For a Shivelite to spy out a Spring Calling was so unthinkable that she’d never been warned against it, and Mirella had been sneaking out for several years before she was caught. Always the voice came to her in the dead of a spring night, tickling her ear until she was urgent with flight. The spirits have come. They are waiting. And she’d rise straightway for the mountains for Small North, the least of the mountains of Ron Jonna, wearing only a shift. 

         Afterwards, there was never a visible sign of her journey. Her gown remained untorn; her feet muddied. These expeditions might have gone on indefinitely had she not been caught by her father, early one dawn. Tallis Taylor had surprised her at daybreak; he’d been up most of the night delivering a calf. There was no disguising the dew on her feet or the altered expression in her eyes.

         “Where have you been, daughter?” he’d asked softly.

         His soft voice should have been a warning.

         “The voices called and I —”

         “What voices?”

         He’d never been an easy man to talk to; quite fluent at his meetings but his words to her were few; fewer still since he became the First Man, but that morning, he’d been calm, almost open. 

         “The voices that come to me every spring. I told you . . . and mother.”

         Silence. She knew he was sifting through the years before he said, “But you were a mere child!”