I climbed the mountain every day after that.

  At first, I wasn't even sure he would be there. The encounter at the frozen waterfall had felt like a dream—too perfect, too impossible to be real. But when I reached the small plateau where the pines gave way to open sky, he was waiting. Standing as still as the peaks themselves, watching my approach with those impossible star-flecked eyes.

  "You came back," he said. Not a question. A statement of wonder.

  "I said I would." I was breathless from the climb; my cheeks flushed with cold and exertion. "I keep my promises."

  The corner of his mouth twitched—almost a smile. "So I'm learning."

  That first day, we sat on a sun-warmed rock and I talked. I talked about everything and nothing—the gossip from the village, who was marrying whom, which crops were failing, the latest ridiculous argument between the baker and the butcher's wife. I told him about the festival coming up, the one where all the young people danced around the bonfire and the elders pretended not to notice when couples slipped away into the darkness.

  He listened. He actually listened, his head tilted slightly, his gaze never leaving my face. No one had ever listened to me like that—like every word I spoke was precious, like my chatter about mundane village life was somehow fascinating.

  "You're very quiet," I observed after a particularly long ramble about the colour of the new priest's robes.

  "I have had millennia to learn the value of silence," he said. "But I find I prefer the sound of your voice."

  My cheeks flushed, and it had nothing to do with the cold.

  The days became weeks. The weeks became months. Every morning, before the sun fully cleared the peaks, I climbed. Every afternoon, as the light began to soften toward twilight, I descended. My mother asked where I went. I told her I was gathering herbs, visiting a friend, exploring—lies that grew easier with practice, though guilt gnawed at me.

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  What I never told him—what I could never bring myself to speak aloud—was what waited for me in that hovel at the base of the mountain.

  My mother's sickness of the mind had many faces. So did she, in her own way—a big woman, strong and sturdy as a blacksmith's anvil, with arms that could haul firewood for hours and shoulders that seemed built to carry the weight of the world. The villagers whispered that she had the build of a woman meant for hard labour and hard living, not for the slow wasting grief that had eaten her from the inside out. When she walked through the village, people stepped aside. Not out of respect. Out of wariness. There was something in the set of her jaw, the breadth of her stance, that made you think twice about crossing her.

  Some days it was the silence. She would sit by the fire for hours, her big hands resting motionless in her lap, her eyes fixed on something none of us could see. She would rock—a slow, endless rhythm, back and forth, back and forth—and no amount of speaking or shaking or begging could pull her out of whatever dark place she had gone to. On those days, I learned to move quietly, to make myself small, to exist in the corners of our hovel like a mouse hoping not to be noticed by a sleeping cat.

  Some days it was the weeping. Great, heaving sobs that shook her entire frame—that strong, sturdy frame that could carry anything except the weight of her own memories. She would wail for children long dead, calling out names I never got to know, names that belonged to siblings I would never meet. She would cry for my father, the man she had nursed through years of wasting illness, watching him shrink and fade until there was nothing left of either of them—not the man he had been, not the woman she had been before grief carved her hollow. On those days, I would sometimes try to comfort her, to approach with a cup of water or a tentative hand. Sometimes she would let me. Sometimes she would look at me with eyes that didn't seem to know who I was, and the wailing would only grow louder.

  And some days, the worst days, it was the rages.

  I had learned, by the time I was five, that crying only made it worse. The first time I learned that lesson, was when I had scraped my knee climbing a tree and came home crying, seeking comfort I should have known better than to expect. My mother's eyes went flat—that terrible, unfocused frenzy that descended like a storm—and she beat me so badly I couldn't walk for three days. The village healer came anyway, despite her protests, and the look on his face when he saw my bruises told me everything, I needed to know about what people thought of our household.

  But nothing compared to the day I was ten.

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