It was the night of the full moon when I went to the back field to talk to Rind, and it was bitterly cold and dead silent. The moon cast a silvery sheen on everything, and the frost glittered everywhere. I brought her a tankard of white goat's milk and a plateful of sugar-powdered cookies, artfully arranged in the shape of a snowflake. She came immediately - she had been expecting me - and she was tall, slender, with long black hair and a flowing blue-white dress that glittered like frost. She smiled, and was friendly, but her presence was like an extra chill in the freezing air. I was very glad of my warm frost-giant coat, especially when she instructed me to sit down and meditate, on an ice-covered lawn chair in the moonlight.

She stood behind me and instructed me. Her demeanor was friendly, even cheerful, but at one point I made a small bad joke and she looked at me, and I immediately apologized. Frost-giantesses are all intimidating, even when they have decided to like you for the moment. She had me swing a small weight on a string, like a pendulum, in horizontal circles; this was part of the exercise. I was instructed to make something special for this purpose, a "stone the color of frost" on a string that could be swung slower and faster as I breathed. She told me that it could also be done with a "singing stick", and the image she sent me was of something rather like a bullroarer, but that was for outside as it took up a lot of space and made a lot of noise; a small pendulum was better for inside.

Rind's Lesson

Breathe in. Yes, it's cold. Feel the frost. Feel the tears in your eyes starting to freeze. That's important, because without freezing, crystallizing, you cannot stop Time. They say that Time is a river, always flowing, not a series of crystallized moments like beads on a string, but really it is both. There is more than one way to move through Time. There is Unn's way, which is Water, and there is my way, which is Wind and Frost. Without Wind, you do not move, and without Frost, you cannot stop.

Why move through time at all? That's something that Unn won't tell you; she is as shifty as the ocean itself. Because sometimes, in order to find the truth of something, you must go back to when it happened. To change things, no, that isn't allowed; the Norns will sabotage your efforts, and it is like nothing for them to do that. Don't waste the energy. And remember that even if you go there and see through your eyes, it is only your eyes; not the eyes of those who told the tale, and there are things you might miss or see differently. But this is only something to be done rarely. You do not know how easy it is to get lost in Time.

Breathe out, now. Blow it out. Spin. Don't breathe with the spinning; spin with the breathing. You are gathering the winds of Time, which is different from the winds of space. You are going backwards, so you know which way to spin, yes? Indeed, widdershins, against the turn of the sun. To go forward again - which you must do, the same number of breaths and spins, and you will know how many because you will feel it fall into place - spin sunwise.