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infants, not by word or action. No one had abused the women who had borne the children either, which was most surprising! No one took the gold away from the mothers either, which was truly astonishing! The third boy was only a little under a year old when he, too, was gone . All gone, except for Needly!
    Unfortunately, when the others had gone, so had the protective immunity that infancy had provided. Gralf had begun to notice the baby. Lillis, who was now a Grandma, managed to keep the infant out of his way while she waited for someone to come and collect the little girl. Her wait was a troubled one, as she half hoped someone would come soon, before the child fell to harm, half longed that no one would take her. Lillis had a great store of thwarted mother love saved up, and she had come to love Needly dearly. She had loved all her own but had given them up as she had been told, had presumed, had accepted that destiny required her to do so. This one, she rebelliously decided, would be taken over her dead body! She even threw a few tantrums with those . . . Oracles, asking them to find out what in . . . was going on?
    The Oracles reacted to tantrums as they did to anything suggesting criticism. They disappeared. They were simply not there when one went looking for them. If eventually discovered and confronted, the Oracles were oracular, meaning allusive rather than definitive, indicative rather than directional, and always refusing to clarify until the matter in question culminated, at which time they invariably said, “Well, that’s more or less what we meant.” With Lillis occupied full-­time down in Tuckwhip waiting for Needly to disappear, Joshua did disappear. Lillis had a crying fit over this, before deciding that she had deserted him, and in all honesty, she would have done the same if he had deserted her. When the second year passed, and the third, Lillis decided Needly’s continued presence could mean only that she, Lillis, was considered to be an adequate custodian or keeper or guardian. This both pleased and annoyed her. Someone could have told her! It would have been polite! She could have told Joshua, and she could have taken the child to their home. If he had consented. Probably.
    The child, though remaining as pallid as those strange growths sometimes seen in cellars, thrived and grew and no one . . . nothing ever informed Lillis, now Grandma, whether she really was the proper guardian or whether Needly had just been overlooked. Was Needly different in some way? Was she, Lillis, supposed to do something about Needly, or was something else supposed to happen? Fearing any attention paid to the child, Lillis did what all mothers in Hench Valley did for their daughters: she uglified the child so that nobody would look at her covetously. Even as she rubbed soot on the child’s skin and made her hair look like a rat’s nest with a carefully contrived horsehair wig, Lillis kept exploring, looking around herself for clues, going off into the woods and speaking into the silence of the trees, asking!
    Once, only once, she went all the way to the Listener and asked it, not really expecting and not receiving any answer.
    She wanted badly to take the child away but was fearful of upsetting some larger purpose. She had learned many things from her real family . . . the one she had supposedly been born into. She had learned that there were larger purposes in the universe than those readily apprehended by human beings, and though it would be egocentric to believe one was, necessarily, part of any such predestined thing, if one truly thought one was involved, then it might be wisest to go along with it.
    Lillis did believe it: she thought she might be caught up in such a purpose. She was, nonetheless, annoyed. If something was supposed to happen, someone or something ought to be kind enough to give her a set of ­directions!
    No one did. She struggled with her