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then just put her head down.”
    â€œWill you take me to see them?”
    Jean led him into the small house, and though he was concerned for the dogs, Matty found himself looking around as they walked through, remembering what the blind man had asked. He noticed the sturdy furniture, neatly arranged, and the bookcases filled with Mentor’s books. In the kitchen, Jean’s baking pans, and the bowls in which she mixed dough, were set out, ready for her wonderful breads to be made.
    He saw nothing that hinted of a trade. Nothing silly like a Gaming Machine, nothing frivolous like the soft upholstered furniture decorated with fringe that a foolish young couple down the road had traded for.
    Of course there were other kinds of trades, Matty knew, though he didn’t fully understand. He had heard murmurs about them. There were trades for things you didn’t see. Those were the most dangerous trades.
    â€œThey’re in here.” Jean opened the door to the storage shed attached to the house at the back of the kitchen. Matty entered and knelt beside the mother dog where she lay on a folded blanket. The tiny puppy, motionless but for its labored breathing, lay in the curve of her belly, the way any puppy would. But a healthy pup would have been wiggling and sucking. This one should have been pawing at its mother for milk.
    Matty knew dogs. He loved them. Gently he touched the puppy with his finger. Then, startled, he jerked his hand away. He had felt something painful.
    Oddly, it made him think of lightning.
    He remembered how he had been instructed, even as a small boy back in his old place, to go indoors during a thunderstorm. He had seen a tree split and blackened by a lightning strike, and he knew that it could happen to a human: the flash and the burning power that would surge through you, looking for a place to enter the earth.
    He had watched through the window and seen great fiery bolts split the sky, and he had smelled the sulfurous smell that they sometimes left behind.
    There was a man in Village, a farmer, who had stood in the field beside his plow, waiting as dark clouds gathered overhead, hoping the storm would pass by. The lightning had found him there, and though the farmer had survived, he had lost all his memory but for the sensation of raw power that had entered him that afternoon. People tended him now, and he helped with farm chores, but his energy was gone, taken away by the mysterious energy that lived in lightning.
    Matty had felt this sensation—the one of pulsating power, as if he had the power of lightning within his own self—in the clearing, on a sunny day with no storm brewing.
    He had tried to put it out of his mind afterward, any thoughts of the day it had happened, because it frightened him so and made him have a secret, which he did not want. But Matty knew, pulling his hand from the ailing puppy, that it was time to test it once again.
    â€œWhere’s your father?” he asked Jean. He wanted no one to watch.
    â€œHe had a meeting to go to. You know about the petition?”
    Matty nodded. Good. The schoolteacher was not around.
    â€œI don’t think he really even cares about the meeting. He just wants to see Stocktender’s widow. He’s courting her.” Jean spoke with affectionate amusement. “Can you imagine? Courting, at his age?”
    He needed the girl to be gone. Matty thought. “I want you to go to Herbalist’s. Get yarrow.”
    â€œI have yarrow in my own garden! Right beside the door!” Jean replied.
    He didn’t need yarrow, not really. He needed her
gone.
Matty thought quickly. “Spearmint? Lemon balm? Catnip? Do you have all of those?”
    She shook her head. “No catnip. If cats were attracted to my garden, the dog would make a terrible fuss.
    â€œWouldn’t you, poor thing?” she said sweetly, leaning down to murmur to the dying mother dog. She stroked the dog’s back but it did not