A/N: I've no rights to the Giver quartet. All I have to offer is my love, after Ms. Lowry stole my heart, broke it into pieces, and handed it back to me. Gladly, I accepted it.

Thank you for reading.

Mother

One

The night before, he had only had half of each foot, but he awoke in the morning with both of them whole.

At first he hadn't noticed. He swung his feet out from under the skins, reached for the sticks that had served as his crutches for so many years, and rose on unsteady soles. It was after the first step something felt wrong, and after the second he looked down.

It was a queer sensation, registering the image of two whole feet where for more than a dozen winters there had been none, feeling his toes press into the floor while at the same time wondering if he had not been filling the spaces with an imagined sensation of having toes. Still leaning on his sticks, he watched as he took a step. Yes, it was a whole foot, his foot. He stepped again. Both feet were weak, however, like a newborn's. Or, at least, the small muscles from leg to lower back did not know how to compensate for feet he had grown accustomed to being without.

He stood staring at them. Then he hobbled his way over to the chair at his eating table—still using his sticks—and sat so that he could better examine this phenomenon. He lifted one leg and draped it across his other knee, rotating his foot about his ankle this way and that. Tentatively, he tried to wiggle his toes, but found he had long forgotten how to command that which had not been there. He gave similar treatment to the opposite foot. Then, with nothing else left to discover, he stood, and without the sticks, he took a step.

Then another.

He walked to the front door, opened it wide, and stepped out into the summer morning. The grass outside was wet and dewey. He scrunched his toes in it. Toes.

Imagine that! Toes!

He smiled so genuinely it hurt his face, for the last time he had smiled in such a way…

"Claire."

It was the first time in seven years that Einar had said her name out loud.

For much of the day, Einar attempted going about his duties without his sticks, but found that he was still as awkward on his feet as a newborn foal that he had to lean on them for respite every hour or so. The toes were incongruous with the movements of the rest of his feet, and became a hindrance from time to time, such as turning around to tend to a lamb, or stepping up into his house from the outside (it was raised on a slight foundation, just high enough that he would catch the front of his foot on the lip and tumble inside). Despite his efforts, he did not complete half the work he had intended to complete just the day prior. Forgiveably, he was distracted.

He did not leave his hut on the hill to show the rest of the village and he did not intend to, not for a while. This was something he had to ponder on his own first. They would have endless questions to which he himself did not yet have the answers.

Once, he had been Fierce Einar up until the day he had limped back from the looming cliff that locked them on the seaside, having lost half his feet climbing it. He then became Lame Einar, a limping laughing stock. Though he was offered praise for his courage and gratitude for his return, it was the pity in their eyes that scorned the most. The price to pay for reaching for the sun.

In a way, that's what it had been. But they did not understand. He could not make them. If he could, he would not want to. For it was not the fall that had rendered him feeble—there had never been a physical fall, but a symbolic one—it was the man (or demon, if such a thing existed) waiting for him at the top.

"You're cold, I can see," the dark man had said. "I could save your toes, make you warm again."

Even now, Einar could not quite describe what he felt. He did want to be warm again, yes. But he very much feared being warm, whatever it meant.

He had said no, in so many words, and the dark man said one more chance. Just one.

When Einar declined again, he found himself paralyzed. It was unnatural, evil magic. No matter what he did, his limbs would not obey his commands. The dark man produced a knife so sinister that even now, in Einar's nightmares, it was the image of the knife that haunted him, not the numb horror after the blade had landed, nor the burst of red in the snow when half of each foot was severed from him.

At the time, Einar could imagine no reason that the dark man had slowed the bleeding enough to save his life other than to watch him suffer for the rest of it, crippled, ostracized, cursed to a life with his father. But not long after Einar returned, something withered inside that bitter old man, and with it his father withered away too. At least Einar had been spared him. But everything else that had once been promised the tall, strong, fearsome Einar had sapped away. No longer able to live his life as a fisherman, he made himself a willful recluse, and tended to the critters in the meadow outside the village. He provided the women mutton for meals, bones for buttons, wool for socks, leather for sandals and sinew for sewing. For what could have been, it was a life. A fine life.

A life. One. Alone.

The strength he once possessed deteriorated without use, the quiet confidence he embodied passed away, and eventually even the fortitude to hold a conversation became as deformed as his feet.

He was still barely a man when Water Claire washed ashore, russet hair and flecked eyes green like his meadow, and slowly she found a way into his life, as water finds a way to seep through cracks and rejoin the stream. At first they had called her selkie, then they had called her wanton, and finally they had named her Mother, long after she had left, for he had trained her how to climb out of their village—and his life—to find a babe she had birthed long ago, whose name she did not even know.

Then he had decided this was why the dark man had let him live after all, for the worst pain he had ever endured was showing the only person he had ever loved how to leave him behind forever.

He had never found her red rock—the symbol she said she would throw down from the top of the cliff to show them all that she had made it, that she was alive, but somehow he knew that having his feet back...it was her. It had to be because of her.

The summer days were long, and though the sun had started to sink, he knew he would have still plenty of daylight left before the stars would take to the sky. He wrapped his feet in leather thongs he had fashioned from old scraps (for he did not possess shoes proper enough for whole feet) and made his way down the meadow path and up to the rocky cliff face, to the place where he had once made his climb, to the place where he had bid her goodbye with a kiss.

He had not been able to properly walk this path since he was but a willful young boy who fancied himself a man. Once she had gone he had returned here every day for years, searching where he could for her stone. Neither he nor Alys, his only friend and ally, could search very far. At the behest of Alys, some of the other villagers had come in search for the red stone. Able-bodied Bethan, who had been like a younger sister to Claire, would scour the piles; her little sister Elen would come, and their mother Bryn would too, on her good days. Even Tall Andras had come in search of the rock, despite having scorned Claire once he learned she had lain with a man without being wed, and seemed hopeful of finding a trace of her. But they found nothing, and eventually the village lost interest in trying to find her memory, Alys passed on in old age, and Einar was left with a terrible, yawning hole in his chest where the yearning was enough to buckle him.

Knowing it was folly, he stepped onto the rocky slope anyway, and the nervousness had his toes already beading with sweat. Carefully, very carefully, he picked his way up the slope until he reached the rock wall, calling memories back from another life. Thinking twice before he made a movement, he stepped and cleared rocks away, making sure to hold his balance, sometimes on his knees.

After the world dimmed around him, he stopped his folly and stood against the rock wall. Of course he would not find her red rock. Not because the others had already combed this place for a sign, but because she had never thrown it. She did not make it.

No. He pinched the bridge of his nose. No, she was not gone. Again, he looked at his newfound feet. If he could be whole and walk again, then there was no doubt that such a miracle as her could still exist.

"No," he said aloud. Firm. As resolute as he had been half his life ago. He looked up at the cliff and could not even see the top, it was so high.

No. He would go after her. He would climb again. One more chance.

Just one.