One morning Einar set a thick log on end. It reached to her knee.
“Step up on that,” he said.
She reached for his hand, needing it for support, but he backed away. Claire checked the log to be certain it was firm on the ground. Then she measured the height with her eyes, raised one leg up, placed it on the top of the log, shifted her weight, and picked up her other foot. But she lost her balance and fell back.
“Try again.”
All afternoon she stepped onto and down from the log. At first she held her arms wide, using them for balance. Then Einar approached with the coarse rope he had used to restrain her hands on the steep path.
“Wait,” she told him. “I don’t need my arms tied.” Firmly she held her own hands at her sides. Wobbling at first, she tested herself again and again until without moving her arms she could maintain her balance as she mounted the log.
“Good,” he said. The next day he brought a higher, narrower log.
Winter came. Outdoors, she ran and climbed on ice. He began to teach her to use a rope, to knot it and twirl it and fling it so that it caught on a rock or a branch. At first it caught things at random. Then, after a bit, she found she could aim with the noose of the rope, that she could choose a log or a bush and catch it precisely on most of her attempts. Then he made the noose smaller. He directed her to capture smaller things: a seedling pine reaching upward from a crevice; a stone balanced on a tree stump. He took away the thick, coarse rope and gave her a thin, woven cord that whistled when she spun it out into the cold air and snapped a twig with its tiny noose.
Inside the hut, in a corner that Alys had cleared for her, she walked back and forth on a piece of rope stretched taut between two posts, her toes gripping the rope, her breath even, her eyes focused, her arms at first stretched for balance, and then, as spring approached, her hands at her side and her movement steady and controlled. She walked the rope forward and backward. She stood on it still as a post: on one leg, then the other. Slowly she bent one knee, lowered herself, remained there poised, then rose again.
Yellow-wing twittered and pranced on his perch, excited as he watched her. Alys, watching, held her breath and then gasped at each new move.
But Claire was calm. She felt strong. She felt ready.
“Now?” she asked Einar.
Einar shook his head. “Next, we begin to strengthen your arms,” he said.
By the following spring, Bryn’s baby, Elen, was sturdy and walking. Bryn was expecting another and hoped for a boy. Bethan, Delwyth, and Eira were tall now, with long legs and secrets that made them whisper and giggle.
Most of the village had lost interest in Claire. She was no longer new and mysterious. The scandal of her child was forgotten; there had been more recent disgraces—a woman who took up with her sister’s husband, a fisherman who was caught stealing from his own brother. The villagers took little note of Claire’s odd new hobby; the hill paths were not visible, and Alys’s hut was separate.
She continued her everyday chores, helping with the gathering of plants, accompanying Alys to births and deaths. Sometimes Alys sent her alone to tend a simple cough or fever or rash. The old woman was increasingly bent over, and her walking now was slow. Her eyesight was dimmed. She needed more rest.
Claire teased her gently and told her that she should train to climb out. “Look how strong Einar has made me!” she said, and held out her bare arm, tightening the muscles with pride.
Each evening, after she had cleaned up the hut from dinner and while Alys sat knitting in her rocker, Claire took up her position, lying on her side on a mat near the wall, and breathed deeply. Then, legs straight, she raised her body on one arm, held herself there, hovering, and then eased herself slowly down. Again and again. First one arm. Then the other.
Her sack of rocks was so heavy now that an ordinary person groaned, trying to lift it. But for Claire it was easy. She swung it onto her back each day and wore it while she tended the garden or gathered the herbs. She ran up and down the hill path with the sack on her back and another in her arms. Steep, rutted places that had once made her stumble and slip were now familiar and easy.
He had her run the path at night. Things felt different in the dark. She trained her feet and hands to know the shapes of things and her mind to sense when she neared an edge and must back away lest she fall.
He wanted to blindfold her so that she could practice the dark in daytime. But she said no.
“I’ll do it at night, even in the middle of the night, when there’s no moon and when it’s bitter cold. But I can’t have something tied over my eyes. It’s like being on the sea. It’s a fearsome memory that I can’t—”
She turned away and couldn’t finish. But he seemed to understand. “You must learn the dark, though,” he told her. “Part of the climbing out will be in dark. You’ll start before the sun comes up.”
“Why?”
“It’s too long a climb to do it all in daylight. If you wait and go at dawn, at sunup, then the dark part will come near the top. You’ll be making your way up and around places where a mistake will bring death on you. I’ll teach you to feel every bit with your feet, but even so you’ll need your eyes as you near the top.”
Together they looked up at the shadowy cliff. Claire had to lean back to see the top. Mist swirled there and she could see hawks circling.
He had said he would teach her to feel with her feet, and after some time she became aware, amused by it, that even her toes were supple now. With astonishment she realized that she could perceive the smallest of pebbles—and pick them up, if need be, with individual toes. She could grasp a twig between the third and fourth toe of her left foot, or carefully feel her way around the sharp edge of a flat rock by her right big toe, which was as sensitive now as a fingertip.
She told this to Einar with delight. “Imagine that!” she said. “Toes!” He nodded in agreement but looked sad.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him.
But he turned away and didn’t reply. Guiltily she realized it had been cruel to be so gleeful over the strength and agility of her feet to someone who had lost his own.
Eleven
Twins! Two boys with bright red hair. Bryn, exhausted as she was, lay laughing at the surprise and the sight of them. Claire held one in each arm and then laughed herself as she realized she was raising and lowering them slightly, the same way Einar had her raise and lower heavy rocks to strengthen her forearms.
It was almost winter again. She moved Yellow-wing’s cage indoors. It had hung all summer and into autumn from a tree branch in the dooryard. Now, in the warmth, he fluffed his wings and chirped. Bethan was there, and Elen. Their mother needed quiet to tend her two new boys, and sent the girls off to amuse themselves. Now little Elen, squatting on the floor, twisted twigs into a bird shape and pretended she had made a wife for Yellow-wing. Bethan was busily helping Alys sort some dried herbs to be packed into bags and stored. Claire, watching, realized that Alys was beginning to teach the young girl in the same way that she had taught Claire for these past years. The village would need someone to take Alys’s place. It was clear that it could not be Claire.
She wrapped her hands around the thick branch that Einar had peeled and set firmly in place above the door. She lifted herself up until her chin was level with the peeled wood. She hung poised there and counted to ten, then lowered herself slowly. Doing this still hurt. That meant she needed it. She must do this each day until it stopped hurting. Then, she knew, Einar would tell her to put on her backpack filled with rocks and begin doing it again.