The Revenants

was a new hut at the far edge of the fields under the shadows of the forest. There was a goat tethered there, and an old water bucket hung on the doorpost. The gathering drum was sounded for the people, and at that gathering the wife Widdek was whipped for having birthed an atavist, and her man was whipped for having fathered and hidden one, and the Speaker told the people in a calm and reasonable voice that the last daughter Widdek was outcast from the people, probably an atavist, and would live apart from the people until the coming of the Keepers who would judge her to Seal her, which was unlikely, or to let her live her life outcast, or to put her to death.
Thereafter it was noted that the man Widdek and the wife Widdek never spoke to one another again, and that the men of the daughters Widdek stayed apart from them and that the daughters who had been sold to the Widdek sons wept often. Still, they had already borne children, and the children were as brown and ruddy as any in the village. After a time, the Speaker gathered the people again and showed these children to them so that they could see there was no fault. The children stood naked and shivering in the centre of the square. One of the boys began to bawl and make puddles, and at that the people began to laugh. The sons and daughters Widdek bore more children thereafter, and the taint was forgotten. As for Jaera, alone in the hut at the edge of the forest, the people did not speak of her at all.
She lived as outcasts must live, from the leavings of the people. She collected the wool and hair which the sheep and goats left on thorns and fences. She skinned the animals which died or were killed by other animals, if she could get to them before the owners did. She crept into the orchards in the deep night, and took seed from gardens to make a garden of her own. She milked the goat which wife Widdek had insisted she be given and took it at night to the edge of the herd for mating. No villager would venture out in the light of the moon, which was known to bring madness and death, so it was in the moonlight that Jaera moved about her world of shadow, bathing in the river, setting her fishtraps, stealing what was left for her to steal. She went little into the sunlight, and the skin of her face and arms grew as pale as the creamy pearl of her breast. Her hair grew out, a strange, deep copper, and fell wildly about her shoulders. She wove clothes of mixed white and grey wool and then steeped the cloth in a brew of leaves and roots which turned it the grey-green of lichen. She began to go, by moonlight, to the house of the Woman Who Talks with Birds.
Some thought the Woman was mute. It was certain that she did not speak, though none knew whether it was that she could not or chose not. She did not speak to Jaera. Still, she was company of a sort, and it was a change to sit before the Woman’s fire in the Woman’s house, listening to the shifting of feathered bodies in the rafters, smelling die dark smells which came from the little pots on the fire, hearing the Woman whistling or calling to her tenants, going always with some small gift, a feather, a flute cut from willow, a ring carved from bone.
She came to womanhood alone. It happened at midsummer, a night when she stayed close to the hut, for the valley was filled with roaming maidens and youths playing midsummer pranks and running screaming through the dusk. They would avoid the hut through habit, she knew, but she did not know what they might chance to do if they found her alone in the night. Moonrise came at midnight, and long before the light sifted over the Eastern Mountain and the wizard’s tower, the young of the valley were safe inside their homes. Then, with the light swelling upward in the east, she became filled with a devil of mockery and went running through the village with the willow flute at her lips sending her music up through barred shutters. She paused longest outside the Speakerhouse, making the lost sound of the stranger bird, but then fled away panting and half sobbing on the forest path which led to the Woman’s house to fall at last on the Woman’s doorstep.
When the door was opened to let the firelight out, Jaera saw the bloodstains on her clothes. The Woman saw them, too, and brought her inside and held her fast in her arms a long time before the fire, brooding soundlessly over her until Jaera’s sobbing stilled. Then she gave Jaera a soft leather garment and some of the soft moss which the women of that valley use for cleanliness’ sake. Before dawn the Woman sent her away, and Jaera saw on the Woman’s face an expression of great sadness.
The devil of mockery had been a devil of error, as well. The song of the stranger bird had not gone unheard. The next day but one, after a day of council, the Speaker came to the Woman’s house with several men and burned the house to the ground. It may be that the Woman was warned, or it may be that she was away in the forest, but her body was not found among the ashes. That night, after moonrise, when Jaera came to the place she found only ashes and charred wood – except that on the stone which had been the doorstep there lay three green feathers and a flute carved from stone or, perhaps, ancient wood. Upon the shaft of the flute were scratched the symbols of Jaera’s name, the three