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“How about the seventh?” she asked.

“Better still.”

“I can tell you more about the olden-day riddles,” she said, and did, and it didn’t bore them, but at least it diverted blood back to their head. There were different types of riddles, and people had riddled them all over medieval England, and kiss was never the answer, although some riddles mentioned kissing: Courtly men and women kiss me! Answer: Cup. The best Saxon riddle writer, Aldhelm, was imitating an earlier riddle writer, Symphosius, who lived in North Africa.

“And this Aldhelm, you said he was taught by the archbishop of Canterbury, who was also from Africa?” They lifted the oars from the water, so their mind could churn on its own. “The archbishop of Canterbury? Chap who heads the entire Church of England and crowns the king? Doesn’t that mean we should trace our forebears to Carthage?” They shook their head and started rowing again. “Funny how some debts never get acknowledged. Do you know what I’ve noticed, about your Fellows of the Albion Society of Antiquaries? They’re all using the past to substantiate a particular version of the present—the version they think most favorable to men like themselves. I don’t trust it. What they say the world was. What they say the world is.”

They lifted the oars and looked at her. A line formed between her brows.

They waited for her to argue.

“I don’t either,” she said.

“But you hope to join them?”

She crossed her arms. “I hope to say things about the past as well.”

“What do you want from it? The past?”

They waited, and when it seemed they’d waited too long, asked a question to which she had no response, they dipped the oars.

Her lips parted. “Connection.”

“Connection,” they repeated, and paused rowing, waiting for more.

“A single life is such a little thing. It’s barely anything, in the succession of generations. The generations go on and on, but individuals vanish like foam.” She broke their gaze, watched the river instead. “When I touch a jet bead that a girl wore around her neck five centuries before I was born, I feel as though we’re part of something continuous, she and I, for all our smallness. When I dig, I feel as though my grandmother is with me. I want that contact. It’s silly.”

“No,” they said, and she lifted her gaze. “It’s not silly.”

Her brown irises were starred with deeper, darker brown, as though the black had leaked from her pupils. She had eyes like portals.

They were staring into them, no, falling into them.

She was going to destroy them. After this ended, whatever this was, they would never be the same.

Shadow swallowed the boat. They tipped their head. There was the bluff, rising from the earth like a shrugged shoulder, blocking the sun. Home lay just around the bend.

Elf stood abruptly. The boat seesawed. They lunged and grabbed her legs before she was ejected into the river.

She staggered, laughing, bouncing even.

“Here!” she cried. “It’s here!”

20

“Where?” asked Georgie, standing beside Elf on the ferny riverbank. Viewed from this angle, the bluff daunted, with its stark face of exposed rock ledges and clinging shrubs, its high crest of trees black against the sky. At its base, a few light-starved saplings clustered amid clumps of moss, more ferns, some white flowers on long stalks, nodding.

Georgie rummaged in the undergrowth. “Where’s the cave?” Elf didn’t answer. They looked up. “Where are you going?”

They ran after her.

She was going up to the top of the bluff, which required circling around to a path that ascended a gentler slope.

“I left a shovel under a beech tree,” she told them.

“We need a shovel why?” They yanked their skirts from a thorn bush, cursing under their breath.

“To dig.”