The Pictish Child by Jane Yolen

miss her sorely. We’ve been the best of friends since childhood, and noo she’s gone away. As far away as ever she could.”
    â€œAnd you wish she were back?”
    â€œMaybe I just wish I were with her!” said Gran. She dried her eyes with the apron. “And dinna ye be telling Da I said so, or I’ll have a year of explaining to do.”
    Just then they heard a key turning in the lock. “Speak of the auld de’il himself,” said Gran. “What a story we shall have at tea!”
    And they did, too, though no one quite believed it. Not even themselves.

A Scottish Glossary
    aboot —about
    ain —own
    auld —old
    bairn —child
    besom —unpleasant woman
    blether —nonsense
    bricht —beautiful (as in a beautiful woman)
    brolly —umbrella
    canna —cannot
    carline —old woman, witch
    clan —one’s extended family
    crisps —potato chips
    cummer —witch
    dab —light, soft, fine
    daft —crazy
    de’il —devil
    didna —did not
    dinna —do not
    dreech —wet, dreary
    fash —bother, annoy
    fob —to palm (off) something
    glundie —a fool
    gomeril —loud-talking fool
    gormless —stupid
    greetin —crying, weeping
    greetin teenie —someone who is always complaining
    haar —a sea mist
    hae —have
    havering —going on and on about something
    hokeypokey —ice cream; hocus pocus
    honk —throw up, vomit
    keep us —God keep us safe
    ken —know
    kin —relatives
    lad, laddie —a boy
    laiging —gossiping
    lang —long
    lass, lassie —a girl or young woman
    midden —dung heap
    muckle —great
    nae —not, no
    nain —none
    noo —now
    puir —poor
    sommat —somewhat, something
    tea —can be used to mean supper
    wardrobe —a stand-alone closet
    wee —little, very little
    wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous —from the Robert Burns poem “To a Mouse,” it means “small, sleek, cowering, frightened”
    weel —well
    wellies —short for “Wellingtons,” rubber boots
    willna —will not
    wi’oot —without

A Personal History by Jane Yolen
    I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison’s birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!
    We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army’s secret radio.
    When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.
    I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book, Owl Moon —died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.
    And I am still writing.
    I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in Newsweek close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.
    The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over