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She had found burning to be much less painful than expulsion froiven the sudden warmth in the March chill When they buried the charred sturateful, to be in the earth, to be closed up and safe She thought of Prince Sitri, Lord of Naked Need, and how his leopard-skin and griffin-wings had burnt up every night, leaving his bare black bones to dance before the supper table of the upper Kings His flesh always returned, so that it could burn again When she thought about it, he looked a little like Thoolden face And Countess Grey aprons, riding her ca fields to her door, when she’d had a door When the shards of the deether, in one house or another, Agares and Lamentation Pole and A and Ekur serving them

Geishkirihallat slowly fell apart into the dirt of Sauve-Majeure

So up a bone and dash off with it, or a coould drag a knuckle up with her cud They would slip their pens or wing north suddenly, as if possessed, and before being coaxed hoarden, near a certain dark, empty house

The lobster trade picked up, and every household had their pots Schisot its first cobblestones, and cherry trees planted along its route So rumbled down south and the Minouflet boys were all killed in so their name In the na up the strip of grass and holly hedges between Faith-My-Joy Square and Adelard-in-the-Garden Square and joined theirls married French boys and buried whatever hatchet they still had biting at the tree Raulguin Sazarin and his Bangor business partner Lucas Battersby found tourreen and for a , would present a pretty little ring to the state of Maine and becoer stones sometime down the way—but no The seam was shallow, the mine closed down as quickly as it came, and that was all the toould ever have of boomand bustle

One day Constance Chedderley and Catherine le Clerq ca blackberries in the hills and told their mother that they’d seen chimney smoke up there Wasn’t that funny? Thankful Dryland and Restitue Sazarin, best friends froowned, black-haired doll fro home with muffins and shortbread in their school satchels When questioned, they said they’d found a nunnery in the iven the them not to tell

Thein the textile h, and soon enough even Peter Mo the work ethic of a fat housecat A statue of Minerva ht tourmaline set into her shield, which was promptly stolen by Bernard and Richie Loliot First Presbyterian Church crumpled up into Second Methodist, and the first Pastor not nah rather predictably called Dryland instead, spoke Sundays about the dangers of drink And you know, old Agnes has just always lived up there,her pies and candies and hther buttoned-up old-fashioned frocks even in su in the potatoes and learning to spin wool like the wives in Sauve-Majeure did before the ot her cider recipe but she won’t share it round We’re thinking of sending Maude and Harriet along as well Young ladies these days can never learn too much when it comes to the quiet industries of home

Far up into the hills above the stretch of land between Cobscook and Passa for it, you’ll find a house all by itself in the arlic It’s an old place, but kept up, the ash fresh and the s clean The roof needs ht of hensbane andin under the kitchen sill in the kitchen, a basil plant that may or may not come back next year

Jenny Sazarin comes by Sunday afternoons for Latin lessons and to trade a basket of cranberries fro down in Lincolnville for a loaf of bread with a sugar-crust that makes her heart beat faster when she eats it She looks forward to it all week It’s quiet up there You can hear the potatoes growing down in the dark earth When October acorns drop down into the old lady’s soot-colored wheelbarrow, they ht away, boiling the bright, sour berries in her great huge pot until they pop

“D’you know they used to burn witches here? I read about it last week,” she says while she munches on a trifle piled up with cream

“No,” the demon says “I’ve never heard that”

“They did It must have been awful I wonder if there really are witches? Pastor Dryland says there’s de to me Demons live in Hell Why would they leave and coh for theluttons and such”

“Perhaps they get punished, from time to time, and have to co cranberries The house smells of red fruit

“What would a deet kicked out of Hell?” wonders little Jenny, her schoolbooks at her feet, the war up her face so that she looks so much like Hubert Sazarin and Thomas Dryland, both of whoirl, that Gerip on her wooden spoon, stained criar it tends

The dehts up the skin and the bones of her skull show through “Perhaps, for one ht pass between two beats of a sparroings, she had all her folk around her, and they ate of her table, and called her by her own naainst the other, and for that one moment, she was joyful, and did not mourn her separation from a God she had never seen”

Cranberries pop and stealy sweet bread The sun goes down over Bald Moose hts come on down in the soft black valley of Sauve-Majeure