She was washing clothes on the riverbank. The slop, scrub, slop, scrub on the rock making its own infintesimal echo through the valley. Scrubbing cotton on rock, feeling the chill mountain waters around her ankles, cooling in the afternoon heat.

The shadow that fell across her, across the bank and across half of the river, could only have been Medicinierre. The acrid smell, the length and blackness of the shadow. Afraid to look up, she stopped her washing and waited.

The Medicinierre were the heart of the people. Young men and women called to the service would be decorated in head-dresses of bright parrot plumage, dressed in bright cloaks, beads and buttons, tiny bells sewn into the seams of their trousers.

The celebrations that attended the callings would go on for two, three days, with singing and dancing.

And then these curates would go into the smokehouse. A span of the moon they would stay there. Four weeks inside the smoke-choked hell-on-Earth.

And when they came out they were no longer young men and women, they were Medicinierre. One hand dyed red, smoke-blackened faces and arms. The plumage, the clothes all smoke-black.

Never again would they wash, they had become wed to the afterlife, the otherlife. Always walking one step in the world of the peoples, one step in the world of the demons.

They were the bridge and through them flowed the power.

She waited. Head lowered. Eyes lowered.

"You are Mulrooney."

"Yes."

"Of John Mulrooney."

"Yes."

"The child is whelp of Mulrooney."

"Yes."

A streaked red hand entered her field of vision. She felt the Medicinierre bend closer.

"This is for you."

The red fist turned slowly, turned and opened like a corpse flower awakening in the touch of the morning sun. In the palm of the hand, a small round trinket, a coin.

Although she had only heard stories, she knew instantly the embossed hands and claws of a Règle de Trois.

"A child for the children. Mulrooney hunt our children. His child for our children.Your child for our children. Blud answers blud."