Chapter 138

Molly came over the hill from Fernhollow on the third morning, on a fat brown cob, with her skirts kilted up and a basket on her arm as if she had come to a christening.

I was in the yard. I saw her before she saw me, and for a moment I did not know her: a broad, rosy woman with a housekeeper’s keys at her belt and a voice that carried across the whole of the yard to the stable boy about her girth strap. Then she looked up and saw me by the well, and her face went exactly as it had gone at seven, when the Thornwood Alpha’s hound came round the corner blue.

“Elowen,” she said. “Oh, you stupid girl. Nobody told me. Nobody told me anything.”

She got down off the cob without help and came across the yard and took hold of me, basket and all. She smelled of bread and woodsmoke and some herb she had been cutting. I stood in it and could not think of a single word, and she did not seem to need one.

“Your letter came last night,” she said into my hair. “