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Auntie Bess wraps her up in one of the fifteen knitted blankets and puts her in Hattie’s arms.

Hattie looks down at her. Then she looks up at me. Her face is sweaty and exhausted, and she’s smiling so big I feel it through the bond before I see it.

“Rowan,” she whispers. “Come meet her.”

I kneel down next to the bed.

She’s so small. So small. Brown and wrinkled and furious, her little fists balled up, her mouth wide open, yelling at the whole world. She’s got a head full of dark, damp curls.

And on her little shoulder, right where mine are, there’s a tiny swirl of grain. Soft and faint in her skin.

Hattie lifts her up and puts her in my arms.

She weighs nothing. She fits in one of my hands. I hold her up against my chest, right against my blossoms, and she stops screaming. Just like that. She goes quiet and turns her little face into the flowers and breathes them in.

And then she opens her eyes and looks at me.

I’ve lived through more storms than I can count. I’ve watched this valley change a thousand times. I’ve stood still while whole generations of humans were born and grew old and died around me.

I never once wanted anything.

Then a storm knocked me down, and a little old woman carved me a body, and a beekeeper with honey on her lips walked into a toy shop and wanted me.

And now this.

My daughter. Looking up at me.

I hold her close and put my mouth right against her tiny head.

“Hey,” I tell her quietly. “It’s me. I’m the one you kept kicking.”

Behind me, I hear Hattie laughing.

And I feel it through the bond, warm and wide and full, pouring into my chest. Her happiness. Mine. All tangled together until I can’t tell them apart anymore.

I don’t want to.

Fifteen

Epilogue: Hattie

We name her Wren.

Rowan doesn’t argue. He just looks at me for a long second when I say it, and then he nods once, like that settles it.

Mother Wren comes up the hill to see her when she’s three days old. She’s never once come up this hill in my whole life. But here she comes, all four and a half feet of her, walking up my path with her cane and her glasses and a little paper bundle under her arm.

She doesn’t knock. Nobody in this village knocks.

“Let me see her,” she says.

I’m in the rocking chair. I lift the baby up, and Mother Wren leans in close. Looks at her little face. Her curls. Her tiny balled-up fists.

Then she pulls the blanket down off the baby’s shoulder.

And there it is. That tiny swirl of grain, faint and soft in her brown skin. Right where Rowan’s blossoms are.

Mother Wren straightens up and grins so big I can see every one of her teeth. All six of them.