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management Druyan did not have some knowledge of. Day to day, the farm would go on exactly as before, though Travic was gone. Day to day, little would change unless the nature of the world itself did. Plowing and planting, harvest and gathering, making and marketing—all that she could see to. That was the reality, no matter how dark the future might look from her vantage. Day by day, she could go on, and so thereby could Splaine Garth.
    And taking into account such realities, there was a hallowed custom. Should a man die childless, and with no issue from previous marriages, if his widow could thereafter hold the land for a year and a day without remarrying and with all crop tithes timely paid, then the land passed to that widow, became hers to hold in her own right.
    The swan called again, as if to underscore the point. Druyan gave a whoop of her own, spinning around with arms spread wide to Valadan, who threw his head up in startlement but stood his ground.
    “The wool tithe was paid after the spring shearing!”
    He snorted at her, trying to understand. The sun was on the far horizon, and most of the vast sky was the color of a ripe apricot. Druyan looked like a part of the marsh—her hair catching rosy-golden lights as the tall grass did, her eyes the silver gray of the shallow pools scattered among the rushes and sweet flag.
    “There’s the barley tithe, when the crop comes in. And after first frost, we have to send part of a cider pressing. Then that’s it, for the year. If we send the crop tithes on time, there’s no reason anyone would think to come here. It’ll be winter, no one will want to travel—and by spring, the year’s half done!” She was touching her long fingers, one by one, assuring herself of the count. “We can do it! A year and a day is nothing!”
    She rammed a boot into the stirrup and vaulted onto Valadan’s back. He caught her excitement and reared playfully against the pink-peach sky.
    “ We’ll do it! ” the lady of Splaine Garth cried to the swans and the sky and the salt marsh.

The Prisoner
    Enna was a childless widow, too. The winter before Druyan had come as a bride to Splaine Garth, an epidemic of lung fever had raged through Darlith and, by the time it had passed, claimed Enna’s husband and two small sons. Enna herself suffered from joint evil, and though she was barely a handspan of years Druyan’s elder, she seemed most often twice that age. The coiled braids of her dark hair were well laced with silver. When the weather turned wet or chill, movement became a torture for her, and her hands swelled till she could scarcely use them for the least task. She had kept the house for Travic after his first wife’s death and continued the service after his remarriage—to expect her to do farmwork would have been a cruelty none of them were capable of. The house was snugger than a farmer’s hut, and even there Enna suffered piteously, especially come winter. That she never submitted to her affliction did not ease it.
    This day, howbeit, had been a good one ere Dalkin came to the gate. After a stretch of dryish weather, Enna had been able to knead the bread as she ought, to set it to rise, and later to shape the loaves. The upsets of the recent raid had faded. She had started a proper meal cooking for her lady, a joint of mutton roasting slow and late berries stewing into a savory sauce for the meat. Then came the news, and no one at Splaine Garth cared a whit for food, which was proper but such a waste of good cookery. And her hands and neck and shoulders had begun to ache from the instant she had seen the burdened horse behind the boy, as if there was rain coming off the sea.
    The lady had ridden out after the burial was accomplished, to have her grief in private, Enna supposed. In the sanctuary of her kitchen, she listened for the sound of the horse returning and heard old Valadan’s hoofbeats just at dusk, when she’d have otherwise begun to fret. She hastened to set out a