Hanne found the ring in the hedge by the top gate in the last week of March, when the ground under the hedge was still hard as a floor. She had gone up for a wren’s nest that had fallen out and was lying in the wet grass, and she was on her knees with her arm in to the elbow when her sleeve caught on something that was not wood. She thought it was wire. It was a ring. It was the colour of brass, with no stone on it and no mark anywhere. It was wedged fast in the roots of an elder. She worked it out with a stone and it came away with a handful of black mould.

She tried it on her middle finger. It went past the knuckle and would go no further. She pushed it on to her thumb instead, and it sat there, and she forgot about it inside a minute and went home with the nest in her cap. She was in the yard with the ring still on her thumb when the pedlar came up the lane. Coll, who did the lane four times in a year with thread and needles and a box of steel pins. He set his bag down on the wall and looked at her hand. “Take that off,” he said. “It came out of a hedge.” “It did not.” He did not come any closer. “Where did you put it?” “On my thumb.”

“Then it stays on your thumb, and it is not yours yet.” She had a bad minute. She got angry first, which was easy. Then she got frightened, which was worse. “What is it?” “It gives one command,” Coll said. “One. It does the words you say. It does not do the meaning you had behind them. If you say it wrong it will do the wrong thing, and it will do it exactly, and there will not be a second one to put it right. Not because I say so. Because that is the whole of it.” She looked at her thumb. “And if I say it right?”

“Then it does the right thing, exactly, once, and there is never another one. Not for you. Not for your children. Not after you are dead. Take it off and put it in the beck if you cannot say it right.” Then he shouldered his bag and went down the lane.

She kept it on for eleven weeks. She did not want a wish. She wanted an occasion. She had heard the words once and she went over them the way you go over a step in the dark. She noticed, in those eleven weeks, that people did not say what they meant. Nan Crozier said her boy was doing fine. Dolf Marrow said he would settle up in the spring. Hanne’s father said his back would be all right once the ground dried. Every one of those sentences had a great deal folded up inside it, and none of them could be got out into the open air without something breaking on the way.

So she went up to the hedge with a slate and a stub of chalk and tried sentences on, and rubbed them out. I want my father’s back to stop hurting. She rubbed that out. Stop had no end to it. A thing that had been hurting for four years did not have a place where it stopped. I want my father’s back not to hurt today. She looked at that a long time. Today. Once, and forever, and today was always going to be today. I want my father to be able to lift a seven-sack. She rubbed that out too. He would lift it, and then he would have lifted it, and nothing else in his life would have changed. She did twenty of them. There was not one that was both small and true. Every one that was small stopped short of the wanting. Every one that was true was the size of a whole life.

The asking started on the first warm day in June. Rob Dorr’s boy had seen the ring in April and had said something in a schoolyard, which is how everything in that valley ever started. Will Tarn came first. He was twenty-one and he wanted Hilde Spar, and he stood in the yard with his cap in his hands and asked her to say it for him, because he could not get his mouth round it. “Say, I want Hilde Spar to love me.”

“If I say that, she loves you,” Hanne said. “Whether or not you are worth it. All the way through, and she could not tell you why, and she would not be able to say no to you about anything else for the rest of her life.” “She would not have to say no.” “She would want to say no and she would find she could not,” Hanne said. “You would never be able to ask her one question, Will. Not one, for forty years.” He thought about it on her step for a long time, and then he went off up the lane, and Hilde Spar married a man from the next valley in the autumn.

Nan Crozier came four days after that. Her boy had been at sea two years and she had had no word since the spring before, and she had begun to say that he had been lost, which the rest of us did not repeat. “Say it,” she said. “I want my boy home.” “He is not lost.” “Say it anyway.” “If I say it, he will be home,” Hanne said, “and home is a place. He could stand in that yard and hate every board of it. He could not go back, and he would not be able to say why not, and you would spend the rest of your life not being able to ask him.”

Nan Crozier put her hand flat on the wall the way people do to hold themselves up. “He is my boy,” she said. “He is,” Hanne said. “But you have got a thing in your head that is bigger than him.”

Anneke Voss waited until July, which was longer than anybody would have expected of her. It was Eddo’s forty pounds. He had borrowed it off Dolf Marrow in the wet year to pay for Bess, and had paid back twenty-one of it in three summers, and had told everybody the rest would go in August. “Say he pays you the forty pounds,” Anneke said. “He will say he pays it in August,” Hanne said. “Say it. He will do it sooner.”

“He will do it in August, on a day of his own choosing, out of his own money, and he will be able to say he did it. If I say it, he pays you because I said so and not because he meant to. Every time, and for the rest of his life, he is a man who settles a debt the moment somebody tells him to, and there is not one thing in him you could call honest.” Anneke Voss looked at her own hands. “That is a hard thing to ask a girl,” she said. “Yes,” said Hanne.

Rob Dorr’s kettle came last, and it was the one that undid her. Everybody in the lane had heard about the ring by the summer. It had got round because Rob Dorr’s boy could not hold a thing. People came down the lane twice a week for nothing at all, and stood about, and went away again. Some of them said thank you. That was the worst. In the last week of August Hanne was in the kitchen cutting a loaf and old Rob Dorr put his head round the door. “Nine years that kettle has boiled over on me,” he said, “and taken the skin off the pot, and my wife has said words about me she has not said out loud before. You could stop it boiling over.”

“No,” said Hanne. He did not argue. He put his head on one side and looked at her, and he said, “Nine years.” “If I say it, the kettle stops boiling over,” Hanne said, “and it goes on not boiling over for the rest of your life, and you will never once see why it stopped, and you will not be able to tell anybody, and in ten years you will have forgotten that you ever asked. That is what I can give you. That exact thing, and nothing you were wanting, which was for the kettle to stop while it is on.” Rob Dorr went away up the lane without saying anything, and Hanne stood at the board with the knife in her hand, and that was the week the lane stopped thanking her.

She went up to the top gate on the first of September with the ring on her thumb and the slate in her pocket. She said out loud, “I want to stop wanting this ring,” and then she stopped, because it was not quite it. She said, “I want to want this ring less.” She said, “I want my wanting of this ring to be finished.” Then she rubbed them out on the slate, all three, and put the chalk down, because that was the trouble with wanting. It does not have an end, and until it has an end there is no saying that it has. The one she said last, standing in the elder roots with the light going, was this.

“I want to want this ring no more. From now on I will not want it. I do not ask for anything for anybody else.” She waited a long time with her hands cold, and then she said it. Nothing happened to the valley. Nothing happened to the fields or the water or the weather or to any other body on earth. Her hands stopped being interested. That was all. She felt exactly as she had felt the day she picked it up, and it came true in no way that fixed a thing.

Eddo met her at the gate with the lamp. “What did you say to it?” She told him. She told him all of it, standing in the cold, because she had not said a word to anybody since June, and her father had been the one person she had not lied to. Eddo put the lamp down on the wall. “You have spent it on saying no to yourself,” he said. “On saying the truth about myself.” “Aye,” he said. “Well. That will last you.” She never did find out what it feels like when the asking stops, which she had been promised, and which nobody could have promised her properly, because she had asked for the end of the wanting and not for the feeling of it.

Rob Dorr’s boy told everybody before the end of the week, as boys do. By Sunday there was a queue of six people down the lane with things they had brought to put in front of her, and she stood in her own yard and said no to all six, one at a time, and shut the door. Rob Dorr was the last of them, and he stood there longest, with his hand round the kettle handle.

“Aye,” he said at last. “I called her a cheat for saying no to me, and I said it in the mill for a month. I was wrong, and I will say so here before I go home. A thing like that goes to one person and one set of words, and you say the whole sentence the first time or you have wasted it for good. And she spent hers on her own self and told the truth, and that is the only thing anybody can spend one on that comes out right.”