"Why?" Guenloie wondered. "Be not cold."

One day Guenloie lagged behind in a village, speaking to the loitering young men. Dorelei sent Drust and Malgon ahead while she waited on the hillside, thinking what she must say as her cousin ran out the stockade gate and up the hill toward her. Dorelei made her face still as Gawse's when she was reproving a mistake.

"Guenloie, thee shames thy husbands."

"How?"

"Tallfolk men have no respect for thee. Do not understand thy ways or dress. Do think thee whore."

Her cousin's smile was completely innocent. "Whore?"

Dorelei wondered if she used the word correctly, having never heard it until this summer among Venicones. "Be woman who cares not who beds her."

Guenloie was honestly bewildered by the idea. "But have husbands."

1 'Do thee remember it. What did a say to thee?"

"Who?"

"Those men."

"Oh—when did come again a would show where did byre a's kine."

"Nae doubt. And thee could lie on the straw to see how soft a was. What else?"

"And where did buy my gold armlet. As if gold could be bought." Guenloie laughed, touching the thick gold wire twining up her supple brown arm. "Did say the truth. Gift from Rainbow."

That again. Tallfolk were always surprised at the gold Prydn wore but never traded. It did come from Rainbow somehow, but none of them remembered how or when.

"Guenloie, speak less with a's men. A will spit on thee. Think of Drust and Malgon."

That teasing smile again that men would always misread. "Do know what to do, Gern-y-fhain." And Guenloie skipped away after her husbands.

Drust and Malgon were steadier than Artcois or Bredei, but then they had to be, dealing with a wife always between two fires, never one thing or the other. Dorelei never had to lecture them on behavior or responsibility, although Drust second husband was a bit jealous and possessive of Guenloie and the most injured when she smiled at the village men.

Artcois and Bredei had to be told all the time of their responsibilities for the flocks. They'd be contrite and nod: yes, they'd be more careful on watch—and next day the sheep would be wandering and Neniane would screech and box their ears in sheer vexation.

Cruaddan was eighteen and the oldest, finding it necessary to grow up fast as Dorelei. It sobered the mischief out of them some of the time, but Cru was a good provider. When ponies begged to be night-borrowed, Cru was there to liberate them. Hawk flew wide of their flocks when Cm was near. There was a time two Bel-

teins past when Hawk was hungrier than careful, and a new lamb wobbled away from its mother on untried legs. Hawk was a black blur against the sky, stooping out of nowhere to sink his talons in the lamb's soft back. The lamb bleated its terror as Hawk labored to rise with it— then there he was, rising away from the ground, gaining speed and height with every stroke of powerful wings, and Dorelei screaming Cru! Cru! Cru! jumping up and down in helpless fury.

Then Hawk lurcned sideways and hung like a picture-bird drawn in the earth with the arrow through him before he fell like a stone. The lamb broke two of its frail legs in the fall and had to be butchered, a wasteful luxury. Mutton was to eat. Lambs were to grow and increase. The most succulent portion went to Cru, the wool to wrap the newest child-wealth in Gawse's fhain. Tendons were dried for cord, the head roasted for a delicacy, porridge boiled in the stomach, fat stored in a pouch. Nothing of a sheep was ever wasted but its bad temper.

Cru wore Hawk's pinion feathers in his hair and made a necklace of the claws, and always after that, Hawk was careful of Cru's bow.

The night was not really cold. Dorelei looked down at Cru sleeping and pulled the sheepskin blanket from his naked body. In sunlight Cru was dark bronze, darker in moonlight, shoulders very broad for his short stature like all Prydn men. They were cousins, and neither could remember a time when the other wasn't there, playing in the warm crannog or trudging the hills behind the ponies. They fought and explored together. Dorelei was there when Cru's fhain scars were cut into his cheeks without a sound from him, and he held her in turn so that the painful knife could not make her cry out. They rode reckless over the hills on the nights of fire festival and knew without words that life was good and theirs the best of all.

Then came a season when their play turned feverish, when they could not touch each other enough. The playing kindled a fire, pawing turned to clawing, and it was

taken for granted that Dorelei would have Cm for first husband. She loved his body that fit so perfectly to hers, the spirit of him that joined with hers like halves of a stone with no rift at all. Side by side, peering at their reflection in still water, they seemed much alike, but it was not until this spring—a day of much learning and marvel—when they stood before a tallfolk woman's bronze mirror, wide-eyed at their true selves. They were alike as two blackberries: the same glossy black hair, fine and straight, high-bridged noses with mere slits for nostrils, the same gray eyes set above their fhain-scarred cheeks in a manner different from tallfolk. Cru was perhaps a finger-width taller. Except for the breadth of his shoulders and Dorelei's breasts, they could be small twin brothers. The woman even remarked at it.

"Faerie girl, is he your brothc

"Husband/'

"Husband? Och—peas in a pod.

The mirror delighted Dorelei. It was like seeing a whole new self. She wanted to see more, to know the self of her that others saw, like Lugh spying the mole on her back. Then Guenloie crowded in, eager to inspect her own image, and didn't look to her husbands for comparison but to the fair-skinned women of the house, preening when they noticed her waved hair.

''Mother be Taixali/' she told them proudly.

On the day of the mirror, Dorelei resolved that if Guenloie ever brought trouble to fhain because of her too-free ways or let herself be taken by a tallfolk man, she could stay among them or go off with her husbands. Fhain would not have her back.

She took another hurtful surprise that day when she heard the fat wives of the house whispering about them.

"Don't they smell, dirty little things."

"And so ugly."

Ugly, she and Cru? They were the most beautiful of all Mother's children, made in the first days when Mother herself was young as Dorelei and bursting to create.

"Cru, how be we ugly?"

"Remember the Lughnassadh tale," he soothed her. "A's but jealous."

He was a comfort and a steady warmth, her Cru.

These summer nights Dorelei and Cru liked to take their sleeping robes away from the rath where they could hear the night sounds around them as they loved, starting out snug between the heavy fleeces, throwing them aside as their hunger rose and they went deliciously mad with each other. Then, sated, the night would chill their sweat and they'd cover again, only to start all over, stroking and licking each other's flesh until the sheepskin went flying once more along with their spirits. But though they loved enough for the whole fhain, no child-wealth came of it.

"Do try too much," Neniane counseled. "Wait until thy blood's come and gone. Rest and try again."

But they couldn't wait any more than a river could pause or Lugh turn back in the sky. Cru had the fire of Heme in him, she had Mother's own need to be filled. Their bodies and spirits were so matched, one hungered with the other's need.

Cru rolled over, face up. Dorelei brushed the hair aside where it tangled over his cheek and kissed the two V-shaped fhain marks. She eased down on her back beside Cru, staring full into Mother's eye.

What dost want of me? Be too young for Gern-y-fhain, not wise like Gawse.

Yet now she must be wise. She must learn more about tallfolk to be ware of them. They were strange. Sometimes Prydn were allowed in the villages, sometimes no closer than the stockade gates, the village traders wearing Blackbar magic about their necks as protection, knowing as well as Dorelei's folk that the iron would always be a wall between them. For tens of generations her people had feared the magic of Blackbar that they couldn't make or master. She didn't know why it was potent against them, but Gawse never questioned it or her mother before her, so Dorelei never touched,

named, or even looked at iron if she could help it. Only in rare moments like this, awake beside sleeping Cm, did she sometimes ponder on it. What was in the Black-bar magic to make it so potent against her people?

Whatever, tallfolk knew and used it. They would never allow Dorelei near their children, but they would travel a full day to find a Prydn midwife whose birth-magic they knew far better than their own and for good reason. Prydn women bore their children in far less comfort than Picts or Britons and knew the best ways to bring them easily and keep them alive. If one of their own lived past its first year, it would grow stronger than others, supple and tough as willow from running the hills. Many were born on the move. Tallfolk never understood the moving.

"Why do you always wander?" a Venicone asked Cru only weeks past. "Why not stay in one place?"

"Herds move."

"Pen them up as we do."

"Why?"

"Do we not own the land?"

Own? Pen? Tallfolk always used such words. Dorelei couldn't fathom their thinking except for the greed. Small wonder they fought all the time. They'd forgotten Mother and her way. A poor lot. Mother must have made them on a bad day toward the end when she was tired of it all. How do children pen off parts of a mother? That was like Salmon fhain saying Dorelei's left arm was Neniane's, the other Guenloie's. How could that be when earth was a living thing, Lugh moved, and the herds drifted as they always had since Mabh followed the reindeer? They moved as birds who were born on the wing, their whole lives pressed to the breast of the wind and taking suck from it.