Every morning they stopped her before she left the cottage. There were stories about the wild place near where they grazed, the tall grassy hill in the middle of it, and her sisters worried.
Violet didn’t spin and weave, so it was left to her to keep their little flock of sheep alive. Her sisters had a loom and a spinning wheel that took up most of the space in their little house, and much of their living was made from turning fluffy sheep into warm blankets. They wouldn’t worry so much if they didn’t. Violet’s sisters loved her, she knew they did. “Do you understand?” Lily would admonish, the two of them trapping her between them to make sure she knew this truth: if Violet ever failed, she and her sisters would starve. “If we don’t have eggs and milk we’ll all starve,” Rose would say to Violet every morning, shaking a spoon at her. Had she collected the eggs yet, had she milked the cow, had she made sure the iron and rowan were still above all the doors to protect them from the Fair Folk so the hens would keep laying and the cow keep giving milk? The elder, Rose and Lily, started each day in a furious bustle, storming around the kitchen before dawn preparing for the day, frying bread for breakfast, slicing cheese for lunch, scrubbing the table, which was already clean, and pestering the youngest, Violet, about her chores. Three poor sisters lived in a cottage at the edge of a wild place.
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