Sorcha Nic Dhiarmada (Human, Drithane)

The thing did not leave the gate, and Sorcha had not expected it to. A creature that asked like never-refused would treat one refusal as weather, not law. It would wait for the house to change its mind, and in the meantime it would try the valley — and the valley was where her certainty ran out, because the valley was full of soft-hearted households and children with pockets, and she could not walk a dark-down against this. There was no custom for it. Yet.

What the valley had instead, it turned out, was the dogs.

Bran found it first, on the track by the lower field, and did what Bran did with anything standing where his map said nothing stood: dropped flat, fixed it with the eye, and moved it. No barking, no heat — the eye and the angle and the slow pressure of a dog whose whole cognition is the difference between where a thing is and where it should be. Muffin tried whatever it was Muffin did. Sorcha watched it happen and watched it fail to land, the way charm fails on a man reading a gauge. Bran wasn't refusing it. Refusal would have meant the question had been heard. Bran had no slot for the question. A collie does not ask whether you are charming. A collie asks where you should be, and the answer that came back — not here — was the only part Bran had any use for.

He put it at the gate. Meg, working the top field, put it at the gate an hour later, from the other direction. By evening the two of them had it filed under the only heading their trade possessed — livestock, errant, one — and were keeping it moved with the impersonal thoroughness they'd give a ewe with opinions. It was, Sorcha thought, the first time she had ever seen the thing handled. Not resisted, which fed it somehow — she could see that much, the way you see wind in grass. Handled. Placed. Made a fact of, by two professionals who had no idea it was anything else and were right anyway.

The children came, of course, with pockets. She gave them the house rule, and the reason her mother had given her — what we can't read, we don't feed — and watched the rule do what rules did in this valley: not get enforced. Get kept. Within three days the households along the chain had it, the way they had the dark-down times, passed kitchen to kitchen without anyone announcing anything. The thing sat at gate after gate, being asked the collies' question and given the valley's answer, and if it was learning anything from either, that was between it and whatever it kept accounts with.

She asked the clerk, once, directly: what is it. He said, carefully, that it was on no manifest. Then it can be on no doorstep, she said, and they both wrote that down in their separate kept ways.