“What a disgraceful noise!” Mother said to Duck and me. “There’s no need to behave like babies!”
I think the way she spoke did more to reassure us even than the cats. The cats had all jumped off Robin’s bed and were rubbing purring round Mother’s ankles. She bent down and stroked them. My mother is beautiful. She looks no older than Robin, but her face has more angles to it than Robin’s and looks more delicate. Her hair is bushy, like mine, just as it was in my dream. But my dream did not show her huge eyes, deep and green as the River, and the long, long lashes round them.
“Lie down, Robin, love,” she said. “It’s all right.”
“You came so suddenly,” Robin said tearfully.
My mother smiled at her and at Hern. “I know it’s hard to believe,” she said to Hern. “Some things you can’t see or touch are true, you know. Now what was all that shouting about?”
“Can I speak to you privately, Mother?” I said.
“I hoped that was it,” said my mother.
“I want to talk to you as well,” complained Duck.
“No, Duck,” said Mother. “You go and make Robin’s bed. It’s all sliding to the floor. It’s high time you did a bit to help, instead of leaving Tanaqui to do all the work. You’ve talked to me for hours already.”
“Not properly, not with you really there,” Duck said. “That doesn’t count.”
“Yes, it does,” said my mother. She is a very firm mother. She would have been good for Duck. Hern grinned, because he thought so, too. “Don’t go away, Hern,” she said. “I want to talk to you afterward.” Then she went back toward the River door, holding out her hand to me. She stopped on the way, beside my loom and the pink clay Gull. She put her hand to its cheek, smiling. Now, I had left the lamp upstairs. There was only the candle flickering by Robin’s bed, so I cannot swear to it, but I think the small statue smiled. “Come along,” she said to me.
I hung back on the threshold of the River. “Where?”
“Silly,” said Mother. “I’ll keep hold of your hand.”
We stepped out across the River—I think. But things get so strange when you are with the Undying. There was a moon, and green light rippled through the trees, above and below us. I do not know if I walked on the water, or beneath it, or in some other place entirely. Certainly nobody saw us, but I remember seeing the square of dim light from the mill door to one side as we talked, and the lights of Shelling on the other.
“You’ve been thinking at last, Tanaqui,” said my mother. “I don’t suppose you can understand how it felt, watching you weave and willing you to stop blaming yourself and start thinking. I’d almost given up hope. I was telling myself that you’d put so much of the River in your coats, maybe that would do instead.”
“Is it important,” I said, “to put the River in?”
“Yes,” said my mother. “But that is connected with the things I was forbidden to talk about when I married your father. You have to be very careful what you ask me, Tanaqui.”
I had supposed some things were forbidden. My father was never talkative, but even he would have told us some of it had he been allowed to. I was prepared to be cunning. “Do you know about Kankredin?” I asked.
“I do,” said Mother. “I was there with you. The mage hidden death reached him this evening. You have to move fast, all of you.”
“We know,” I said. “Are you allowed to tell me if Tanamil’s a relation of ours? His name is Younger River, isn’t it?”
“No. He is of himself,” Mother said, to my great relief. “You have charge of him simply because he was bound when my father was bound. He has his name because he made the younger River—even more unwillingly than your grandfather made this one.”
“Oh good,” I said. “I was afraid he was going to turn out to be our uncle. I think Robin’s in love with him.”
“So do I,” my mother said dryly. “That kind of thing seems to run in our family.”
“Can you tell me how to call him?” I asked next. “Do I have to go to the watersmeet?”
“Any lesser stream will do,” she told me. “But there’s no need to scream like you did before.”
That made me a little ashamed, but not much. I was too pleased, and too happy to have a mother again. I leaned against her. She was warm and solid and smelled, just faintly, of tanaqui. “I can’t ask about the Undying,” I said, as if I was talking to myself, “which means I can’t ask if the One is my grandfather. But I know he is. Mother is his daughter. Are we—?”
Mother chuckled. It was like water in pebbles. “Don’t get too cunning, Sweetrush.”
“Can I ask your name, then, and how you came to marry my father?” I said. “You are the lady who haunts the mill, aren’t you?”
“While Closti was a young man, I certainly haunted it,” said Mother. “He used to come here to fish from the time he was Gull’s age. And one day I met him by the millpond. ‘My name is Anoreth,’ I said, ‘and will you marry me?’ Anoreth means ‘unbound,’ Tanaqui—I can tell you that, since you are nearly there already. I suppose asking like that is more the kind of thing you would do than Robin, isn’t it? Closti said he had seen me reflected in the water, often and often, and he was only too glad to marry me. But he was betrothed to Zwitt’s sister. He had to give the coat back, and they were furious. So was Zara. And I was cast off by my father. That was when the mill was forbidden, through his anger. So when Duck was born, I should have died, but my soul was forbidden to go, you see. I had to ask your father to do for me what Tanamil did for Gull. That way at least I could watch over you all.”
It seemed a sad story to me. Now I know why Zwitt dislikes us so much. “Gull,” I said. “Can I get Gull back?”