huts that clustered around it like so many limpets. Niav felt cheated, her Aunty Grizzel had lied to her – suddenly this was an unlovely world. The soaring gull did not impress her. She stood hunched and shivering in her shawl at the clifftop, gazing sourly up at it.
The replying scut of bird lime, which just missed, was somehow not a coincidence.
“I am not going to blame her for not telling me,” she told herself as she glowered out over the grey sea, trying to fight her anger. “It must be terrible to have your brother scraped off a rock and then brought home by his greatest enemy, particularly if he could then look smug about it.”
Was she fooling herself? Hadn’t she a right to have been told a long time ago? She wasn’t a baby, and, if there was some mystery about it all, it was a mystery that belonged to her. She was just so used to Aunty Grizzel’s moods – but maybe there should be limits. She couldn’t just throw those eggs away. It would be wicked to let them go to waste on a whim. And it was just a whim. Gloom, doom. People listened to Aunt Grizzel quite enough as it was. Being expected to act as fledgling to the local wise-woman really could be depressing if they treated you like a baby the next minute.
It had been a beautiful, sun-kissed morning and the rain, so far, was holding off. Niav had come down to her special spot by the river in search of bull-rush roots. Aunty Grizzel seemed in real need of sweetening up, and the roots, after a short spell shoved among the hot ashes, were the sweetest thing she knew.
They had told her it was meant to be a bad place, an unlucky place where unfortunate things were washed in, but there, amid the gentle rustle of the reeds, at the very centre of the great, headless snake-stone bowl, Niav had discovered an impeccable nest, exactly placed, holding six perfect eggs, and not a guarding parent in sight – almost a miracle.
But then cousin Kyle, that vermin, had ruined everything. He hadn’t just burst through the rushes and spoiled the perfect moment, he had told her something utterly unforgivable – that this, her favourite place of all places, was where the body of her mother, Befind, had been found washed in “all bloated like so much bladderwrack!” And she had never, never known. No one had even so much as hinted.
Of course she threw an egg at him – and it did not miss.
She had held herself firm, while he crashed his way back through the rushes trying to wipe the egg yolk from his eyes. She didn’t cry. Not only had she collected up the remaining eggs and packed them neatly in the basket, all carefully bounced out with moss as she had been taught, she had even gone grubbing for a respectable bundle of roots as well.
Unsurprisingly, the last thing Niav got when she reached home laden with her unexpected goodies was gratitude or congratulations.
“They will be bound to have gone rotten. Why else would they be left for you to find so easy?” Aunt Grizzel said sourly, after one glance at Niav’s basket.
She had tossed her long wavy hair from around her shoulders and swept back towards the weaving-hut. The beads of her many-rowed jet necklace all flashed in a shaft of sunlight – she was a good-looking woman and everyone acknowledged it.
“Perhaps something got the parents – a fox or something. I don’t know!” said Niav, trailing behind her in exasperation.
“Can’t have been anything with any sense, or it would have eaten the eggs as well. No, they are bound to be bad. Get rid of them, I’d say.”
“The egg I chucked at Kyle was just fine! I had a good sniff at what was left of it.”
“What a waste, then,” growled Aunty Grizzel. “Is that what you’d prefer me to say instead? And how did poor little Kyle offend you this time, Madam?”
Niav bit her lip. There had to have been a reason for her Aunt not having told her something about the snake rock. “Is it true my mum was washed in down by my snake rock?”
“Yes, she was. And—”
“Was she all bloated – like a blown up bladder – and blue and green?”
“No she was not. Befind was as beautiful as she always was. I wonder whose lively imagination that was? Pity you didn’t chuck