Down in the south hollow of the basin, Pip appointed itself companion to the statue of the broad-hipped woman who carried an empty stone basket propped against her left hip.
Osha had copied the half-worn letters on her hem before the shepherd left: Bess of the Low Mill, who brought the loaves up in the snow-year. Three centuries of wind had scoured the carved wickerwork until it was just a shallow granite bowl cradled in her stone forearm, completely empty except for a dusting of frost.
Pip trotted alongside her on its six uneven legs, peering into the hollow of the stone basket with one amber eye. Through the bond, Ysabet—sitting on a dry boulder twenty paces away with a sewing awl in her good left hand, stitching a frayed harness-trace held down under her crooked right fingers—felt a familiar, earnest twitch of Pip’s attention: empty thing; ought to be full.
Pip rooted nose-first under a shale bank, dug up a handsome, thumb-sized crystal of milky quartz, and stood up on its four hind legs to drop the crystal neatly into the stone woman’s basket.
Clink.
The statue took one slow, grinding step toward the afternoon sun, then a second. On the third step, where the bottom of her granite skirt was chipped uneven on the left side, her whole torso tilted fifteen degrees toward the ditch. The milky quartz crystal rolled straight across the worn stone lip of the basket and dropped onto the gravel with a dry rattle.
