Tomas watched with a smile as Dove moved the dolls around, attacking each other on occasion, and sometimes making them look as if they were dancing together. He left the guessing to his siblings, but enjoyed the story they created out of it. It was a fun new game for his siblings, having someone without a voice in the house.

    Esther seemed to really enjoy having Dove around. She’d never had a sister, and Tomas could see she was already attaching herself to her as if she were. How Ansel felt about it was slightly more ambiguous, though. He’d always been a quiet child, and even with the visitor in the house, he hadn’t spoken much more than usual. From what Tomas could tell, however, Ansel was enjoying the new face nearly as much as Esther was.

    He couldn’t help but wonder how Dove felt about it all, though. He wasn’t sure how he would feel if he was treated like an oddity like that. But Dove went through it all with a smile on her face, grinning and nodding enthusiastically when they correctly interpreted her actions. Her features glowed in the lantern light, her hair a bright river of silver flowing down down her back in loose effortless waves. She looked happy.

    He glanced over at his mother. She was stitching up a hole he’d ripped in his pants a day or so ago when chasing after one of the goats, and hardly seemed to be paying any attention to the giggles and calls of the children. Tomas knew better, of course; his mother seemed to have sixth sense of sorts. She always knew what was going on and where, sometimes even before anyone had even asked her. So he wasn’t really surprised when she looked up at him with a twinkle in her eyes and smiled somewhat mischievously.

    “The end?” Esther’s small voice questioned, and Tomas’s eyes returned to the little group. Dove nodded, grinning, and Esther clapped. “Yay! That was so much fun.”

    Adelaide set aside her sewing then and spoke up. “And now I think it’s time for you munchkins to get to bed.”

    “Aw, but mummy!-” Esther got cut off.

    “I know you want to stay up, Esther, but you need sleep. It’s getting late, and I can’t have you being tired tomorrow.” Her eyes turned to Ansel. “Or you, Ansel. Now, you and your sister go get ready for bed.”

    With various sounds of disappointment, the children got up and began preparing for their bedtime. Tomas watched them go with a quiet chuckle, remembering fondly the times when he was younger and had been told to go to bed. Often times he’d end up laying in his bed, awake, listening to his parent’s voices until they lulled him to sleep.

    Adelaide smiled after them, shaking her head ever so slightly and picking up her sewing again. Dove carefully placed the cornhusk dolls to one side, being ever so gentle, as if the dolls were a precious treasure that could crumble if handled wrongly.

    Several minutes and a handful of complaints later, the children were in their beds. Whether they were planning on sleeping or not was, of course, an entirely different matter.

    Dove looked a bit lost after all this. With the children in bed and Adelaide sewing Tomas’s pants, she seemed uncertain what to do with herself. Fortunately, Adelaide soon noticed and spoke up.

“Sweetheart, you can go to bed too, if you like. I have a nightgown you can borrow until yours is cleaned.” Tomas hadn’t realized she’d arrived in her nightgown until his mother brought it up. Realizing he’d chased down a girl in her nightdress, his face grew a bit warm; it was no wonder she’d been wary of him in the beginning.

Of course, there were her bonds to be taken into account as well. He still couldn’t help but wonder what had happened, and why she’d been tied up. He hadn’t asked her yet, unable to find the right way of asking, and unsure if he’d even be able to understand her response. His siblings, particularly Esther, seemed to be much better at guessing at her charades than he was.

    Dove nodded at Adelaide with a grateful smile. Adelaide smiled back and once again set aside her sewing, getting up and going into the other room where she kept all the old clothes.

    Returning, she handed Dove a white garment.

    “It might be a bit large, I’m afraid, but it’s not as if nightgowns are supposed to be form fitting, now are they?” she said with a sweet smile. Dove’s lips quirked into a quick smile as she took it from Adelaide. “You can go change in the other room. Same one you changed in this morning, alright?”

    Dove nodded, though her smile seemed a bit more forced as she looked at the garment she held in her hands, eyeing it as if it were a dead snake that she didn’t trust was dead quite yet. She left the room without another look or gesture, though, going to change out of the milk spattered dress she wore.

Tomas still couldn’t help but smile at that. He’d been looking in that direction when Dove had missed the bucket, and had barely managed to stifle his laughter and look away, not wanting to embarrass her any more than she probably already felt. He remembered how he’d felt the first time he’d squirted himself with milk, and wanted to spare her the discomfort.

Adelaide walked across the room, but didn’t return to her seat, instead coming to sit beside Tomas. His eyes met hers curiously.

“We need to talk,” she stated simply. Tomas’s eyebrows knit together in slight confusion.

“Talk about what?” he asked.

“Dove,” she said, and for a moment it didn’t click that she was talking about the strange mute girl he’d brought home. When it did click, however, his brow only scrunched further.

“What about her?” he questioned, not sure what there was to talk about.

“How much do you know about her?” Adelaide asked, her tone betraying nothing but simple curiosity.

Tomas opened his mouth to speak, but quickly shut it again, realizing he didn’t have much he could say. “Well,” he began. “She’s from Lucerne.” Adelaide nodded for him to continue. “She can’t talk… she was born without a voice. And she had her hands bound when I found her.” He stopped there, drawing a blank on what else he could say about the pale girl.

“Do you know why her hands were bound?” his mother continued to question. Tomas shook his head. Adelaide leaned back in her seat, the interrogation seemingly over for the moment.

Tomas said nothing, letting her think. Instead he watched the lantern light flicker across her features, showing the crevices of the valleys of age. It was clear his mother had once been beautiful, and to him she still was. Her blue eyes, so wise and full of mischief, that crinkled at the corners when her rich laughter escaped her lips; her hair, once luscious and dark, now sprinkled as with snow, white hairs peeking out, showing her age perhaps better than her face. To him, though, it was the signs of age that made her beautiful, that made her his mother.

After a moment longer, she spoke again. “She can’t stay here, you know that, right?”

Tomas blinked. He hadn’t really thought about, to be honest. He never really thought things like this through; he saw someone or something in need, and he just did his best to help. He didn’t ever think much further ahead than that. It was another thing his father had reproached him for. His father had always been one to think before he did anything, weighing the decision against the possible outcomes.

His mother continued. “Whoever she is, someone is out looking for her.” Her wise eyes met his. “Possibly more than one, considering the state of her wrists when she arrived.”

“How do we find them, though?” he asked, realizing his mother was right, as usual. “The people who are looking for her. The right people.”

Adelaide chuckled, and he looked confused. “Oh, love, I’m sure it won’t be all too difficult.” Noticing his confusion, she continued. “She’s not a commoner, you know. Not with those hands and that bearing.”

Tomas felt rather blind in that moment. His mother had always been observant, a trait he hadn’t seemed to inherit. He found himself to be rather naive when it came to noticing some things. He felt like he had only inherited his parent’s bad qualities. It had never occurred to him that Dove was of high ranking. He suddenly felt silly for nicknaming her Dove.

“Look, I think tomorrow you should take her into town and see if you can find out anything. Since she’s clearly of a higher ranking, perhaps someone will have put the word out that they’re searching for her,” Adelaide continued.

“How can you tell she’s of high ranking? ‘Those hands and that bearing’?” Tomas asked. He was curious to know what his mother had noticed that he hadn’t.

Adelaide smiled. “I watched her this morning during breakfast. She has small, gentle hands. No callouses. And she couldn’t even put on her belt without help; she’s not used to dressing herself. And ‘that bearing’ means the way she walks, the way she carries herself. She minces, she doesn’t stride.”

“Why are you telling me all this now? Why not with her here? Couldn’t she try to explain it if you asked her? I mean, she’s pretty good at motioning things. We could ask her where she came from.” He was rambling. He found that happened when he let his mouth run too far ahead of his thoughts.

His mother sighed and then smiled. “Go ahead. But I doubt it’s the sort of story that can be told easily.”

He glanced in the direction Dove had gone, and then wondered in the back of his mind why she hadn’t reappeared yet. Getting dressed didn’t take that long.

His eyes returned to his mother’s face, and he got the feeling she knew more than she was telling. Knowing better than to ask, he let the feeling slip away into the back of his mind for another time. That was just who his mother was; she’d always been a mysterious woman.

She stood then, walking back over to her sewing and picking it up, rolling a piece of thread between her fingers absently. Before she began again, however, she looked at him, face calm.

“Sleep on it. That’s what your father always did.” She smiled, disrupting the smooth calm of her features. “Said he always knew what to do after a good night’s sleep.”

Tomas nodded, doing his best to keep his face composed like his mother’s. His father had been a good man, wise in his own way, though not quite like Tomas’s mother. He had rare pearls of wisdom that would always come at seemingly random times, but it was always the right time. Always the right thing to say. Tomas envied him that ability. He’d never been particularly good with words.

But again, his father’s words had come at the right time. Through his mother, of course, but they were still his father’s words. He would sleep on it, he decided, as his father would have. Perhaps in the morning he would have a clearer answer. 

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A/N Don't know that there's much to say here... but still! Hope you're enjoying :) This one was slightly more... I don't know what. Stranger to write than some of the rest. Don't know why. Tell me what you think, okay? You guys know the drill x)