She had been the second member of the DiThon family to leave for Gwynned. Bolted, in fact, when Rietta had tried to marry her off to a toothless old man thirty years her senior. To everyone's surprise, Kirah had slouched back into town but seven months later, a different person, and not the better for it. While it was true she had already changed from the carefree, outspoken scamp she'd been before Rand's leaving, this was different. Worse somehow. She was skittish and withdrawn, like a reclusive old woman, though barely possessed of nineteen years. Something awful must have happened to her, but she refused to talk about it.

Bram had no notion of how Kirah paid for the room she let from the baker, or why she'd returned to a village she'd always professed to hate. She had explained to him once that it was not the village but the castle she hated. Rietta would never have welcomed her back at the castle anyway.

Nevertheless, Bram stopped by to see her whenever he came to the village. He took the stairs two at a time and knocked on his aunt's door. When no answer came, he pushed the door back gingerly, calling, "Kirah?"' It’s me. Bram.'

He stepped full into the spartan room and saw that rope bed was made feather tick fluffed into place, but he was alone. Some objects on the wooden table under the small street-side window caught his eye. A quill and ink pot were next to a note with his name neatly lettered on the front. He picked up the parchment and caught his bottom lip between his teeth; Behind the note was a pair of boots quite obviously too big for he diminutive aunt.

Bram,

The boots, of course, are for you. Don't insult my resourcefulness by protesting the expense. Besides, we can't have the local lord's son walking about like a beggar, can we? What will people say? But then, you know how concerned I've always been about that sort of thing…

Sorry to have missed you, but I felt the need for a walk and the peace it provides. Have a most merry day, dear nephew.

– K-

Bram shook his head, touched and sad at the same time at the thought of her solitary walk. The village rumor mill had it that Kirah went daily, no matter the weather, to a cove along the coast to wait for a lover who would never return. Frankly, Bram suspected his aunt had never had a lover, could not see when or where she'd had the opportunity, except, perhaps, during the time she'd spent in Gwynned. So what if she sat looking out to sea, seeking solitude?

Bram slipped on the new boots, and his eyes sank shut languorously. The fit was perfect, the soles double- thick. He no longer dreaded treading on the half-frozen dirt road.

Bram spied the quill. Taking it up, he dipped it in the ink pot and scratched a brief, Thank you, -В- at the bottom of Kirah's own note. He rolled his old, soft boots into a floppy log, tucking them under his arm as he pulled Kirah's door shut behind him. Bram checked the position of the sun in the grayish sky. Nahamkin would be wondering where he was.

A freckle-faced young woman was leaving the bakery with a coarse loaf of bread stuffed in her flour-sack apron when Bram bounded back down the stairs. Blushing, she bobbed the courtesy due the lord's son and hastened down the street, past Roxtin the carpenter's shop. Bram found himself reflecting that, although he was very friendly, he had few friends. Perhaps it wasn't possible for the villagers to be more than distantly polite with anyone named DiThon, he decided.

Bram had one true friend, a funny old man, Nahamkin. A farmer all his life, the man rose before the sun and set before it as well. Too old to make a living at farming anymore, Nahamkin was a cotter now, a tenant of a village cottage that held just enough land for him to sustain himself on the small plantings. His sons struggled on with the larger potato, barley malt, and maize fields that surrounded the village as part of the DiThon estate. Nahamkin puttered with the flowers and vegetables that had not been profitable enough for him to bother with as a farmer.

Rounding a corner at the far edge of town, Bram came into sight of the hovel in which Nahamkin happily lived. During the growing season the cottage's seediness was obscured by tall, wild gardens and flowering trees. Unfortunately there was nothing to cover it now. The thatch was rotted to black all over. The walls were not the wattle and daub of the rest of the village, but old, rocky mud, crumbling in places. And yet there was a sweet and comfortable look about the place, for the sun seemed to shine more strongly here, bringing the vellow-green of spring to the chaos of Nahamkin's aniens earlier than to the rest of Thonvil.

Bram knocked at the oddly tilting door. He could hear the old man shuffling behind it. The door flew open revealing the stoop-backed, wrinkle-faced codger, Bram had grown so fond of. Nahamkin waved made with a work-weathered hand. "Come in. come in," Nahamkin said in his hardy, hisp.

Bram dipped his head to keep from smacking it on the low door frame, having done it too many times to his own discomfort and the old man's amusement. Pots and tins and wooden pails were scattered everywhere, catching the drips of melting snow that pounded a steady, irregular rhythm with the sound of a crackling fire. It was an oddly welcoming clamor. Or perhaps it was Nahamkin's wide, toothless smile that made Bram feel welcome. The old farmer had taken the nobleman under his wing when Bram was very young and shared everything he knew about sowing the earth.

Nahamkin wiped suet from his wrinkled hands onto his stiff, much-stained leather jerkin. "You're just in time to help with the candle makin'," he announced, then returned to the dry sink to slice beef tallow into a dull, green-stained copper pot.

Evidence of the cotter's work hung from the beams overhead. Butter-colored candles-in-the-making dangled from a branch in pairs by cotton wicks soaked in a lime water and vinegar solution.

"Take the thinner ones and give them another coating in that pot over there." Nahamkin bobbed his head toward a tall tin by the fire. "That one's got the alum and saltpeter that makes 'em burn longer and cleaner. Dip them in the pot of cold well water to speed up the cooling between layers."

Bram did as he was told and withdrew the thinnest pair of candles from the branch. "How do you know so much about making candles?" he asked more for conversation than curiosity.

"My wife, rest her soul, used to make and peddle them," said Nahamkin, moving his pot of suet scraps to the fire. "I'm afraid mine don't come close to the perfection of hers, but I've got to see, haven't I?" Watching Bram, Nahamkin shook a knobby-knuckled digit at him. "Here, now, you'll have to roll those on some

parchment, or they'll be as crooked as my old fingers."

Chuckling, Bram quickly complied. They worked quietly, companionably, Bram dipping, rolling, cooling the candles, Nahamkin inspecting his work and cutting new wicks. It took thirty to forty dips to make a candle of sufficient size.

At last the old man rocked back on his heels and regarded the day's work with a satisfied sigh. "That ought to hold me until this time next year, provided I live that long." Nahamkin made a reverent gesture for luck.

"I don't know why you need so many candles," jibed Bram, wiping waxy residue from his hands. "You're alwavs on the straw, eyelids drawn, before darkness falls."

"Those of us who rise with the chickens need to see, too," Nahamkin shot back. He smirked as he added, "But you wouldn't know about early rising, being a lord's son."

Bram threw his head back and laughed. "We both know how much good that's done me."

The old man nodded kindly, fondly watching his young friend put away the candle-making supplies. No one knew better than Nahamkin that Bram's life was not typical of a lord's only son. The two had talked of it often enough. The old man secretly thought Bram was the lord of Castle DiThon, for all practical purposes, considering the work he alone did there. No one had to look very close to see that the responsible young man was nothing like his parents and sister. Over the years, Bram's comments had drawn Cormac as an oddly distant father at his closest moments, and Rietta as a mother who'd been domineering until life had forced her to consider only herself.