Ciondo replied in indignation, 'Does it matter?' Then good sense prevailed over argument, and Kala scolded the gawkers roundly for keeping poor Juard from his bed.

A month passed, and seven days. Juard recovered his health and returned to fishing on the sloop. The Wayfinder who had brought his recovery took a longer time to mend. Kala pressed food and comforts on him constantly, until he complained of her coddling. Unlike anybody else, she listened, and left him alone. His white hair began to grow out its natural color, a golden, honey-brown, until Sabin sitting in her chair seat on the cliffside could no longer pick him out from the villagers who manned the sloops. She saw him seldom, and spoke with him not at all. Winding the skeins of wool and stringing the looms in her father's craft shop in furious concentration, she avoided walking the beach. Since the night she forgot her jacket, she could not bear to watch the combers. She heard them, felt them, even indoors with her ears filled with the clack of shuttle and loom - the thunder of what might be hooves, and the tumble of white, upfiung spray that pounded the beaches in procession. She swept cut threads from the floor, and helped her mother bake, and each night begged her sleep to show her silence.

    It did not. She misplaced socks and tools, and once, let the fire burn out. The waking world came to seem as a dream, and herself, strangely separate, adrift. She was scolded more often for stargazing, and seemed more than ever to care less.

    The Wayfinder laughed in the tavern at night, accepted, but with a reverence that marked him apart. Two boats he saved from ruin when storms caused shoaling off the reefs. Another smack was recovered with a damaged compass after squall winds blew it astray. No one knowingly broke the Wayfinder's faith, but his presence loomed too large to shelter. Sabin understood this, her hands fallen idle over wool she was meant to be spinning. She twisted the red-dyed fibers aimlessly, knowing: there were traders who had heard of Juard's loss, and who saw him back among the men. They asked questions. Driven by balked curiosity, they

pressured and cajoled, and won themselves no satisfaction. The silence itself caused talk.

Summer passed. The winds shifted and blew in cold from the

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