Claire sighed. “I don’t know. But it’s not a feeling of a bad memory. It’s as if I have never seen them before.”
“Fish neither?”
“Fish are familiar,” Claire said slowly. “I think I have known of fish somehow. They don’t frighten me. I like how silvery they look.”
“Nary birds?”
Claire shook her head and shuddered. “Their wings seem so unnatural. I can’t get used to them. Even the littlest ones are strange to me.”
Alys thought, and rocked. Her wooden needles clicked in her gnarled hands. Finally she said, “Lame Einar has a way with birds. I’ll have him catch us one, for a pet.”
“Pet?”
“A plaything. A pretty. He’ll make a cage for it, from twigs.”
Claire cringed at the thought, but agreed. It would be a start to the learning.
One afternoon she stood barefoot on the beach, watching the trio of little girls. Using sticks, they had outlined a house and were furnishing it with debris they found in the sand.
“Here’s my bed!” Bethan announced, and patted an armful of seaweed into a shape.
“And cups in the kitchen!” Eira set five scoop-shaped shells in a row. She lifted one daintily and pretended to drink from it.
Delwyth ran to fetch a branch she saw beside some rocks, and dragged it back. Torn from a nearby tree by the constant wind, it was crowned with a thicket of leaves. “Broom! I found us a broom!” the little girl announced happily, and scraped the sand with it. “Wait. It needs fixing.” Carefully she tugged at a thin side branch, broke it loose, and tossed it aside. “There. Now it’s a proper broom.”
Claire, watching, leaned down and picked up the slender branch that Delwyth had discarded. The sand was damp and she saw her own footprints in it. With the tip of the branch, she poked a round hole in each of her own toeprints, then laughed and scribbled the footprints away with the stick. A gentle surge of seawater moved in silently, smoothed the roughened sand, and receded.
She leaned forward and wrote the first letter of her name.
C.
Then L. And A.
But a foamy inrush of seawater erased the letters.
Claire moved back slightly, farther from the sea’s edge, and began again. CLAIRE, she wrote.
“What be that?” A shadow fell across her letters. It was Bethan, looking down.
“My name.”
The little girl stared at it.
“Would you like to do your name beside it?” Claire offered her the stick.
“How?” she asked.
“Just make the letters.”
“What be letters?”
Claire was startled at first. Then she thought: Oh. They haven’t learned yet. She had a sudden image of herself, learning. Of a teacher, explaining the sounds of letters. There was a place she had gone, a place called school. All children did. But she looked around now, at the cliff and hills and huts, at the sea—she could see the boats bobbing in the distance, and the men leaning in with their nets—and she was uncertain.
“Will you go to school soon?” she asked Bethan.
“What be school?”
She didn’t know how to answer the child. And maybe, she realized, it wasn’t important. Six letters; they made a name. What did it matter? She looked again at the word she had written, then erased it with her own toes, stamped the sand firm, and tossed the stick into a pile of glistening kelp nearby.
Alys had sent Old Benedikt to ask the favor of Lame Einar. Not long after, slow on his ruined feet, the young man made his way laboriously down from his hut on the hillside, carrying the twig cage on his back, with the bird inside.
“Here it be,” he told Alys.
Einar was not one for talking. His failures had made him a recluse, but people remembered the vulnerable boy he had once been. Though he had stolen from his father, they forgave him that; his father had been a harsh and unjust man. That he had climbed out, many admired, for the cliff was steep and jagged and the world beyond unknown; few had the courage that Einar had had. They regretted his failure, but they welcomed his damaged return. Einar, though, had never forgiven himself; he lived in self-imposed shame and stayed mostly silent.
“It sings,” he said. He leaned his two sturdy sticks against Alys’s hut and hung the cage on a tree branch near the entrance. He watched for a moment until the carefully crafted perch inside stopped swaying and the little finch stilled the nervous flutter of its bright-colored wings. Then Lame Einar took up his sticks again; he righted himself between them, for balance, and went slowly away.
The bird was chirping when Claire returned from the beach, carrying her sandals. She stopped in surprise, looking at the cage and the bird within. “It can’t get out, can it?” she asked nervously.
Alys laughed. “Were you to take it in your hand, child, it would tremble in fear. Have you never been near to a wee bird before?”
Claire shook her head no.
“You’ll feed it each day. Seeds, mostly, and some of the bugs from the field.”
“I don’t like the bugs,” Claire whispered.
“It will help when you learn them. Fear dims when you learn things.”
The bird chirped loudly, and Claire jumped. Alys laughed at her again.
Claire took a breath and calmed herself. She went closer and peered into the cage. The bird tilted its head and looked back at her. “It should have a name,” Claire said.
“Name it, then. It be yours.”
“I’ve never named a single thing.”
Alys frowned, and she looked at Claire with her squinted eyes. “Do you know that, then?” she asked.
Claire sighed. “I feel it, that’s all.”
“Naming is hard. Someone named you once.”
Claire looked away. “I suppose,” she said slowly, and then turned her attention again to the cage. “Look! It cleans itself!” She pointed. The bird had raised one wing and pecked fastidiously at its feathers beneath. “Isn’t that a lovely patch of color on his wing?” She hesitated, then asked, “What is it called? I know red. You taught me red from the berries. It’s a pretty red there around his eyes, but what is that bright color on his wing? I can’t think of its name.”
Alys was troubled by this, for she knew by now that the girl was clever, and filled with knowledge of many things. But she seemed lacking in so many ways, and the realm of colors was one. The names of the various hues were one of the first things small children learned. Yet when Alys had sent Claire on a simple errand some days ago, asking her to fetch some jewelweed, which Alys needed to treat a painful poison ivy rash on one of Old Benedikt’s grandsons, Claire had not known how to find the flower that grew in such profusion by the stream. “The bright orange blossoms,” Alys reminded her. “We gathered some the other day.”
“I forget orange,” Claire had said, embarrassed. “We gathered several things that day. What does orange look like?”
And now she could not name the color that decorated the wing of the little singing finch.
“Yellow,” Alys told her. “The same as evening primrose, remember?”
“Yellow,” Claire repeated, learning it. Yellow-wing became the bird’s name.
On a cool foggy morning, she climbed the hill to find Lame Einar and thank him. It had taken a while to accustom herself to the bird, to end her fearfulness around it. But now it hopped to the side of the cage when she brought seeds to it in a little shell dish and waited, head cocked, while she set the dish down. It would have hopped onto her finger, she knew, if she had held it still and waited. But she wasn’t ready for that, or for the feeding of live insects. The little girls took on that task, happy to find beetles and hoppers in the grass and bring them to Yellow-wing.