While she waited, Anrid let the snake coil around her; she did that all the time now. The serpent had been her doorway to this. It was important that the others see her handling it, confront their own fear of doing the same. She was still the newest, still the youngest, and now volur. She needed to find a way to survive. Volurs could be killed. She knew it.

A knock, the door opened. She gestured for Frigga to enter, closed the door herself, letting no one else in. She had already blocked up the holes through which she and the others used to peek. She put the serpent in the basket they'd made for it.

She hated the snake.

Anrid turned to the older woman, looked at her a moment, opened her mouth to speak, and began to cry. The tears stunned her with how desperately they fell. Her hands were shaking.

"Oh, child," said Frigga.

Anrid couldn't stop weeping. You'd have had to kill her to make her stop. "Will you…?" she began. Choked on her words, tears in her throat. Hands in trembling fists to her mouth. A shuddering of breath. Tried again. "Will you stay with me? Please stay?"

"Oh, child. Have you a place for me?"

Anrid could only nod, again and again, a spasm of the head. The older woman, nearly kin, closest thing she had, came forward and they wrapped each other in arms that had not known or given comfort for so long.

Only the younger one wept, however. Then, later that night, she slept.

Brogan the miller, awake as usual before dawn, was thinking, as he pissed into the stream before beginning the day, about some of the things he disliked.

It was a long list. He was a sour, solitary man. Had been drawn to the mill because it gave him a house at the edge of the village, a place removed from (and a stature above) the others. He'd murdered someone to get this mill, but that was an old story and he didn't think or even dream about it often any more. Brogan didn't really like people. They talked too much, most of them.

His servant was, usefully, a mute. He'd been very happy (briefly) when he'd learned that Ord, a farmer with fields east of the village, was looking for work for his youngest son who didn't talk. Brogan had made arrangements to bring the boy to the mill. He was old enough, a broad-shouldered lad. A straw pallet, food, a day a week to help his father. Milk and cheese for Brogan in exchange for that last.

And a decent worker who didn't prattle on when feeding the animals or standing waist-deep in the stream mending the wheel. Brogan, who had come to the mill as a worker himself thirty years ago—and taken certain measures a little later to ensure he'd stay—couldn't understand why people would mar an easy silence with wasted words.

There were still stars in the west. First hint of greyness east. Dawn wind ruffling the reeds in the river. Brogan scratched himself and went to unbolt the mill. A warm day coming. Still summertime, though late in the season, with what that meant.

Brogan didn't like the new end-of-summer fair, third year now. The road west of their hamlet towards the river (of which the millstream was a tributary) became too busy. Steady traffic from coast to Esferth and then back, afterwards.

People on roads signified trouble for Brogan the miller. Nothing good about them at all. Strangers stole things, came looking for women or drink, or just mischief to make or find. Brogan had coins buried in three places around the mill. Would have spent some of them by now, but he'd never wanted anything enough to spend good money on it. A woman, now and again, but you could buy one of those for grain, and many of the farmers paid him with flour and wheels of bread. More than he needed. He left his money buried, but worried about it. Long ago, he'd lain awake wondering if someone would find the old miller in his grave, dig him up, see the crushed skull. Now it was the coins that woke him sometimes in the dark. All over the world men knew that millers made money.

He had three dogs. Didn't like them, their barking, but they offered protection. And Modig, the mute, was a good-sized lad, handy with a cudgel. Brogan himself wasn't a big man, but he'd survived a fight or two in his day.

He'd considered taking a wife, some time ago. Children to do the work as he grew older. The idea had come, lingered a while, and passed: women changed things, and Brogan the miller didn't like change. That was the principal reason he didn't like the king. Even after all these years, Aeldred was always changing things. You had to make bows and arrows for yourself now, or buy them, and you were supposed to practise every week, and be tested by someone from the fyrd each spring. Didn't they have other things to do, the fyrd? Farmers with bows: that was a stupid, dangerous thought. They'd kill each other before the Erlings had a chance.

It was dark in the mill, but after so many years he knew his way blind. He opened the shutters over the stream, to let in some light and air. Went down the steps, heard the mice skitter from his footfall. He lifted the lock to the sluice, gripped with both hands, put his back to it, and pulled back the chute gate. The water started pouring in. Soon the familiar sounds of the turning wheel and millstones grinding above began. He went back up, took the first sack, opened it, dumped it into the hopper above the turning stones. Through the open window the eastern sky showed brighter. The first women and children would be coming for their flour after sunrise, most of them straight from the dawn prayers in the small chapel.

Brogan was still thinking about changes as he checked the millstones, which were turning easily. A new cleric in the village now. This one could read and write, was supposed to be teaching people. There were new rules for military service, new taxes for the building of the burhs. Yes, the burhs were supposed to protect them, but Brogan doubted a walled fort at Drengest south and east on the coast, or the other one inland two days east, would do much good for their hamlet or his mill if trouble came. And reading? Reading? What in the name of Jad's toes and fingers did that have to do with anything? Might be well enough for a soft man at court where they ate with ale-soddened musicians piping and warbling to spoil good meat. But here? In a farming village? Modig would do so much better mending the fence or the water-wheel once he could spell his name! Brogan turned his head to spit expertly out the window into the stream.

The new cleric had called shortly after arriving. Fair enough: the mill was owned by the chapel and the miller together. That was why Brogan was miller, really. When the old one had come to his unexpected end (a sudden fever in midsummer, taken in the one night, buried sadly by his servant at dawn), it had made sense for the cleric to strike a bargain with the dour young man after the funeral rites. The miller's assistant, Brogan by name, had seemed to know what he was doing, and the village couldn't afford to have the mill idle while they considered who should have the position. It was a stroke of good fortune for the young fellow, obviously, but Jad could sometimes bestow generously where you might not have expected it.

Thirty years later, this newest cleric (fifth one Brogan had worked with) had looked around the mill in a cursory sort of way, clearly uninterested in what he saw, and then, growing enthusiastic, had asked Brogan about installing one of the newer-styled vertical wheels. He'd read a letter from a fellow cleric in Ferrieres about them, he said. More power, a better use of the river.

Changes, again. Ferrieres. Brogan, wasting more words than he'd wanted to, had explained about the flow of their small stream, the limited needs of the hamlet, and the cost of having a vertical wheel built and attached.