I am only going to say this once. The serpent-pirate woman they call Rain has been coming up off the coast and standing at the edge of our fields, polite as a Sunday and twice as smooth, and she has got it into the heads of half the children on the southern Downs that going up against the tuskboars in the Whispering Groves is some grand adventure they are old enough for, and not a half-ton creature that will gut them, and I have had my fill of it.

My own boy came in at dusk with a sharpened fence stake and a light in his eye I did not put there, talking about how the lady with no eyes says a brave heart sees better in the dark than any of us, and how she will show them where the big boars bed down in the old growth.

I do not care that she found his name without being told it. I do not care that she can taste a storm coming off the air or that the dockmen think she hung the moon. Those boars are half a ton of bad temper and worse eyesight, they have already come out of the deep forest because something out there has gone wrong, and they are rooting right up to the Groves townline. And I would dearly love to know how this woman means to trek half the children of the Downs clear across Wexamour to reach them. A grown woman who steals copper pots in the night is sending little ones to face down boars like it is a footrace.

So mind your young ones, lock your tool sheds, and if a stranger in a red coat stops to admire your fence line and ask after your sons, you give her the directions she wants and nothing else, because whatever she is collecting up here this spring, I promise you it is not boar, and I will not have it be my boy.

Merrigan Ploughwell farms the middle fields outside Brannock Crossing and has raised four children to mostly grown without losing one to the forest, and intends to keep that record. She can be reached by owl, or by standing in the lane and hollering, which she does anyway.