Echo sat listening to birdsong right at the bottom of the valley, in the old place where stonemasons used to come and chip blocks out of the dark basalt. She could see the deep wheel-tracks where mules had pulled carts laden with the stone, taking them up to the village that spread out across the terraced farming land. The tortured cliffs here towered over her and she was in shadow, though the sun was bright that morning. The other children would all be playing out on the grassy fields. She wasn’t like the other children. They all had brown, sun-touched faces and pale hair that reminded her of the straw they gave to the steadily-diminishing herd of sheep. The only thing that was pale about her was her skin – white as the clouds in the sky, so they said. But her hair wasn’t like straw and n