You walked three days down from the pine-dark hills, and on the third evening you came to the flooded ford where the old wooden bridge had broken against its pylons and lay in the water like a dead hand. In the rain, the lights of the hall burned small and separate, and you stood a long while among the reeds, holding the leather purse to your chest with both hands, for it had been your habit for nine years to hold it so. It was a small thing, no wider than your palm, its leather worn to the softness of cloth, and its seam had been stitched and re-stitched by your own hand in the nights of your exile, until the thread of the sister's making was gone entirely and only your own remained, coarser and darker, like the scar of a wound that cannot learn to close. You thought you had preserved it. You did not know that a thing preserved in that manner becomes a shroud.

The sister — Elspeth — had pressed the oil on the morning you fled, in the garden where the rain still lay bright on the leaves of rue and feverfew. She had stood at the fence with the purse held out at arm's length, her face unreadable, white as the underside of a birch leaf. Take this, she said. Open it when you are tempted to forget. You had believed she meant her own face, the house, the country of your birth, the orchard where the two of you had hung a rope swing in the summer of your father's death. You had been young, and love had made you certain, and certainty is the first lie a good man tells himself. You took the purse and pressed it to your breast, and you had carried it since through nine winters of the road, and on the worst nights, when the road offered neither shelter nor work, you had opened the purse and chewed a single leaf of the dried herb, and the bitterness had been like a sacrament upon the tongue, and you had gone on.

The hall of King Cuthred stood at the head of the valley on its mound of raised stone, and a month of rain had turned the approaches to slough; the sentry at the gate was a boy with a wet spear and the face of a frightened heron. You answered him with the words you had used at every gate that year, that you were a leech of no particular name, come from beyond the hills to offer service to the king, and that you asked no wage but the fire and a corner of the hall. The boy looked at you as the rain ran off the brim of his helm, and he pointed with his spear toward the door, as if hoping the matter would be taken from his hands. You crossed the yard and entered.

The hall was long and low, and the smoke of the hearth hung in the rafters like a weather that belonged to the roof alone, and King Cuthred sat at the high board with his hounds at his feet and his grey beard in his cup. He was a king of the old kind, who had grown old in his own strength and did not fear the cold of the evenings. He looked at you with the weary patience of a man who has seen a hundred such strangers cross his threshold, and he asked only one question: whether you could heal the sick child in the east chamber, for his own physician had run out of words and had taken to bleeding the boy in the mornings, and the boy was worse. You said that you had a gift, and that the gift was in your hands and in a medicine you carried, and you drew the purse from your breast and laid it on the board before him. The leather whispered against the wood. The smell of rue rose into the smoke.

The old physician of the hall came forward then. His name was Aldwyn, and he had the face of a folded map, creased by weathers and by the long watching of other men's pain. He was old in a way that made the king seem young, and his eyes were the pale grey of the sea before a storm. He took up the purse and turned it over in his hands, and you saw his fingers pause upon the seam, and you saw something pass across his face like the shadow of a bird across a winter field. It was gone almost before you could name it. He did not look at you. He said only that the boy's fever had resisted every remedy, and that the stranger's medicine could not do a worse harm.

So you were taken in. For the first days you served in the infirmary, grinding powders, boiling barley, washing the linen that the servants brought in bundles from the hall. You were diligent and quiet, and the old physician watched you with a strange close tenderness, as a man watches a flame he has not yet decided to trust. You learned the names of the herbs in his stores, and you taught him one or two of your own, and the two of you worked side by side in the close warmth of the sickroom. There were whispers about you among the women, as there are whispers about any stranger, and you kept your head down and your instruments close, and you did not mind the whispers. A man who has carried a sister's gift for nine years does not need the good opinion of a strange kitchen.

The child was called Edan. He was a boy of perhaps eight years, with the fine bones and the dark hair that you remembered in the women of your own country, and that likeness struck you the first time you saw him, though you could not say why. He lay in a narrow bed in the east chamber, with the shutters closed against the light, and his face was small and sharp and his eyes burned in a way that was terrible in a child. The fever had come to him in the autumn, and Aldwyn had bled him, and the fever had not forgiven the offence. He slept, or he slipped in and out of a waking that was worse than sleep, and in that waking he called for his mother, who was dead. He called her name in a voice so small that it was like the memory of a voice. He called her Elspeth.

You did not know that you had been waiting for that name.

You thought at first that you had misheard, that the distortion of fever had made the boy's own name strange to you. But he called it again, in the thin hour before dawn, and you stood at the foot of his bed with the purse half drawn from your breast, and you could not move. Elspeth. The same name. The same music of two short syllables that had been the first word you ever learned to write, the same sound that had followed you through the pine-dark hills for nine years like the smell of smoke in a coat. You asked Aldwyn, in the morning, what country the boy's mother had come from, and the old physician looked at you with those pale sea-coloured eyes and said: from the north, beyond the hills, the country of the orchards. He said it quietly, and then he turned away.

The fever climbed that evening. The boy's skin was dry and bright as a fired pot, and he whimpered in his sleep and turned his face to the wall. You made the decision alone, in the silence of the long room, with the candle guttering and the old physician gone to the hall for instructions. You drew the purse from your breast and you opened it for the first time in a year. The oil within had turned to a dark gall, and it gave off a smell of earth and old roots, and you told yourself that this was the scent of the garden, the scent of home, though something in your heart knew better. You warmed the oil in a cup of water and you bathed the boy's forehead and chest, and you whispered the old words of your country over him, the words your mother had used when Elspeth was small and sickly. The boy lay still under your hands. In the middle of the night the fever broke, or seemed to break. It poured out of him in sweat, and you believed, with the whole trembling certainty of a man who has loved one thing too long, that the sister's gift had done its work. You sat beside him until the dawn, holding the purse in both hands, and you were at peace for the first time in nine years.

Aldwyn found you at first light. He came into the chamber and looked at the boy, and then he looked at you, and you saw the shadow pass across his face again, darker and slower than before. He took the cup in which the oil had been warmed and he lifted it to his nose, and he set it down with the care of a man laying a cup upon a grave. Then he spoke. He asked you where you had come by the purse. You told him, with pride, that it was your sister's, given to you on the morning you left your country, that it held the oil she had pressed with her own hands from the garden of your childhood. You told him the name of the country, and the name of the orchard, and the name of the sister. And the old physician stood a long time in the grey light of the chamber, and at last he said: I buried that garden nineteen years ago. My son lies beneath it.

You did not understand him. He said again, slowly, with the patience of a man speaking to a man who has chosen not to hear: my son was Aldous. He was a young lord of this valley, and he loved a woman of the orchards beyond the hills, and he was cut down at a harvest board by a man who loved her too. The woman gave that man a purse of oil on the morning he fled. She walked to the garden of the graves and she pressed the herbs that grew above my son, and she gave them to his murderer, and she said, carry this, and open it when you are tempted to forget. And she meant: remember what your love has made. She meant: you have buried my life under your own. She lived nine years with that, and in the ninth she was delivered of this boy and she did not rise from the bed afterward. She was your sister. This child is her son. And you, he said, are the man who killed my boy, and you have carried the oil of the grave for nineteen years, believing it was a blessing.

The room was very still. The candle had guttered into a pool of wax, and the boy lay sleeping in the pale dawn, and you stood with the purse in your hands, and the purse that had been the softness of cloth was suddenly a thing with weight, a thing with edges, a thing that had been waiting to be opened. You looked down at it. The seam was yours, but beneath your seam, in the corner, you saw it now: the old thread, the thread of Elspeth's making, pale and fine as the thread of a spider's web, and it had always been there, and you had never seen it. You held the purse as you had held it for nineteen years, and you understood at last that what you had carried was not her love. It was her grief. It was the small weight of the life you had taken from her, pressed into leather and sealed with wax. You had held her ruin to your breast every night, and called it home.

You spoke then, and your voice was the voice of a man who is drowning and knows there is no shore. You said that you had loved her, that you would have died for her, that you had seen Aldous lay hands upon her at the harvest board and had not been able to bear it. And the old physician, who had been your master for a season and your enemy for nineteen years without your knowing, answered you with a gentleness that was worse than a blow. That is what my son said, he told you. He loved her with the same hunger. He would have died for her. And she died of the two of you, of the love that would not let her live. There is no difference between you. There never was. The two of you held her in your hands like a cup, and each of you believed the other would break it, and it was the holding that broke her. Your love was a blade, and you have been sharpening it for nineteen years with the oil of the grave. Now put it down.

You did not put it down. You put it on the boy's chest.

That was the only answer you could give. The boy slept, and the purse lay upon his breast, rising and falling with his breath, and you stood back and looked at it, and it seemed to you that the purse was no longer yours. It had made its way through the world to return to the hand of the mother's son. You thought of the boy's small mouth calling out her name in the dark, the same name you had whispered to the road for nineteen years, and you understood that the boy had been calling not for a mother who had held him, but for the mother he had never been allowed to keep. You had kept her instead. You had made a possession of her memory, and the memory had grown bitter, and you had eaten of it as a man eats of food that has turned, believing it would still nourish him. It had not nourished anyone. It had fed the ground.

Aldwyn said no more. There was no more to say. You went to the door of the east chamber and you stood there in the cold morning, and a thin snow had begun to fall, the first snow of the year, and it fell soundless over the yard and the mound of the old fort and the flooded ford below. You thought of the long road you had walked to reach this place, and of the roads you had walked before it, and of the man you had been when you set out, and of the man you had been last night, and they were the same man, and that man had been a stranger to himself in every season of his walking. You had not been an exile from your country. You had been an exile from the truth, and the truth had been waiting in a worn leather purse against your heart.

The snow thickened. In the chamber behind you the boy slept on under the weight of the purse, and a servant had come in to stoke the fire, and Aldwyn was bending over the bed with his old hands folded in a gesture that was not prayer but the residue of prayer, the thing that remains when the words have been worn away. You went out into the yard, and then you went down through the gate, past the boy with the wet spear, and the snow was already covering the stones of the ford. At the water's edge you stopped and looked back once. The hall stood on its mound, grey and small in the falling snow, and you knew that you would not enter it again, that you would not see Edan again, that you would not know whether the fever had taken him or given him back. You left the purse with him. It had nothing left to give, and neither did you. It was the only true thing you had ever done.

You turned and walked into the snow of the northern waste, and behind you the whispers of the hall grew distant, and then faint, and then they were gone, and you walked on with your arms empty at your sides, and the wind spoke in the pines and in the dry reeds, and it was not the voice of the sister, and it was not your own. There was nothing left to carry. There was no one left to mourn. And you went on, because the empty place at your heart had at last learned to speak in its true voice, and the voice said only this: go, and be no one, and let the dead be dead.