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movement on the muddy bank distracted me. My shadow! Although I was sitting perfectly still, it seemed to be moving—indeed, shaking. Could it be just the play of light from the stream? I concentrated my gaze. No, there could be no doubt.
    My shadow was shaking its head at me.

3: S ECRETS
    I growled at my insolent shadow, still mocking me on the stream bank. “Why didn’t you just stay back there at the boulder?”
    Hallia stiffened, slapping her hand on the muddy slope. “Young hawk!”
    “Not you—oh, I’m sorry.” I reached out my hand, but she swatted it away. I glared down at my shadow, which seemed to be quivering with laughter. “Hallia, I wasn’t talking to you at all! Just my shadow.”
    Slowly, her expression softened. “Seems you’re having as much trouble with that shadow these days as you are with Gwynnia.” She pushed aside some branches to glance at the meadow where we had left her. “She’s gone again. I wonder where.”
    “Probably just foraging down the stream. She’s not far away, that much is certain.” I tossed a river stone onto my shadow—half expecting it to toss something back. “So tell me. How did your father come to know so much? Was he a scholar? A bard?”
    “Neither. He was the healer of our clan, for many years.” Taking her braid, she toyed with it, separating the strands, as if she were untying a much-knotted memory. “Even after we were forced to leave our ancestral lands by the sea, which nearly broke his heart, he continued his work. And he knew much more than the art of healing. He understood things no one else did about certain places. And . . . certain people.” She swallowed. “That was why, I suppose, he was entrusted with caring for one of the Seven Wise Tools.”
    I started. “Really?”
    She nodded.
    “Which one?”
    “I shouldn’t say more. It’s a secret among the Mellwyn-bri-Meath.”
    As I watched the water moving past our feet, my own memories flowed like the stream. I remembered well those legendary tools, having rescued most of them from the collapsing Shrouded Castle. There was the plow that tilled its own field, the saw that cut only as much wood as one needed—and what else? Oh yes: the magical hoe, hammer, and shovel. Plus that bucket, feeling almost as heavy as the plow, since it always brimmed with water.
    Only the seventh one had eluded me—though not my thoughts. For while I didn’t know its description, let alone its powers, I had often dreamed of finding it, usually behind an impenetrable wall of flames. Whenever, in my dreams, I had tried to rescue it, the searing flames burned my hands, my face, my useless eyes. All I could hear were my screams; all I could smell was the stench of my own burning skin. When I couldn’t stand the agony any longer, I always awoke, soaked in sweat.
    Gently, Hallia touched my hand. “I can see from your face, young hawk, that you know some secrets of your own about the Seven Wise Tools.”
    “That I do,” I replied, still gazing at the stream. “I have held them all, even used them all—except for the one that was lost forever.”
    She gazed at me, weighing her thoughts. At last, she whispered, “It wasn’t.”
    “What do you mean? That’s what everyone said. Even Cairpré.”
    “Because that’s what everyone thought. Except for my father, and the few of us he had trusted with the secret. You see, that Wise Tool was the one in his charge. And when the wicked king Stangmar’s soldiers came to seize it, my father gave them not the tool itself, but a copy he had made—a fake. The real one he hid away, somewhere safe.”
    “Where?”
    “He never told anyone. Soon after he made the switch, the hunters . . . found him.”
    Reading the grief in her eyes, I wrapped my hand around hers. For some time we sat there, watching the swirling current. As much as I wanted to share her secret, I wanted still more to share her burden.
    At length, she spoke again. “It was a key, young hawk, a magical