a grown woman, in others’ eyes if not your own. What people hear from a child’s mouth as foolishness becomes something else on the lips of a woman grown: sacrilege, or spite, or madness. Work the work as you see fit, but keep your mouth closed around your notions, and keep fire out of water and earth out of air.”
“But—”
“Empty the bowl now, and get on to bed.”
Moon went into the garden again and flung the water out of the bowl—southward, because it was consecrated to fire. Then she stood a little while in the cold, with a terrible hard feeling in her chest that was beyond sadness, beyond tears. She drew in great breaths to freeze it, and exhaled hard to force the fragments out. But it was immune to cold or wind.
“I’d like to be a woman,” she whispered. “But I’d rather be a child with you here, than a woman with you gone.” The sound of the words, the knowledge that they were true, did what the cold couldn’t. The terrible feeling cracked, melted, and poured out of her in painful tears. Slowly the comforting order around her, the beds and borders Alder Owl had made, stopped the flow of them, and the kind cold air wiped them off her face.
At dawn, when the light of sunrise lay tangled in the treetops, Alder Owl settled her pack on her back and went out by the front door. Moon went with her as far as the gate at the bottom of the yard. In the uncertain misty land of dawn, Alder Owl was a solid, certain figure, cloaked in shabby purple wool, her silver and black hair tucked under a drunken-brimmed green hat.
“I don’t think you should wear the hat,” Moon said, past the tightness in her throat. “You look like an eggplant.”
“I like it. I’m an old woman. I can wear what I please.”
She was going. What did one say, except “Goodbye,” which wasn’t at all what Moon wanted? “When will you come back?”
“When I’ve found him. Or when I know he can’t be found.”
“You always tell me not to try to prove negatives.”
“There are ways,” Alder Owl replied, with a sideways look, “to prove this one.”
Moon Very Thin shivered in the weak sun. Alder Owl squinted up at her, pinched her chin lightly. Then she closed the gate behind her and walked down the hill. Moon watched her—green and purple, silly and strong—until the trees hid her from sight.
She cured the squash before she put them in the cellar. She honored the elements, each at its own hour. She made cheese and wine, and put up the last of the herbs, and beat the rugs, and waxed all the floors against the coming winter muck. She mended the thatch and the fence, pruned the apple trees and turned the garden beds, taking comfort from maintaining the order that Alder Owl had established.
Moon took over other established things, too. By the time the first snow fell, her neighbors had begun to bring their aches and pains to her, to fetch her when a child was feverish, to call her in to set a dog’s broken leg or stitch up a horse’s gashed flank. They asked about the best day to sign a contract, and whether there was a charm to keep nightshade out of the hay field. In return, they brought her mistletoe and willow bark, a sack of rye flour, a tub of butter.
She didn’t mind the work. She’d been brought up for it; it seemed as natural as getting out of bed in the morning. But she found she minded the payment. When the nearest neighbor’s boy, Fell, trotted up to the gate on his donkey with the flour sack riding pillion, and thanked her, and gave it to her, she almost thrust it back at him. Alder Owl had given her the skill, and had left her there to serve them. The payment should be Alder Owl’s. But there was no saying which would appear first, Alder Owl or the bottom of the sack.
“You look funny,” Fell said.
“You look worse,” Moon replied, because she’d taught him to climb trees and to fish, and had thus earned the privilege. “Do you know those things made out of wood or bone, with a row of little spines set close together? They call them ‘combs.’”
“Hah, hah.” He pointed to the flour. “I hope you make it all into cakes and get fat.” He grinned and loped back down the path to the donkey. They kicked up snow as they climbed the hill, and he waved at the crest.
She felt better. Alder Owl would never have had that conversation.
Every evening at sunset, Moon took the little drum out of the cupboard over the mantel. She looked at it, and touched it, and thought of her teacher. She tried to imagine her well and warm and safe, with a hot meal before her and pleasant company near. At last, when the rim of the sun blinked out behind the far line of hills, she swung the beater against the fine skin head, and the drum sounded its woodpecker knock.
Each time Moon wondered: Could Alder Owl really hear it? And if she could, what if Moon were to beat it again? If she beat it three times, would Alder Owl think something was wrong, and return home?
Nothing was wrong. Moon put the drum away until the next sunset.
The Long Night came, and she visited all her neighbors, as they visited her. She brought them fir boughs tied with bittersweet, and honey candy, and said the blessing-charm on their doorsteps. She watched the landscape thaw and freeze, thaw and freeze. Candle-day came, and she went to the village, which was sopping and giddy with a spell of warmer weather, to watch the lighting of the new year’s lamps from the flame of the old. It could be, said the villagers, that no one would ever find the prince. It could be that the King of Stones had taken him beneath the earth, and that he would lie there without breath, in silence, forever. And had she had any word of Alder Owl, and hadn’t it been a long time that she’d been gone?