It was just short of two weeks later that Fia caught sight of the line of cobs coming through the trees on the next ridge over. She had been sitting at her window sketching an attempt at a design when she glanced up. At that, the design forgotten, she rushed to the kitchen.

“They’re coming!” she cried on the way to all who could hear.

Calima came to the door of her workroom as she passed. In the kitchen Arethmay seemed to stand very still for a moment, and then she bowed her head over her work and continued, though there was a change to her face. Larna continued stirring her pudding.

“How far away?” she asked.

“The next ridge over,” Fia replied, trying to hold in her excitement seeing as everyone else was.

“Then it will take them a little,” the cook said, and dipped a spoon in to test the pudding for doneness.

It did take them “a little.” Fia took the broom and began to sweep, just for something to busy herself with while they waited. She wasn’t sure exactly what was so exciting, but somehow the event was.

She had gotten a great deal of sweeping done before finally Ilido appeared in the door.

He didn’t even lay off his cloak, but kept his mittened hand on the doorknob. “Andro’s hurt,” he said.

“How badly?” Calima asked, as if she were inquiring about the weather, except that there was a hollow ring to her tone, as she put down the knitting she had taken up for the same reason Fia had grabbed the broom. Arethmay’s face showed serious concern and Larna forgot about her pudding.

“Just his leg, but I don’t know how bad it is.”

Fia breathed again, and she thought she heard all the others do so, too.

“Well, bring him in!” Calima said, and was her usual bustling self. “Are there enough out there to do it, or do they need help? We’ve got the near room ready; he’ll rest easy there. Hurry, now!”

Two men came carrying him in, slung between them, his face twitching in pain with every step. They took him to the room that Calima had indicated. There was a healer among the group, so Calima and he presided over the care of their mountain guide, while Arethmay and Larna handled the settling in of the new people so they would not disturb Calima or Andro.

“What happened?” Fia pulled Ilido off to the side.

“He tried to save a fool’s life.” Ilido spoke hollowly. “I am only thankful that he did not lose his own.”

Then he went out to tend the horses.

There was little Fia could do, so she wandered to the stove and began to stir the pudding. There were lumps in it, she noticed. Leave a pudding for a minute and you’ll get lumps. Larna would be displeased when she returned. So Fia tried to vigorously beat them out as the household bustled all around her with more people and happenings than she had ever seen it hold. She wondered about what Calima had said the day she arrived, about the long ago times when she was a girl. It must have been something.

The days thereafter were crowded and busy. Fia’s jeweler’s practice fell by the wayside as she helped Larna with the laundry and the kitchen. She listened raptly to what the Othirans had to tell of, and learned a great deal more about the troubles there. She inquired of them if they had seen ought of her brothers, but no one could tell her that they had.

Many of them were moved on in the next few days to places already waiting for them, and by the end of two or three weeks they were all gone. Only the original six remained, and Andro was feeling much better, though Calima still would not allow him to move about on his leg, or spend any time out of doors. So Fia helped Ilido with the barn chores and found it refreshingly different and interesting, and Ilido told her about the man who had walked too near the edge of a steep slope while the path was coated with a sheet of ice. Andro had reached out and tried to pull him back from danger but the man had gone over anyway, and Andro had lost his own balance in trying to save him.

Ilido and some of the men had worked together to descend the icy slope and bring Andro back up from where he had been caught against a gnarled oak part way down. They had roped themselves to sturdy trees and inched over the treacherous mountainside to him, then the others cautiously pulled them all up, glad to find their guide alive, even if badly injured.

The other man had fallen all the way down and had broken his neck. Ilido had scrambled carefully down to see if he was still living. But he was dead.

“I feel sorry for his wife and family,” Ilido said. “If he had one. But he should have listened to Andro, and been more careful.”

And so time passed, and storms came and went. Then a warm spell came to the high mountains, with the sun shining on the banks of snow and sound of water dripping off the eaves. The nights would still dip into the cold again, but the days were lovely.

Calima had reinstated the lessons and things were getting generally back to usual, except that Fia and Ilido still did all the chores.

Ilido was chopping kindling by the woodshed as Fia sat on an upturned log beside the path. The sun was warm and bright, the fresh air like a tawny mountain cat lulled to sleep by the winter’s trick of disappearing. A storm might howl down from the north in not too many days, but to look at it today you would think it was spring.

She turned her eyes from the distracting antics of a pair of nuthatches searching for pine nuts on the path, and tried to bring to mind the bracelet exactly as she had first imagined it to be. It was her first piece that Calima had instructed her to design on her own, without a pattern, and without any help. She said her pupil was coming along so quickly it was time she began to weave her own design, but it seemed to Fia that she did not yet have the skill to accomplish that.

She could imagine them in her thoughts: the delicate interplay of precious metal, deceptively fragile but unexpectedly strong. But to make them come about… ah, there was the rub.

Her fingers seemed to be all thumbs, and her clear and flowing design vanished without a trace when she took the wax circlet in her own two hands. No matter how long she stared at it, closed her eyes, looked at the pine boughs above her or watched the nuthatches, the mental picture would not return.

She had thought to model it after the fresco in the palace room where she had sat waiting for the Chancellor for what had seemed so many hours. The forest motif had seemed to be fitting, and the inclusion of the forest creatures had fascinated her imagination ever since. Of course, the design must be modified from a wall to a jewelry piece, but it shouldn’t have been too difficult. To simply bend and shape a beautiful theme into another purpose should be rather unchallenging.

But she was finding it was not so. Again she shook her head in an attempt to clear her thoughts. She seemed to be stuck without a beginning. She decided she needed to identify the basic play of the pattern, like a braid. Where would the dips go, and how many?

She touched the carver to the wax, gently making an X. There, that would be her guide; she hoped. She would carry on the basic rhythms from those two crossed angles. She brought the lines around in undulating waves, rising and sinking to form the tracery. But at the meeting point they broke the smooth bend; the rhythm looked to carry them past the original mark. Her waves were too gentle.

She smoothed the lines and tried once more, with sharper curves in an attempt to make it meet. But it was still off, the angle was too steep and the lines carried little flow. It seemed to defy her grasp. Again she masked the marks and tried another tack.

Carrying the full kindling basket, Ilido approached where she sat struggling with her design.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, setting the kindling basket at her feet.

She shrugged helplessly and sighed. “I don’t know what to do. The tracery just isn’t coming out right.”

“Here,” he offered. “Let me take a look.”

He cradled it in his hand, his brow knitted seriously as he carefully considered the pattern-work. Then he looked up.

“May I?” he asked as he picked the tool from her fingers.

“Sure,” she replied and shrugged a shoulder.

Hesitantly, he shifted the carver in his hand, while staring at the wax. Then he tipped his head to one side and lightly set the tool against the wax, lifting it quickly as he sketched a dotted line next to the curves she had been struggling with. His head tipped to the other side and he set the tool down.

“I’m not sure, maybe something like that,” he suggested and handed the piece back to her. The flowing grace captured by his amateurish marks seemed to lift the fog that had gathered in her mind. She snatched up the carver and with swift strokes smoothly ran over his marks, creating a solid line.

“It’s perfect!” She surveyed the outcome with delight. “That’s the exact rhythm. You’re good at this!”

He grinned a little and indicated the smooth line.

“You’re the one that’s good at it,” he said. “Glad I could help, though.”

“I can see it now, the rest of it. It’s going to be beautiful. Almost as good as Calima’s designs,” she proclaimed proudly.

“You never know.” Ilido shrugged. “Maybe it’ll be better.”

Fia laughed at that thought in genuine amusement, and he picked up the basket and went on down the path, whistling merrily. The nuthatches bolted into the air with a whir of tiny wings, but she knew they’d be back as soon as Ilido had reached the door. She bent her head over her project, the images dancing in her mind. A roe there, regal head uplifted, a stag here, carrying a proud crown of antlers. As her fingers flew, sketching in the design, she considered placing a fawn somewhere, but decided it would crowd the other creatures. An owl on a broken branch, a squirrel leaping to a tree trunk, a partridge with his wings fanned, and a wildcat skulking beneath a bough. They would all stand out against a backdrop of leaves of the mountain oak and bushy maple, intershot with the needles of the great pines, all laid over branches interlacing to form the tracery.

She glowed. This was going to be beautiful!

Her thoughts and fingers danced, and the sun slid through the sky without her noticing.

Fia showed her nearly finished design to Andro, as he lay with his foot propped up in bed. He looked it over carefully and pronounced it well designed, and then she talked of how she planned to finish it off, and he smiled, whether at her words or herself she could not tell. But she didn’t really care if it lightened the day for him a little. It was hard enough for anyone to be stuck getting well again, and for someone with so much responsibility it must be harder than usual.

And then after they had finished discussing the bracelet she asked about the Olayin family history and learned a great many interesting things, one of which was that Andro was almost as good as his mother when it came to telling stories. But there was one story he didn’t seem to want to tell, about a girl’s name that he mentioned once and then only briefly. Fia asked him who she was.

“She was here for a while,” he said, and she could see he didn’t want to say more.

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