When the fae have taken something precious from you,

do not try to go and steal it back.

They’ll only take you, too, and their mercy runs dry for thieves.

While I pleaded with the fae who had stolen me from you, you dragged yourself back to Avon Town - still broken inside, still full of rage and grief - by the time the fat golden sun (beautiful and awful, for you knew what that cloudless sky really meant) was beginning to sink in the west. It cast long yellow fingers over your garden, which you saw, all lit up in splendor, as you drew up on the back of your humble little house. There were all your flowers, and they were in full bloom.

In the past this had always been where you’d gone first when you needed to clear your head: when Eire and Niamh were having their shouting matches (well, when Niamh shouted at Eire, who mostly cowered silently and looked away), you came here and knelt among the crocuses and irises and tended to them, and you sang softly to yourself. This was an ancient song whose words you didn’t know, for Mama had sung it to you when you were but a babe rocked on her knee, too little to know what words were. But the tune you knew by heart, and it rose to your lips now and came out in an unsteady little voice, thin but still sweet, still familiar to you.

You knelt among your flowers now as you had then and ran your fingers through the soil. It was black and damp, and when you turned over a rock left over from the winter, you found a mess of worms writhing underneath; they had come back already, woken from their long sleep beneath the ice. Blessed little beasts, knowing nothing of the cruelty the faerie had wrought.

The flowers themselves bloomed bright and big and full with color, all at once instead of each in their own season. (If that was not proof enough that the strange faerie’s magic had a hand in all this, you did not know what was.) There was a row of ruby-red amaryllis, one of your greatest prides; Papa had spent a whole month’s salary getting you the bulbs for those back when he’d still traded the little ticking toys and trinkets he made up and down the river. There beside them were crocuses, pale purple, and the irises too, as deeply blue as the sky. There were your beloved roses in shades of gold and white and blush.

But something was wrong. Never before had you seen your flowers quite this big and heavy and brilliant - they were so bright they seemed to mirror the light of the fading sun, like coins or gems or eyes in the night. You reached out and cupped the petals of a crocus, and instead of the sun-warmed softness you expected, you found that they were as hard and smooth and cool as enamel.

On any other day this should have rendered you speechless, but today you had come to expect madness.

The rest of your flowers were the same: each petal and leaf was hard and cold as stone, and the colors themselves were bright, bright - here your irises had become deepest lapis lazuli, like the inlays of the cabinets you’d brought from Mama’s house to Avon; here were roses with petals of solid carnelian and carmine and citrine and coral. The ruby-red amaryllises had become real rubies, and their leaves were delicate sheaths of jade and quartz. They were still shot through with veins and, you supposed, still grew, but those veins were the ore-veins of gold and silver through stone, and no longer carried sap. (Or did they? You supposed you didn’t know. Nothing the fae did made sense, after all.)

You could not pluck the flowers from their stems. They were held as fast as real rock to rock. But then you thought of digging them up whole, roots and all, and before you could stop yourself you were covered in dirt and had one of the crocus bulbs in your palm. It was made of solid gold.

What of your vegetables, the onions and potatoes and carrots and radishes you grew to keep yourself and your sisters and Papa fed? They, too, had turned to jade and garnet, and the potatoes were gold eggs the size of both your hands put together, and the onions were clusters of silver and copper. And the little apple tree, still slender and stunted as it had been before winter, was bowed nearly in half with fruits of gleaming red gold.

This was the curse of the fae: to make you rich and starve you at the same time, for you could hardly eat gold and silver, and Eire was not here to hunt for you anymore, and who here would accept cursed fae fruits from the Wicklighters without thinking themselves cursed in turn?

You laughed a little. Then you cried. As the moon rose and assumed its full white splendor, you huddled among the ruins of your beautiful, cold garden and wondered what you were going to do.

Then you remembered: There was someone in the village who might still take your cursed gold.

Hart Harrowe had died last winter because he’d come down sick from helping your father, yes, and now widowed Alba could hardly look Papa in the eye, but you knew it was more out of grief and guilt than anger. And though you knew better than to ask her for favors, there was Rand, who was hardly older than you: perhaps twenty summers of age in all, friendly and big and broad-shouldered. You knew from the way he looked at you sometimes - through his coarse black lashes, when he thought you couldn’t see - that he’d take your silver and gold, cursed or not.

That settled it. You squared your thin shoulders and gathered up the unearthed roots and stems and bulbs (each one shining like a tiny moon itself) in your skirts and carried them into the house, and there you stopped and sank to the floor, and you let yourself mourn your lost Niamh - only for a moment.

Your family had never been much for Mag’s tales of the Queen of Ravens, whom the rest of the village loved and feared alike; Papa brought with him tales of the gods from over the sea, his own family’s gods, who had names like Baba Dev and Meomri Ke and Anashumnag. (It was the way people here made faces at these sorts of names that had led him to hide - once in Avon - the little carven images of the gods that he’d brought with him from his first home; those gods had spent the eighteen years since they’d come here locked in the lovingly painted ivory chest under the floorboards beside the hearth. Niamh pretended they were not there and turned her face away whenever Papa whispered, after vespers, those other little prayers in words you did not know - but you saw the way she stepped carefully around those hearthside boards even so, as if to not tread on the faces of the gods. You wondered, sometimes, if she secretly loved and feared them the way the rest of Avon Town loved and feared Mag’s storied Queen.)

Either way, you yourself knew little enough of divinities. Niamh had of course raised you - fed and supped you - on legends about the fae, but the fae were not to be worshipped; they were to be feared and hated, and perhaps to be killed, if the legends that whispered they could die (though not a mortal death, really) were true. They were beautiful, Niamh said, but cruel, and cruel things are twice as terrible when they are also enchantingly lovely.

To whom would you pray, then? You considered it there on the floorboards (even then you took care to give the gods under the hearth a wide berth; although they were not your gods, they were someone’s ). To the east and north there were the followers of the All-Father and far in the south you’d heard of the faith of three thousand godlings, each kinder and more benevolent than the last, each wise in the ways of being good and merciful to mortal sinners. Those three thousand gods, you thought, would listen well if you asked them tonight to bring back your Niamh, or at least to let you find your way to her without harm. But they were not your gods either and Avon was too distant from their domains. There was nothing they could do to help you steal your sister back from the fae.

So you prayed, Dear earth, dear sky and sea, dear woods and bones and flowering things, grant me the strength to outwit what I cannot outwit and to catch what can outrun anything, and let me find the answer to what I still do not know how to ask, and by the grace of it may I bring her back .

Did the earth and sky and sea listen? How would you know? In the end you didn’t really need anything to hear you, perhaps, but only needed to say it for your own sake, for if you didn’t the silence would press in on you and choke what remained of your breath from your weak body. By the time you were done your face was wet. You dried your tears on your sleeve and rose, and you laid out all the riches you’d taken from the garden on the table. Your heart hurt to see them shine, for you knew: This was the price of losing her, these gilded onions probably worth ten harvests at the market alone, and it was still not enough. Nothing was worth losing your Niamh.

At dawn you knew Rand would be awake, tending the fields. You rose quietly before the birds began to sing and changed your dress and shift and shawl - everything, for it was soiled with sweat and tears and the bitter smell of heartbreak - and packed all the gem-fruits and roses and crocuses and irises, the silver and copper onions and the gold potatoes, into a sack made from an old shirt that Papa had worn to holes, now patched unevenly (Eire must have started the stitches and Niamh, with her clever, careful fingers, righted what she could of the rest of it) and seamed along the sleeves and hem. Then you climbed the ladder and peered up into the darkness of the loft. Papa was asleep, and his piss-pot was full. You carried it down and emptied it outside, and then you went back and kissed his forehead, and you whispered to his gods (though you still could not well speak their names) and asked them to care for him. He did not stir, to your disappointment and relief.

You took a moment to weave your hair up around your head: a cluster of careful rosettes from which the rest of it spilled in warm honey waves, just so. This was how you’d done it ever since Mama had taught you all those years ago, and it was one of the only things you still remembered of her. Now, at eighteen, you were used to it enough from having done it every day since that you could put it all up in the dark, without looking, and quick enough that Papa wouldn’t wake before you were done. You fastened it with a blue silk ribbon (the good one that matched your dress, for you’d picked your best to wear; nothing less for finding Niamh), and you took one last look at the place beneath the hearth where your father’s gods lived, and you bade them goodbye.

You let yourself quietly out through the door. It closed behind you without a noise, and in the gray half-light you slipped down the little road that marked the middle of Avon Town, toward the Harrowe farm, glad for once in your life that you were such a mouse.

The sack of fae jewels rode heavy on your tender, thin back; you hoisted it higher and hunched awkwardly as you walked. It was still strange seeing everything cloaked not in snow and ice but leaves - still budding, half-unfurled - and grass and sapling growth. A thousand perfumes wafted over you as you made your way down: the pungent smell of manure and fresh hay, the sweetness of wild violets and clover, the fragrance of mustard and garlic plants that crushed under your feet where you strayed to the edge of the road. A faint taste of petrichor promised rain soon. You could not find it in yourself to be happy about that; not as if you’d be around to see it fall. Nor Niamh.

Rand was not in the barn where they kept their sheep and goats (one of whom they had meant to gift your own family the winter Hart died); he was not in the coop with the sleepy clucking range of hens and chicks. The rooster crowed as you rounded the back and came upon the still-gray sprawl of the pastures, where green young shoots of alfalfa and ryegrass were already pushing up from their beds.

Rand was not afield in the pastures either, nor by the troughs where the goats and ewes fed by day. But a little further on you came across the roofed shrine to the Queen that Papa had helped the Harrowes put together some years earlier (a triptych altar like no other, replete with moving figures of the Queen’s three aspects and ravens hung from strings that flapped and made real cawing sounds every vespers; only a watchmaker as distinguished as Papa would have envisioned that ). Within the shrine, amidst the quiet lowing of waking cattle, you heard the sound of low voices: one Rand’s, surely, the other a stranger’s, too soft to really hear.

You squinted through the gloaming. One door to the little shrine room was open, and through it you saw Rand himself, his big form nearly blotting out the lit candles behind him. The big raven’s head that overlooked the altar seemed to crown him with darkly painted plumage. And he was talking to - to -

You hardly believed it. That was the miller’s boy, whom even Rand had always looked past out in the village square.

He was just as Niamh always said he looked (though without her sneering, you saw that he was really not half bad): slender, with wide dark eyes almost too big for his face. His mouth was soft - lovely - and his hair was long and curled down past his ears. His features were finely carved. If he hadn’t been wearing a boy’s clothes, the rough woven shirt and trousers gathered at the waist, you might have thought him a girl.

And Rand was speaking to him, his face open and friendly as ever, as you had thought only Eire might have before this…

As you strained to peer through the golden crack of the door, the sack on your shoulder shifted. You tried to hoist it back, but too late - the lip had come open and out rolled one of the golden bulbs, and it caught the light of the candles and flashed like the unrisen sun.

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Your heart flew into your throat and you clapped both hands over your mouth. Rand hadn’t seen, somehow, but a moment passed and then the miller’s boy looked down, at the bulb, and then up at you, and for a split second you looked at each other mutely, you pleading, him uncertain, wide-eyed. But you knew he knew you were up to something wrong; your blush gave it away. You knew you’d been discovered.

Rand saw the miller boy’s face and followed his gaze, and there you were, standing in the open doorway with your bag half open, faerie fruits spilling out, the baleful stare of the carven raven taking in all your godless blasphemy as it happened. And you knew: Rand would never trust you again.

It was the miller’s boy, in an unexpectedly hoarse and low voice, who said, “You’ve dropped your apples.”

You looked down. There indeed were the red-gold faerie apples you’d tucked into your skirts, having tumbled out onto the soil, gleaming in the half-light.

Rand said, “Aislin, ah - didn’t reckon to see you here, now - come for a worship?” When you said nothing, he went on awkwardly, “Isaac and me, well, speak of the devil, we’ve been just talking about you - about your sister. You’re looking for her too, aren’t you.”

It wasn’t a question. He spoke gravely, almost sadly, and you forgot all about the faerie fruits and the matter of his trust. All you knew was that he understood - that you didn’t have to explain yourself, what a relief - and you almost burst into tears before you saw that the miller’s boy was shivering: no, trembling with pent feeling, and his eyes were red and raw.

The guilt that wracked you then was a jolt. By sister they meant Eire. Who else would he have been crying about? That was what the miller’s boy had come here for, then, to pray about lost Eire to the Queen of Ravens. (He had to come here for everyone knew Old Mag called the boy a devil and kept him away from the big shrine in the middle of the village, so Rand must be letting him pray here instead, at the edge of his farm before dawn, where he thought nobody would be able to see him and decry him as a heathen and a sinner.)

But in your grief about Niamh - ah, you’d nearly forgotten about Eire, and of course Eire was the one they’d have noticed missing first, for she was always trysting with the miller’s boy and trading her kills and Niamh’s needling pieces in the village square (for all that they called her, too, cursed on account of being perhaps fae-touched, that red-headed demon child), not shutting herself up and sewing and embroidering in haughty silence the way Niamh always did. For Eire loved the miller’s boy (this you understood in an unspoken, instinctive way - for who could overcome all the hatred that the rest of the village turned on the boy, the same hatred Niamh echoed, if not for love?). For he loved her, and he missed her, and you had forgotten to miss her, and that was the unbearable weight of your true sin, not these cursed fruits.

“You’re weeping,” Rand said, almost in surprise, and then, “Oh, Aislin, come, please, my girl. It will be alright. We’ll find her, your Eire. We will.”

He had taken you up in his big arms (you hadn’t remembered getting there) and was holding you tightly, and you were indeed sobbing into his shoulders, the rough homespun linen of his shirt (a gift Niamh had made for him - for the rest of the family, too - when they’d shared their wheat flour with you one early winter). He smelled like lavender and cut grass and new earth. He knew nothing of what you were really crying for. He didn’t know you’d forgotten to grieve Eire. Or that Niamh was gone.

Behind you the miller’s boy made a noise somewhere between a gasp and a cry, and you knew he’d picked up one of your fruits and found that it was made of gold.

You burst free of Rand’s arms and said, “Help me find her. I will pay you for it. I’ve brought you gold and silver.”

You snatched back the faerie fruit from the miller boy’s hands (he didn’t fight it but only flinched away from you, eyes big and mouth quivering), and you held it out to Rand. “Here,” you said, “solid gold. Test it any way you like. I’ll ask the smith for the crucible if you need - ”

He held up his hand. “No need,” he said, but his brow was furrowed. “Aislin, how - ”

“Don’t ask me,” you said with an unbridled ferocity you surprised even yourself with, that before had been only Niamh’s domain, “anything. Nothing. Nothing about these at all. Do you want my gold or not?”

Rand was, though not clever the way Niamh or Eire were, not an idiot, either. You knew he knew something was wrong about the sudden spring, the vanished winter; you knew they all did, even if the people of Avon Town treated the thought of faeries with something between the ancient distrust they still bore for big beasts and shadows in the night and the disbelief they held for gods who were not their own. You knew, too, that none of them wanted to think overlong about it, for it was a blessing at first blush and one they all wanted to keep. Simpler not to open a gifted mare’s mouth than to have to pay the price for her rotted teeth. But you also knew that facing him with signs of the curse as miraculous and terrible as apples and onions made of solid gold was testing the bounds of his blindness toward the wrongness of it all. You meant not to let him unblind himself, not now, not until at least you had your sister back - your sisters, both of them, if you even could.

So you said, “This will be my dowry to you if you help me.”

That was the second time in the span of seven days that you’d made to promise your own hand in marriage to a man who had never courted you, not even having asked your father first, not even being in love with him, and this time Niamh was not there to step in and stop you.

And Rand, well, he was no cunning fae prince. You saw him blush as soon as you said it - the miller’s boy in the corner made another choked noise - and Rand said, stumbling, “Aislin, you - a bride? Me? I haven’t - my mother - ”

“Your mother?” Of course he’d have asked Hart Harrowe and Papa too if he could marry you, and he’d make do with Alba with his father gone, but you were too full of your own sudden fire to stop for that. “Rand, your mother knows I’m a good woman. Do you want to wait for her blessing to have me promised to you? I am giving myself to you no matter what she says.” You stepped closer, your heart racing, your mouth dry, your jaw set. “Rand,” you said, “this is enough gold for you to buy anything you’d like - ten acres, a new house, twenty good young oxen - and you’ll have leftovers for tithes. I can get you more, too.” (This you weren’t sure of, but did it matter? He wouldn’t know.) “And I know the way you look at me. I’ve seen it.”

You’d never seen such a tall, broad man look so much like a rabbit caught in a snare. He was deeply red from ear to ear. “Aislin - ” He was in pieces; you’d done your job well. Stuttering now: “Well, of course you’re beautiful but - I never - I hadn’t thought you - ”

“That I wanted you?” You took another step closer, took his hand in one of your own. In your other, the faerie gold flickered. “Rand,” you said in the soft, sweet voice you knew took even Niamh out of her highest tempers, on nights when Eire had given up trying to make herself small and silent against her onslaught of insults, “I have seen you, too. I’ve looked at you, too. I know you’re a good farmer,” and here you took your hand (small, slight, tender especially beside his own large, rough one) and put it up to his chest, your palm flat against the flat plane of his flesh, the frantic beat of his heart hard and quick against your own pulse. “But you are a good soul ,” you said, even more softly, “and that is why I want you - have always wanted you, have dreamed of you for my husband.”

Behind you, the miller’s boy coughed.

“Aislin,” said Rand again, and looked from your face to the gold in your hand, and back again. “Aislin.” He was too good a boy, you thought, frustrated; any man besides him would’ve leapt at the chance to have the prettiest girl in the village or her gold, never mind that Papa didn’t yet know. “Aislin,” he said a third time, and you saw his face flicker between greed and uncertainty, “I don’t understand - ”

“Then answer me later,” you said, and pressed the onion into his hands. “I have to go, and I can’t go alone. Please,” and you mustered up a little break in your voice, a little quiver to your lip (this not really even pretended, for part of you was still shattering over Niamh’s kidnapping even as you beguiled the Harrowes’ boy into helping you find her). “I can’t bear to know what might happen to her if I wait a moment longer.”

He let out a breath, and you saw him break under your pleading gaze at last.

“Let me get Cian and Colm,” he said, “and I’ll ask Ma for the oxen. We can take this upriver and sell it - ”

“No,” you said, again with that ferocity you’d never known you had. You gripped his wrist as hard as you could (not hard, for your hands were little and weak, all the more reason to bring someone with strength with you to go and face the beasts). “Nobody else. Just us.”

He frowned. “But we’ll need - ”

“I need you, Rand,” you said desperately, “just you. More people means more waiting, and, and - ” You struggled to think of a good excuse. “And gossip. Please, Papa’s already in a bad way and I can’t have them talking about how he didn’t watch over my sister - ”

“They’ll be gossiping about us, ” said Rand, “for we aren’t married, you and I.”

“Not yet, ” you said, “but here, look, the Queen is watching us, and it’s as blessed a chapel as any other.” You whirled and seized the miller’s boy - Isaac. “You. Bind our hands, won’t you? There’s a wedding sash under the altar, I know it, and you’re as good a witness as any. Papa put it there two years back when he - ”

“ Aislin, ” Rand breathed.

This was not the blushing exclamation of the lovestruck, gold-drunk boy he’d been a few moments ago. There was a lowness to his voice, a note of warning, that made you blush - not from bashfulness - and you let go of poor Isaac and stepped back, unable to meet Rand’s eyes.

He pushed you gently back from the altar. “No wedding yet. We’ve not even told anyone else.” He sighed; you could tell he was battling his own inner reason, and you’d thought it won for a panicked heartbeat before he went on, “I’ll help you, but please, girl, tell me what all the rush is for before you go gallivanting off into the woods on some fool’s errand.” He looked down at the gilded onion, then up again at you, and he said, “What happened to Eire?”

There was no use trying to lie; what could you say that they’d believe any more than the truth? You said, “Faeries took her.”

“Faeries aren’t real,” said Rand.

You shoved the sack of gold apples against his chest. “ This is real,” you said. “The end of winter is real. All our flowers and crops are blooming at the same time and you know better than any of us how they each have their season.” You seized his shirt. “Tell me, Rand, have you ever seen anything like this before?”

“No,” he said, “no, but - ”

“Do you think it could be anything but a curse?”

“It’s a miracle,” he said. “Old Mag said so.”

You opened your mouth to retort, but it was the miller’s boy who said then, in the smallest voice, “Old Mag’s head is full of worms, and she can’t tell a horse from a cow.”

Rand didn’t know what to say.

“This was no miracle,” you told him. “Magic is at hand. Old magic - cruel magic - real magic. How else do you think there’d be apples of solid gold growing in my garden, Rand? Do you think I spin gold from cloth?” You drew yourself up and tried for Niamh’s chilly, grand bearing in the way she spoke about the faeries to you in her stories, for all that you were not her. “A faerie came to our door three nights ago and told us he’d taken Eire away, and I mean to get her back.”

“But it can’t be faeries,” said Rand slowly. “They’re only stories.”

“Stories that we all know, Rand,” you said fiercely. “Why do you think they’re still being told all these ages later? Do you think I’m lying about what I saw? ”

Rand’s frown grew deeper. “Aislin - ”

You lifted your chin. “Tell me you think I’m crazy,” you said, “that my grief has driven me mad. Tell me you don’t think it’s faeries and I’ll leave and take my apples with me, and you’ll never have to hear from me again.”

Rand shook his head and bit his lip, but you held his gaze and didn’t let go.

“All right,” he said, “what do you want to do, then?”

“Take me to the Wall,” you said. “I need to cross it. I’ll look for her there.”

At that he flinched. Faeries or no, everyone knew the Wall - vast and unyielding and far to the north - was the bounds of the kingdom as far as livable winters went, and beyond it was only ice and terrible beasts, bears bigger than the biggest oxen and wolves with eyes like stars. No one in their right mind would want to cross it. Well, you thought grimly, you weren’t in your right mind.

“How do you expect to undo it if it’s a curse?” said Rand.

You didn’t know. “I can search for Eire, at least. I’ll buy her back with my gold.”

“You say it’s faeries,” said Rand. “The stories say they don’t deal in trades the way we do.”

“I can try,” you said.

Rand’s jaw worked. “But we could at least take Cian and Colm - ”

“We go alone or not at all,” you said, “and that is final, Rand Harrowe. Will you come with me or let me go myself?”

That cinched it. Mad or not, you knew he’d never let you throw yourself to the wolves by your lonesome, tender and innocent and rose-lovely as you were.

“I’ll get one of the mares,” he said, “and we can ride out before the sun’s up, if it suits you.”

You could have kissed him. You threw your arms around his neck instead. He was stiff and did not move to hold you in turn.

“Best get anything you want before we’re off,” he said, pulling you off him instead. “Say your goodbyes.”

At that your belly twisted. Who did you have to say goodbye to anyway, with your sisters gone and your father too weak to risk hurting his heart over knowing you were going away, too?

So you waited in the little shrine by the altar, surrounded by candles and the ever-growing light of the coming dawn, while Rand went and got the horses. From your skirts you withdrew the drop spindle you often used for turning wool into thread in months when you could stand to be outside away from your wheel in the cottage. Isaac waited with you; you weren’t sure why. You’d never spoken to him before. (This was the first time you’d even known his name, for all that you’d been in the same village together for sixteen years now. You’d never hated him the way Old Mag did, nor scorned him like Niamh had, but still - )

The horizon had turned the gold of your fae onions by the time Rand returned and said, “Put those in the saddle bags. It won’t do for you to hoist that sack over your shoulder while you ride.”

You knew you could have done that - for all that the gold and silver was heavy - for you weren’t the shrinking violet Rand and everyone else seemed to make you out to be, but you nodded anyway. It wasn’t in you to argue, not now.

Before you stepped over the threshold, though, something came over you. You turned back to look at Isaac, who didn’t meet your gaze, only stared at the ground and the flickering flames by his sides.

“You should have this,” you said, and pressed the last three of your faerie apples into his hands. He didn’t move; he only looked up at you, his face open with surprise. You should have told him you were glad he had brought joy to your Eire while he could, or that you knew he missed her and that you did too - or that you were sorry. (For what? For the way the villagers treated him, besides Rand, and for the way Niamh talked about him behind his back? For the way you’d never said anything otherwise, yourself? For not having gone to look for Eire sooner? That she was gone at all?) “Take care of my father, if you can,” was all you said instead, and might have gone on, but you saw the tightness in his lips and the glint in his eyes and you knew he was about to cry again, or perhaps shout at you. Either would have been deserved, and you were a coward. So you turned and fled.

You thought Rand would have something to say about that, for you saw him looking at you a few steps on up the hill, watching you give those apples to the boy from that low rise. But he said nothing. Only silence wreathed you as he helped you onto his mare and spurred her on down toward the main road, and you did not ask if he’d told Alba or Cian or Colm where he was going or with whom or why. You didn’t need to.

It was a fool’s errand, after all, just as he’d said. He should never have taken it up alongside you. But men in love are wont to be the greatest fools of all, and you - sweet, cunning thing - had no patience that day for mercy upon fools. You had a sister to find.