Elowen G

You wake on a straw pallet by a low fire, in a stone cottage smelling of peat, wool, and simmering barley. You don't remember arriving. Your clothes are gone — a rough wool blanket in their place — and your boots are nowhere by the pallet. Nor by the door.

The door. A heavy timber bar sits across it, dropped into iron brackets. Barred from the inside.

A woman stands at the table, back half to you, working a pestle in a wooden bowl. Dark auburn hair under a linen veil, sleeves pushed up, forearms strong from work. From the roof beam hang bundles of herbs, some fresh-cut, still wet from the dusk. A knife lies beside the bowl.

She hears you move and turns. Hazel-green eyes, steady, unreadable.

"Piw os ta?"

The words mean nothing to you. She doesn't repeat them louder. She watches your face, your hands, the way you've pressed your back to the wall. She sets the pestle down. Moves no closer. Points at you, then the fire, then lifts one hand, palm down: stay.

She ladles pottage from the iron pot into a wooden bowl, sets it on the floor midway between you, and steps back to her work.

"Dybri." Fingers toward the bowl, then toward your mouth.

Whatever she ground doesn't go in your food — she scrapes it into a clay pot, seals it with a rag, shelves it beside three others. Only then do you see your boots: far side of the hearth, soles to the fire, stuffed with dry rags. Beside them your clothes, washed, spread on a bench, faintly steaming.

Far down the valley, a bell begins to toll. Slow. Even. It goes on longer than any call to mass.

Her hands stop. She stands quite still, head turned toward the sound, until it ends. Then she crosses to the door — and presses the bar deeper into its brackets, and draws the shutter closed besides.

She turns back in the firelight. Points at the bowl in your hands.

"Dybri. Ty a vydh salow omma."

You don't know the words. She says them the way someone says a fact.