* * * *

THE FIRST TIME I MET SKY Eyes, I thought she was blind. Her eyes were clouded white-blue, with no black circles in the middle, no white back ground. I thought she was blind, and then she looked at me and saw that I was seven years old and my mother was sick with something that ate her until her arms were brown sticks and my father wouldn’t admit it and I wanted everything to be back the way it was, but knew—even then—that it could never be that way again.

I don’t know how I knew this, but I did.

She also saw that I had been sent to her against my will to bring back some healing potion to cure my mother or, more likely, some soothing potion to help her die. This latter she gave me, a slender, black vial, accepting the single coin from my small, brown hand, but the knowledge in her cloudy eyes held me. She saw that we were just come to the village and not likely to move on. And she saw deeper — the strange patterns of thought in my child mind, that I had taken care to hide even from my mother.

“Oh, Jamillah, the person you could be,” she said, touching my chin with a cool finger. “Are you brave enough? Are you cold enough?”

I ran then, without words, but she didn’t seem to mind. “You’ll come back,” she called.

Never, I told myself, frightened in a way that made my very bones quiver beneath my flesh. How had she known my name? I wanted to dash the vial of soothing potion against a rock, for I could feel peaceful death within it. I would have smashed it, too, but for the fact that I could also feel painful death whenever I touched my mother. Old knowledge, for a child of seven, that caught in my throat. Sometimes I didn’t speak for days.

I was the one who fed my mother the potion, a drop at a time. The neck of the vial was just large enough to admit my smallest finger, let it emerge, glistening. Her lips held what smile they could as I touched the finger to her tongue. Then her eyes would glaze slightly, as the pain left her. And a bit of her life went, too.

The vial didn’t last as long as she did. I couldn’t bear to give more than a single drop, couldn’t bear the sleep that so mimicked death when I gave her two drops in quick succession. She lingered and I was sent back to Sky Eyes with the empty vial. This time we hadn’t even a coin.

People talked when they saw me slowly walking up the street with the black vial in my hands. People always talk as if children cannot hear, or, if they do hear, cannot understand. Since I hadn’t spoken for weeks now, and no one believed I would again, they didn’t even bother to lower their voices.

“That poor, strange child.”

“What her parents are thinking, sending her to that witch.... “

“Ah, but she’s a girl, so she should be safe. I don’t allow my son to even speak to that woman.”

“What will happen to the child when the mother dies?”

By then my cold feet had taken me to the door of Sky Eyes’s hut. The black, empty vial gleamed in my hand. Before I could knock on the rough wood the door opened to me. “Come in,” she said. “No need to stand in the cold — or listen to poisonous gossip.” This last she said clearly, in a voice that carried to at least three of the gossipers. They walked swiftly away whispering to each other.

She led me in to the flickering warmth, but my shivers did not decrease. Her eyes were clear, pale blue — winter sky blue — without the clouds that had drifted through them before. I moved my mouth to ask why, but the sounds had forgotten how to come out. No matter; she knew my question.

She gave the merest shrug. “No one knows, least of all I. Some say my mother spent too much time looking at the sky when she was carrying me inside, looking at the sky and wishing to be somewhere other than where she was. And then I was born and she was.” She paused for a bare moment and continued matter-of-factly. “My mother died when I was born. At least you’ve had yours for seven years.”

I stared at her. No matter how many people whispered about my mother’s impending death behind my back, to my face it was always, “...when your mother gets better.... “ Even my father, when he sent me for this soothing, killing potion, sent me with lies about medicine to make her strong, make her well. But I knew, and so did my mother, and so did Sky Eyes. I gravely held out the vial.

“Poor child,” she said, taking it in a small, neat hand. “You couldn’t bear to end it quickly, could you?”

Pain filled me.

“The best thing is usually the hard thing,” she said. She went to a stained wooden table and anchored the vial in a lump of reddish clay. She stuck a small funnel into the slender black neck. “If it’s too easy — like telling a child her mother will live instead of admitting she’ll be dust before the month is out —” She poured a thin, gleaming stream into the mouth of the funnel, a mere thread of liquid. “If it’s too easy, it’s likely wrong.”

She quit pouring almost as soon as she’d begun, when even an inexperienced child could tell the vial was nowhere near full. She took the funnel out and placed it in a basin of water. She rinsed her hands and dried them on her gray skirt.

“Can you remember that?” she whispered, seating the stopper firmly before handing the vial back to me. “The best thing is usually the hard thing.”

Traces of clay marked the black. I didn’t have to nod to show her I would always remember; she knew. She closed her eyes and was an ordinary woman, tired, but with traces of beauty that nothing could erase. “Go now,” she said. “Be quick or the cold will eat your feet.”

She hadn’t mentioned payment, and I scurried for the door, half afraid she would demand a coin I didn’t have, but she was silent. As I left though, she whispered, just loud enough for me to hear, “Come back to me.”

I didn’t linger on the way home, although the tiny vial felt heavy to me, as though it contained an entire world.

My father let me into our room, which had one bed, continuously occupied by my mother. When he slept, which wasn’t often, he crept next to the wall and made himself as thin as possible. I slept next to the fire atop a folded blanket and beneath my mother’s cloak. The room smelled sick, stale, hopeless, but somehow the cloak had retained a warm, sheep smell. Aside from the clothes we wore, our few belongings were stacked near the wall, still packed in bundles. Something about that made me uneasy, but Father could not be bothered to think about them. We had been traveling toward Shaboor when Mother’s sickness had demanded we stop; he still maintained that we would be going on soon, soon, when she was a little stronger. He spent all his time with her, stroking her face with his fingers or laying cool cloths on her forehead — switching to hot when cool did no good. Nothing did any good. She just lay there dying.

She was awake now, her lips drawn back in a grimace of pain, too weak even to weep. “You have the medicine, Jamillah?” Father asked. “She gave it to you?”

I nodded.

“Quickly, then. The waiting is so hard for her.”

I went toward the bed, but I couldn’t force my feet to move quickly. The best thing is usually the hard thing. My father gave me a little shove. “She’s waiting.”

I stood by the bed and looked for her smile, but it had been eaten away by the pain. The lines in her face belonged to a woman who had lived her whole life and was ready to die. The best thing...I lifted the vial and she moved her lips. I moved my own, trying to bring words out. Goodbye. I love you. Please tell me what to do. Neither of us could speak, though. I leaned over and kissed her wasted cheek. The hard thing...I removed the stopper and tilted the vial, watching the thick, shining potion trickle into her mouth.

Father watched me from the middle of the room. He knew what I was doing, but he just stood and watched until it was too late and then he ran to the bed with a cry and snatched the vial. “What are you doing? You are giving her too much.”

He slapped me, hard, which he had never done before. I buried myself in the wool of Mother’s cloak and let my tears lead me into sleep.

SOMETIME in the night, while I slept, my mother died and my father left. I awoke to angry voices in the hall. “ — gone and she’s dead and that child without a tongue in her head. What are we supposed to do with her?”

I didn’t want to open my eyes, but I couldn’t stop myself. My mother lay terribly still in the bed, with her hands arranged across her chest. The bundles were gone. All that was left was me and the cloak I slept under. And the black, empty vial on the night table.

The fire was out; the air against my face cold. I wanted to silence my ears as well as my voice, but the argument in the hall continued to invade.

“She could sweep up and scrub the pots perhaps.”

“I will not have her here! Do you know what she did?”

“She’s a mere child.” The fat man who did his wife’s bidding; he’d slipped me sweets before when she wasn’t looking.

It was the wife, the innkeeper herself, who hissed now. “She killed her own mother.”

Suddenly there was no warmth in the cloak, no warmth left in my body. I began to shiver violently.

“Now, you can’t know that.”

“When I was up to start the bread, I heard him crying, ‘what has she done, what has she done?’ and then this morning the woman is dead and the daughter left behind with the empty poison bottle. Maybe we could sell her to pay the bill for the burial and the room.”

There was still no warmth in the world, but I stood and drew the cloak around me. It dragged on the rough floor. I walked past the bed that held my silent mother and went to the window. It opened easily, I knew, for we had frequently tried to air the room of the sick smell — never successfully —despite the winter.

Our room was on the ground floor, looking into a narrow alley. I pulled myself up on the frame and swung my legs through. The cloak caught on a loose nail. When I pulled it free, a long curl of wool ripped off. Then I was gone, leaving my mother to the cold. I don’t know what the innkeepers said when they found I was gone, but I imagine they were relieved for different reasons: he that he wasn’t forced to deal with the idea of selling me, and she that she wasn’t forced to deal with me at all.

I had never come out through the alley before. The backs of the buildings — unpainted, rough — were much different than the fronts. The wind whistled between them, diving through the gaps in my cloak. I didn’t want to come out just in front of the inn, where they might see me, so I ran along the alley until it spit me onto a street. Thin ice broke under my bare feet, cut my ankles. I was crying, but silently, tears freezing on my eyelashes and cheeks.

By the time I’d stumbled around and found myself in familiar surroundings, my teeth were chattering so hard that I couldn’t have spoken had I been otherwise able to. By the time I reached Sky Eyes’s door, I could barely walk. I crept up the steps, and fell against the door. My feet were numb, and my fingers, and my heart. I couldn’t even knock, but lay there thinking that I should. The wind burrowed down the gaping neck of the cloak. Too cold. Too penetrating.

The door opened and I sprawled into warmth. Sky Eyes lifted me. “I’m sorry that you had to do what you did,” she said, “but I’m not sorry you did it.” She carried me to the fire, shutting out the cold with a push of one bare foot. She wore only a loosely tied robe; her grip on me shifted it from one shoulder and I could see the swell of one breast and its brown nipple. Her eyes were golden and rose and violet, a sunset giving over to dusk. I was too deadened by cold to be embarrassed.

“Who is it?” asked a young male voice. Over her shoulder, I saw one of the village boys, wrapped in a bedsheet. His shoulders were bare and sweaty and so was the rest of him, I knew, beneath the sheet. He glowered at me, impatient at the interruption.

She set me down on the hearth stone. “Her name is Jamillah.” She was touching my feet now, although I could barely feel it. She frowned. “Her mother just died and her father has abandoned her. She’s going to live with me and be my student.”

She pulled her gaping robe shut. “Put your clothes on,” she told him. “I’m done with bed for the time being.”

“But —” he said, and then did as he was told. It made me angry in a way that I didn’t understand at all, that he would just stop in the middle of that curious dance adults did, with hardly an argument, merely because she said so. I think even then I realized how hard it would be to defy her myself.

She ignored him then, although I watched him through my half-frozen lashes, as he awkwardly struggled into his pants, dropping the sheet in the process. I had seen glimpses of my father in the mornings or evenings, getting into and out of the bed he shared with my mother before she sickened, but never a well-muscled young man, still hard with passion. It made me uneasy, but still I looked.

Sky Eyes took hot water from a kettle near the fire and mixed it with cold in a large, shallow bowl, then dripped something light green and fragrant into it. “Sit with your back to the wall here,” she told me. I ended up with my feet and hands in the bowl, knees bent up to my chest and the bowl directly before me. The scent of the water and the pain of returning sensation in my hands and feet made me feel as if I were floating through a burning sea.

The boy came up behind Sky Eyes as she was dampening a cloth in the water. He ran his hands down her back. “Go,” she said. “I’ve no time for you now.”

“But we haven’t finished —”

She gave him one steady look of her sunset eyes, which were almost entirely gone to violet now. He left without another word.

She sighed. “I do like to bed that boy,” she said, “when it’s convenient. Ah, well, he’ll be back.”

My pain was not enough to conceal my embarrassment and surprise. She turned the steady gaze on me. “I am not used to having children about,” she said, “although the villagers would have that I am despoiling their male children. In my mind, there is nothing evil or dirty about sex, as long as all participants are willing and reasonably grown up. There is more harm done in half the marriage beds in this village than is imagined in mine. I will not pretend that I am a celibate priestess.” She bathed my face with the cloth. “So if a lusty young man knocks at the door, let him in.” Her mischievous grin faded into total seriousness. “If any of them — or any else — ever touch you against your will, you have my permission to kill them.”

I burst into shaking tears at that statement, and Sky Eyes held me, oblivious to the water spilled on her robe. “You did what you had to—no, not what you had to; what you could. You did the hard thing, the best thing, and now her pain is over.”

I cried harder, clinging to her with hands that burned with ice. I wanted to hear that it wasn’t my fault, that my mother hadn’t died at my hands. Sky Eyes drew back and held my shoulders. “You did it. Neither of us will pretend otherwise. If you do not accept that, I will bundle you up and carry you back to the innkeepers to be sold for debts. You choose.”

My tears died within me, and the last of my childhood. I nodded. “I’m sorry it’s so,” she said, hugging me to her, “but with ability comes responsibility. I don’t know yet if your mother would have thanked you or not, and your father certainly did not, but I think that you will someday believe you did the best thing.” She wiped away my tears with the fragrant cloth, examined my hands and feet. “Well, you won’t be running away for a day or two. Let’s get you into my bed now — since I’m not using it at the moment.” She winked one gray-violet eye and carried me to a big bed. The four posts had lengths of black silk tied to them. She deftly unknotted them.

I must have looked as curious as I felt. “Sometimes, if you wish it —or your partner does —” she began, placing the cloth in a covered basket. Her voice trailed off and a faint flush came to her cheeks. “Never mind for now.”

Later that day, Sky Eyes pulled boxes of dusty bottles out of a small storage room. She hung mismatched cloth to disguise the tall shelves that covered three of the walls: yellow, with slender green lizards printed on it; solid purple; red and blue striped. Only one wall was left to show cool, gray stone with a wooden door in the center of it.

She had no other bed, so she formed a pallet of blankets and pillows on the floor. “Here,” she said, carrying me in and setting me down. “Birdy has a nest now. And I have my bed back — just in case I should need it.” There were hooks on the back of the door that had held dried herbs; the air in the tiny room still smelled of them. On the highest hook she hung the cloak which was the only thing inherited from my mother.

“I’ll be going out now,” she said, running one hand along the wool lining. “If any beautiful male creatures come by, tell them to wait a few minutes for me — or a number of years for yourself.”

Then she was gone and I was alone. I had never had a room of my own before.

She was gone for some hours, during which I drowsed in and out of dream and thought, not always sure which was which. The vial, held by my winter-kissed hands, approached my mother’s lips. I tried to stop, but the hands moved of their own will, tilting the vial, pouring — and then the face changed and it was Sky Eyes, her eyes as night black as the vial itself. “The best thing,” her voice a mere breath, “is the hard thing. Is it so hard to forgive yourself?” And then my hands were holding the vial to my own lips and I was drinking a deep, endless drop. And crying.

I hadn’t heard her return, but my cries brought her in to me. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, taking me into her arms. Her breath held the scent of wine; her eyes were deep summer blue with clouds floating across them. “Comfort is not a coin I am often called to give.” She let me rest against her shoulder for a moment and then set me back in the pillows. “I can’t take your pain away and wouldn’t if I could. No comfort now, but someday you will be able to use it.”

My sniffling subsided, not because of her less than tender words, but because I had worn out. Too much had happened in too little time. My eyes drifted shut. Sky Eyes touched my face. “I hate them,” she said, her voice hard and vicious. “I hate them all.”

The next day she slathered my hands and feet with gel and wrapped them with strips of cloth, wound round and round. “You are too big to carry far,” she said, “but I don’t think you can — or should — walk yet. Stand up for a moment.” I did, biting my lip against the pain. She draped my mother’s cloak around me, fastening the throat clasp, and put on her own. Then she crouched down, facing away from me. “Climb onto my back.”

It wasn’t easy, with my awkward, bundled limbs and two cloaks to deal with, but she finally staggered to a standing position. “It’s a good thing you’re only seven,” she said. “At twelve you may well have to carry me.” She had to let go of one of my legs to open the door, and I almost fell off.

She started laughing. “This will give them something to gossip about.” She shut the door and grabbed me again, readjusting before she tottered off into the wind.

When we reached the low stone building, she pushed the door open without knocking. I had had no idea of our destination, but this place, cold by design, revealed its nature by the bodies stretched or twisted or curled up on the narrow benches that hung in tiers from the walls. A death house. A place where the corpses of those unfortunate enough to die in winter were kept until the ground thawed. I wanted to run on my bandaged feet, but Sky Eyes carried me to the low bench where my mother lay. She let go. I tried to cling to her, but my bandaged hands gave out and I slipped to the floor beside my dead mother.

A thin layer of frost covered her skin and clothes and hair, sealed her to the bench. “Look at her expression,” Sky Eyes said softly.

I made myself look. Under the frost, her mouth was slack, her teeth barely showing. Not drawn into that grimace of pain. Her hands were still arranged across her chest; my father’s work, no doubt. He had comforted the dead and left me huddled on the floor. A sudden rage flared within me. He had known she was dying, had known that the pain easer was a life drainer, had known that I would end up killing her. He had known and let me do it and then blamed me for it.

A rough howl escaped me. I ran my hands over my mother’s face, her hands, her frost-coated hair. Tears melted trails in her white frost shroud. “No,” I said, my voice thick and awkward. “I didn’t mean to.”

“You did,” said Sky Eyes, looking at me through pink-tinted dusk. “You made a choice, a decision, and carried it out. You acted — though it was perhaps the hardest thing you will ever do in your life. Poor child, that you were called upon to do the hardest thing so young.”

I hated her, for not letting me lie even to myself, or to the dead. At the same time, her words had a curiously lightening effect. How hard could life be, if I had already done the hardest thing? I had yet to learn that the many smaller hard things, common as dust, were more wearing than the one hardest. Fortunately, she didn’t tell me, but let me discover it myself, in the years to follow.

“I’m sorry,” I said, laying my face on my mother’s cold cheek. This time Sky Eyes did not contradict me.

WHEN I HAD cried myself out and we were both shivering violently, it was time to leave the death house. I had to crawl up on the edge of my mother’s bench to get on Sky Eyes’s back, so stiff and clumsy were we both. I found my gaze drawn to the other bodies: several old ones who had found this last winter of their lives too harsh; a young woman with her dead child clasped upon her chest, both pulled into death by the birth; a large bearded man with terribly whitened hands and an odd, peaceful expression.

Sky Eyes nodded toward him. “They say that freezing to death makes one warm and sleepy, that there is no pain. I can feel that in him. Can you?”

Even as she asked me, she was showing me how to do so. Almost against my will, my mind threaded itself into his death. Yes; it was a comfortable death, as was the death of the old woman on the bench beneath him. I jerked away from the wrenching denial of the young woman who held her child only after her life had bled out of her. Sky Eyes stopped. She turned her head and looked back over her shoulder at me. “Do you want to feel her death?”

I held very still, afraid that the shivering within me would be interpreted as assent or denial. Would it be a terrible thing to know? Would I regret it? Yet I could not refuse. I nodded and let my mind touch the last minutes of my mother’s life.

Release from pain. Regret that there would be no more minutes of life, but acceptance that it had to be that way to escape the consuming pain. Shock and sorrow at the knowledge in my eyes. Then nothing. Life flowing from her in a thin stream, until there was no more left in her.

I didn’t notice that Sky Eyes had even started walking until we were out of the death house and down the street. Tears froze on my cheeks. “You’d be better off not crying now,” she said. “Or your face will freeze and the frozen-hearted bitches of the village will be imagining that I am torturing you.”

I stopped crying and let my head rest on her left shoulder. Perhaps it was torture, but it was the torture of sudden, rapid growth. I fell asleep and didn’t wake until she let me slide to the step outside her door.

“You are heavy,” she said, opening the door with hands that shook. “Perhaps it is different when a woman has raised a baby from the first; the strength in her back and arms would grow along with the child. I must be an imbecile to begin this way.”

Her words would have stung had she not, even as she was speaking, led me gently in and settled me on the hearth. She knelt beside me and stirred the embers with a stick which burst into flame. She built the fire up to a rage and leaned on one arm, looking at me with those summer blue eyes. “What a first lesson: how to speak with the dead. There’s no doubt; I’m an imbecile.” She affected the childish expression of one who had but a small portion of wit.

My mouth twitched into a smile and she dropped the pretense. “Ah, you must have been starved for humor if my poor performance is enough for you. I suppose I will have to do, flaws and all. Shall we have soup for supper? Or breakfast, I guess it would be.”

I had never had soup for breakfast before, but then I had never listened to the dead before breakfast eith...