A bundle of dried silverwort slipped from the crooked shelf above the back counter and burst against the flagstones in a shower of papery grey leaves. The sound was small and final, the way things sound in a room where no one is breathing.
Astrid Beckford heard it from the lane.
She had been three shops away, counting chimney pots out of habit, when a draught off the moor caught the shop door of Malliver's Sundries and rattled it twice in its frame. The smell of camphor and dried thyme rolled out into the street. She stopped walking.
The lane was called Lantern Street, though no one had lit a lantern on it in living memory. The cobbles were green-black with damp, and the gable ends of the row leaned toward each other like old women comparing aches. At the far end, where the street bent toward the market square, a pie cart was doing a quiet trade. Nobody looked toward the herb shop.
Astrid walked faster.
The door of Malliver's was never fully latched. Old Malliver had been dead four winters, and the lock had a tongue that slipped at the slightest kindness. Astrid pushed it with her fingertips and stepped into a room that smelled of dried peel and candle grease and something sharper underneath, a mineral tang that prickled the inside of her nose.
"Mother?"
The word came out before she could stop it. She had not called her mother that in years. She had not seen her mother in this shop, either. Her mother kept house in the long cottage at the edge of the Beckford land and never came to town if she could help it. But the word had a shape in this room, and the shape had called it out.
"Mother," Astrid said, quieter, "are you here?"
No answer. The second drawer from the top of the apothecary chest stood half-open, a tangle of reddish string spilling from it onto the floor. A jar of something dark had rolled against the leg of the counter and lay on its side, stopper gone, its contents beading on the flagstones in a thin amber line. Astrid's boot found the stickiness before her eye did. She crouched, touched the wet stone with her thumb, brought it to her tongue.
Honey. Burnt.
She straightened slowly.
"Miren?" she said. The second name came easier than the first, but the silence it fell into was the same.
The shop had a long shape to it, the counter at one end and a back room behind a curtain of stained green serge. Astrid crossed to the counter and put her hands flat on it. A ring of dust marked where a till had once been bolted down. Whoever had been minding the place had left it in a hurry, and the hurry was recent.
"Mother Beckford," Astrid tried. "Are you in the back?"
A sound came from behind the curtain. Not a word. A breath that had words caught in it, as if a voice had tried to climb out of a chest and given up.
Astrid took the curtain in her fist and pulled it aside.
Her grandmother Miren lay on her side on the floor of the back room, one hand outstretched toward the leg of a wooden stool, the other curled against her collarbone. Around her, in a scatter that looked deliberate, lay bundles of dried silverwort, their grey leaves already stirring in the draught from the street. Their smell filled the small room, dusty and metallic, like the air after a lightning strike.
"Gran." Astrid was on her knees before she knew she had moved. Her hands found her grandmother's face. The skin was cold but not gone cold. The eyes were half-open and moving under the lids. "Gran, can you hear me?"
Miren's lips worked. The breath came again, this time shaped into something closer to a word.
"Thread," she said. "Broken thread."
"Gran, it's Astrid. Hold still. Let me look at you."
"Don't pull it. Don't pull the thread." Miren's hand came up and gripped Astrid's wrist with a strength that did not belong to her. Her eyes opened properly, pale and too bright. "I had it, girl. I had the line. The thread was there, and now it is broken."
"You're safe," Astrid said. "You're in Malliver's shop. I'm here."
Miren stared past her at the bundles on the floor. Her brow creased, and the creases were older than the woman underneath.
"Silverwort," she said. "I brought the silverwort for the threading. Where is the threading?" She tried to push herself upright. Her elbow gave and she sagged back. "Where has it gone?"
Astrid looked at the bundles. She had seen silverwort her whole life. It grew on the peat hags above the Hollowfern works, a pale, hairy plant that the old women picked at midsummer for threading and burning. Her grandmother had been a thread-woman once, before the knees went and the eyes got too close to the page. Astrid had not known she still kept a line.
"Gran, listen to me. I'm going to help you sit up. Lean into me."
She got a shoulder under Miren's arm and lifted. Miren weighed less than a sack of kindling. The bones of her upper arm were sharp under the wool of her sleeve. When she was upright, propped against the leg of the stool, she kept her hand on Astrid's wrist.
"There was a thread," Miren said again, more slowly. "It went through the room. I could feel it. And then something crossed it. Something with weight on it. And the thread went out like a blown lamp." She blinked at the bundles. "I had marked them. They were marked. Look at the tying."
Astrid looked. The bundles had been tied with red string, each one knotted in a particular way, a kind of clove hitch she had seen her grandmother do a hundred times. Three of them were now untied. The string lay loose among the leaves.
"Something untied them," Miren said. "Not a person. Something with hands but not hands." She looked at Astrid then, properly. "Did you come alone?"
"Yes."
"You were not sent?"
"No. I was in town. I heard something. I came in."
Miren's mouth pressed thin. The brightness in them was still wrong, but the woman underneath had begun to reassemble herself around the eyes.
"Sit down," she said. "No. Stay where you are. Don't sit on the floor." She struggled to her feet on her own, using the stool. Astrid reached to steady her and was shaken off with a small, impatient motion. "I'm not a sack of oats. Help me to the stool, not onto it."
Astrid helped her. Miren settled, hands on her knees, breathing through her nose.
"Look at the door," Miren said.
Astrid looked. The door to the street was still where they had left it, half-open, the camphor smell still rolling in. Through the gap, Lantern Street went about its small business. A cart rattled past, going too fast for the cobbles. A woman in a green shawl called something to her daughter across the way.
"There," Miren said. "That is how it was when I came in. The door was open. I thought the draught had knocked the bundles down. I knelt to gather them. And then I heard the thread go."
"You heard a thread break."
"I heard it. A sound like a long string pulled past a nail. It came from the corner, there, where the wall meets the chest. Then the bundles were down and I could not remember kneeling." She put a hand to her chest and coughed, a small, dry sound. "I want water."
"There is a jug on the counter," Astrid said. "Stay there. I will fetch it."
She brought the jug and a chipped cup. Miren drank without comment, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her hand was trembling, the way hands tremble when the body has decided to admit what the mind is still hiding.
"Now then," Miren said. She set the cup on the floor. "You are here. You came in. That is one thing. Sit down, Astrid, I have a question for you."
Astrid sat on the floor across from her, among the scattered silverwort. The leaves tickled her ankles. The smell of them was very strong now, and under it the burnt honey, and under that the cold mineral tang she had smelled coming in.
"When did you last see your sister?" Miren said.
Astrid opened her mouth. The answer came out before she could weigh it.
"Three months ago. The morning she left for the peatworks."
"And before that? What did she tell you?"
Astrid hesitated. Her grandmother was watching her with eyes that had stopped their trembling and gone sharp.
"She told me she had found something in the ledger," Astrid said. "A line about a worker who went missing from the works in the year before I was born. She said the line went cold on the page when she touched it."
Miren nodded once, slowly. The nod had a weight to it that Astrid did not like.
"Did she say the name of the worker?"
"She said she would not write it down. She said some names belong to the page and should not be lifted from it."
"That is a thing Miren would say," her grandmother said. "It is also a thing she should not have said to you."
"She said it to me because I was the only one who would listen."
"Yes." Miren's voice softened for the first time. The softness sat on her face the way frost sits on a window, brief and bright. "That is why I am asking. Did she say anything else?"
Astrid thought. The morning in question had been a cold one, late October, the kind of morning when the milk freezes in the pail on the back step. Miren had come into the kitchen with her hair still damp from the pump and her boots already on. She had eaten a piece of bread standing up. She had kissed Astrid on the temple and said, "If I am not back by supper, look in the green tin under my bed." Then she had gone out the back door and down the lane, and Astrid had heard her boots on the gravel for longer than the lane should have allowed.
"She said," Astrid said slowly, "that the ledger remembered more than the town did. And that there was a name in it that the town had been told to forget."
Miren closed her eyes. When she opened them, the brightness was back, but it had settled lower, like a lamp turned down.
"She was right," Miren said. "The town has been told to forget. I was one of those who did the telling. We thought it was kindness. We thought it was mercy." She paused. "It was not mercy. It was the same thing the peatworks does to a body. It covers it and it presses it down and it calls the covering good ground."
She put her hand on Astrid's knee.
"I have lost the line," she said. "The silverwort thread I keep, the one I use to follow what is hidden in the moors, it was laid across this room and it has been cut. Whatever cut it is still close. Do you feel it?"
Astrid did feel it. She had felt it since she walked in. It was the prickling at the back of her throat, the way the hair on her arms had stood up the moment she crossed the threshold. She had put it down to the cold, to the camphor, to her own uneasiness at being in a dead woman's shop. She knew now it was not any of those.
"Yes," she said. "I feel something."
"Then we do not stay here," Miren said. "Help me up. We are going out the back way, through the yard."
"The back door is locked. I saw the bolt when I came in."
"It is not locked. It is barred. There is a difference. The bar is on our side. Reach under the chest. There is a hook."
Astrid reached under the chest. Her fingers found the iron hook and lifted the bar from its cradle. The back door gave. A blade of grey daylight fell into the room and laid itself along the floor between them.
"Out," Miren said. "Now. Quickly. And do not look back."
Astrid helped her grandmother through the door and out into the narrow yard behind Malliver's. The yard was stacked with crates and the smell of old rope. A single magpie sat on the ridge of the roof and watched them go.
The yard stank of tar and brine and something sweeter underneath, like overripe pears left to blister in a cupboard. Astrid kept one arm around her grandmother's waist and felt the bones there, the way they shifted under her grip like pebbles in a shifting bag. Miren was lighter than she had any right to be. Three months of peatworks, of whatever Miren had been doing in that dark, and she had come back as half a woman.
The magpie on the ridge clicked its beak once and took off, its black and white a stitch against the grey cloth of the sky.
"Astrid." Miren's voice was in her ear, low and urgent. "When we reach the gate, do not stop. Do not look into the yard of the inn. Do not speak to anyone."
"Grandmother, who cut the thread?"
"Not here."
They reached the gate. It was a low thing of green-painted slats, warped so that the latch had to be lifted before it would give. Astrid lifted it. The hinges screamed. She winced and pushed through, drawing Miren after her into the alley that ran behind the row.
The alley was narrow and cobbled and ran with a thin stream of dark water that smelled of iron. A cat watched them from a window ledge. Somewhere a child was singing, high and reedy, a song Astrid half-remembered from her own childhood, the one about the lady who walked into the well.
They made their way down the alley to the lane, then to the street. The wind hit them as they came around the corner of the chemist's. It was coming off the moor, grey and smelling of wet heather and far-off rain. Astrid pulled the collar of her coat up around her grandmother's neck and tucked the ends in.
"The Three Bells," Miren said. "Take me to the Three Bells. There is a room at the back they let me have when I first came back. No one asks questions there."
They walked. Astrid matched her pace to her grandmother's, which was slow, which was the pace of someone who had spent three months in a place that had tried to press her into the ground. The street was quiet for a morning. A woman came out of the post office and looked at them and looked away. A dog trotted past, its tags clinking. None of it touched them. They moved through the town like a single shape, Astrid tall and straight, Miren small and bent, their shadows fused on the cobbles ahead of them.
The Three Bells stood at the edge of the market square, a tall narrow house with a faded sign of three golden bells swinging in the wind. The door was propped open with a brick. Inside it was warm and smelled of woodsmoke and bacon and the sweet dark tang of old ale. A man behind the bar looked up at them, looked at Miren, and looked away again. He did not greet them. He did not ask what they wanted. He jerked his head toward a door at the back of the passage and went back to polishing a glass.
"His name is Pol," Miren said as they made their way down the passage. "He does not like me. But he is more afraid of me than he dislikes me, and that is a useful arrangement."
"You have made useful arrangements."
"I have made what arrangements I could. There is not much else one can do down a well."
They reached the door. Miren took the latch herself this time. She lifted it and the door swung inward onto a small room with a low ceiling and a single window, the glass thick and bubbled and old. A bed with a patchwork quilt. A small table with a candle stub and a clay pot and a book. A chair. A small fire in the grate, barely alive, a few embers pulsing under a skin of ash. Miren made her way to the chair and lowered herself into it with a slow careful motion, as if her joints were made of something that might break if she moved too fast.
Astrid shut the door behind them and stood with her back to it. Her hands were shaking. She looked down at them and watched them shake. It was not the cold. It was the relief, and the fear, and the strangeness of standing in a room in an inn in a town she had been trying to find for three months, looking at a grandmother she had not been sure she would ever see again.
"Sit," Miren said. "You are making me nervous, standing there like that. You are making me think of your grandfather. He used to stand in doorways. I never could break him of it. Sit, Astrid."
Astrid sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress was firm and smelled faintly of lavender and something sharper, like turpentine.
"The chamomile," Miren said. "Is there any left in the tin?"
"Yes."
"Pour it. Into the clay pot. Let it steep a moment. Then I will drink. It will help. I have not eaten in a long while, and the stuff down the well does not nourish a body the way food does. It nourishes a body in other ways, but not those ways."
Astrid took the battered tin from her pocket. It was lighter than she expected. She pried up the lid. Inside were a few dried blossoms, pale and thin as old paper, and a folded scrap of paper. She set the blossoms in the clay pot and poured a little water from the jug on the table, water that was barely warm. The blossoms did not steep so much as soften, giving up a faint sour perfume that filled the small room.
Miren watched her. Her eyes were clearer now, the fog in them thinning, though the hollows under them were deep and dark.
"You found the tin," she said. "I am glad. I was not sure you would."
"Where did you leave it?"
"In the place I always leave important things. Behind the loose stone in the chimney. The stone that is loose because your grandfather would not have it fixed. He said a house ought to have at least one secret place in it, even if the secret is only a hiding spot for a tin of chamomile and a letter from a man who drowned."
"You are speaking in riddles, Grandmother."
"I am not. I am speaking in the only way I can. The peatworks has done something to my head. The words come out strange. I can feel them coming out wrong, but the right ones will not come."
Astrid brought the pot to her and held it while Miren took two small sips. The smell of chamomile rose into the room, and for a moment the room was only a room in an inn, and the old woman in the chair was only an old woman drinking chamomile, and the morning outside was only a morning in a market town in the north of England.
Then Miren set the pot down and looked up at her.
"Listen to me," she said. "I am going to tell you what I can. I will not be able to tell you all of it, but I will tell you what I can. Then I am going to give you a thing, and you are going to take it and you are going to do what I cannot do. You are going to read it. And you are going to decide what to do with it. And you are not going to ask me to come with you, because I cannot. I am not well enough. I am not whole enough."
"What is the thing?"
"The Hollowfern Ledger."
Astrid had heard of the Ledger. Every child in Hollowfern had heard of it. It was the book the old peat-cutters used to keep, the one where they wrote down what they found in the cuts. Sometimes it was only the things you would expect, a Roman coin, a horn of a beast long since gone. Sometimes it was the things you would not expect at all, and those were the entries the old men would not read aloud, the ones they kept for themselves, the ones they passed on to whoever in the family had the gift.
"Where is it?" Astrid asked.
"It is in the tin. The folded paper. It is not a paper. It is a leaf. A leaf of the Ledger, taken out and folded small enough to fit in a tin of chamomile. I have had it since I was a girl. I have been waiting for the right time to read it, and the right time is now, and I am not the one who is meant to read it. I am the one who is meant to keep it until the right one comes."
"Why me?"
"Because you have steady hands. And because you are the one who came. There is a thing I was told, long ago, by a man who came up out of the river in a storm. He said that the Ledger would be read by someone with steady hands before the equinox. He said the hands would be a Beckford's hands. He did not say whose. I thought it would be your mother's. It was not your mother. It was not me. So it must be you."
"Must it?"
"Or your sister. But Fenna has been gone from the moors a long time, and I do not feel her in this. I feel you. So it must be you. Unless you tell me your hands are not steady."
Astrid looked down at her hands. They were still shaking. But the shaking was less. It was the kind of shaking that comes from a thing being over, not from a thing beginning.
"They are steady enough," she said.
"Then take it. Take the tin. Take what is inside it. Read it tonight, by candle, alone. Do not read it aloud to anyone. Do not let anyone read it over your shoulder. When you have read it, you will know what to do. If you do not know what to do, come back to me and I will tell you what I know, which is not much, but is more than nothing."
Astrid took the tin from the table. The tin was lighter than it had been. She did not know why. The folded paper was still in it, she could feel it through the metal, a small hard square.
"Grandmother."
"Yes."
"What is the Ledger? Truly."
Miren was quiet for a long moment. The fire in the grate ticked. A bell rang somewhere in the inn, the sound muffled and far.
"It is a record," Miren said at last. "Of the things that live under the moor. Not the birds, not the sheep, not the things that walk in the daylight. The other things. The ones that were here before us. The ones the Romans made their roads around. The ones the monks built their walls against. The ones your grandfather would not speak of, because he was afraid of them, and he was not a man who would admit to being afraid of anything. The Ledger is the record of those things. The places they go. The names they have. The things they want. The things they give in exchange for what they want. It is the most dangerous book in the north of England, and it has been in my keeping since I was nineteen years old, and I have read it seven times, and I have understood it less each time, and I am giving it to you because the equinox is in eleven days, and if it is not read by then, something will go down into the cuts that will not come back up."
"What will go down?"
"I do not know. That is the truth. I do not know. I know it is coming. I know it has to do with the peatworks. I know it has to do with your sister. I know it has to do with the man in the river. I do not know what it is. That is what the Ledger is for. The Ledger will say."
Astrid sat with the tin in her hands. The tin was cold. Her grandmother was looking at her with those fogged eyes that were clearing by the minute, and there was something in them that Astrid had never seen before. It was not fear, though there was fear in it. It was not love, though there was love in it. It was the look of a woman who had been carrying a thing for a long time and was about to set it down.
"Drink your chamomile," Astrid said. "And then we will talk about the rest."
The chamomile was cold by then. The Wellwife did not seem to mind. She drank it in three long swallows, the way a field hand drinks water at the end of a row, and set the cup on the bedside table with a small ceramic click that sounded, in the quiet of the cottage, like the closing of a latch.
Then she told the rest.
Not in order. Not in any way Astrid could have followed, if she had not spent the last three years learning to read the bones of stories for the shape of the thing underneath. The Wellwife told it in the way the old tellers tell: in circles, in images, in the smell of a thing and the weight of a thing, trusting the listener to do the work of joining the seams.
She told of a man named Vassle who had once been a man and was now the god of the river below the peatworks, though god was not the right word and man was not the right word either, and the Wellwife did not have a better one. She told of a bargain he had made, long ago, with the people of the cuts, and of what he had been given in exchange for what he gave, and of the price that had to be paid, in his name, every hundred years, when the river ran backward and the bell in the weathervane tower rang three times at dusk.
She told of Miren.
Astrid's hands tightened on the tin.
Miren had come to the cottage on a Tuesday in early September, the Wellwife said. She had come without warning, the way Miren did everything, with her satchel over her shoulder and her hair full of peat-smoke and a look on her face that the Wellwife had recognized at once. It was the look of a person who had seen a thing she could not stop seeing.
"She had been down to the cuts," the Wellwife said. "Past the second marker. Past the third. She had been to the place where the river goes under the hill, and she had seen something there that she would not describe to me, only that it had too many arms, and it was weeping, and its weeping was the sound of the water moving over the stones."
Astrid's mouth was dry.
"She asked me about the Ledger. Of course she did. She asked me if it was true that there were things written in it that could not be unwritten. I told her yes. She asked me if it was true that the Ledger could be used to summon what was written. I told her yes. She asked me if it was true that what was summoned could be made to forget what it had been summoned for. I told her no."
The Wellwife paused. She was looking at the candle on the table. The flame was steady now, though the air in the cottage had begun to move, a slow draft from under the door, carrying the smell of the moor.
"She did not ask me for the Ledger. I want you to know that. She did not ask me for it, and I did not give it to her. What she asked me for was a stone. A river-stone. One of the smooth ones that Vassle is said to speak through, if you know how to listen. I gave her one. I should not have. I knew when I gave it that I should not have. But she was your sister, and she had that look, and I am an old woman who has outlived her usefulness for courage, and I gave her the stone."
The draft strengthened. The flame bent sideways and then righted itself. Somewhere outside, a dog began to bark, then stopped.
"She went back to the cuts. I do not know what she did there. I do not know what she asked the river, or what the river asked her in return. I know that she did not come back up. I know that for three days I walked the moors and called her name, and on the fourth day I went down to the cuts myself, and I stood at the place where the river goes under the hill, and I listened, and I heard her."
Astrid could not speak.
"I heard her voice through the stone. Not her real voice. The voice that comes back when a person has been under for a while. It was thin. It was tired. It was hers."
The Wellwife turned to Astrid. The fog had gone from her eyes. They were clear now, and wet, and very old.
"She said: tell Astrid. Tell Astrid it was not his fault. Tell Astrid the man in the river is not what she thinks. Tell Astrid to read the Ledger before the equinox. Tell Astrid the bell will ring and she must not answer it, no matter what voice it uses, no matter what name it calls her by."
The draft died. The candle flame stood up straight. The cottage was very quiet.
"She is alive," the Wellwife said. "She is under. Vassle has her. He is keeping her the way he keeps all the things he is given in payment, in the cold beneath the hill, where the river runs backward. She is alive because he has not yet been paid for her. When he is paid, she will not be."
The tin was cold in Astrid's hands. The Ledger was inside it. The Ledger was the size of a prayer book and the weight of a sin and it had been in her grandmother's keeping for sixty years and now it was in hers.
"What is the payment?" Astrid said. Her voice was very steady. Her hands were not.
"The payment is a reading," the Wellwife said. "A reading of the Ledger, on the night of the equinox, at the place where the river goes under the hill. If the Ledger is read, Vassle is paid, and your sister is released into whatever comes next. If the Ledger is read by the wrong person, or in the wrong way, or with the wrong intention, Vassle is paid twice over, and what comes up from the cuts will not be your sister, and will not be Vassle, and will not be anything that has a name in any book I have ever read."
Astrid looked down at the tin. The paper label was yellow. The handwriting was old. The clasp was a simple thing, brass, green at the edges.
"Who is the right person?" she said.
"You are," the Wellwife said. "You are the eldest. You were named for the rowan. You have the look."
"What look?"
"The look of a person who can hold two truths at once and not be broken by either of them. Your sister had the look too, but her courage was of a different kind, and it carried her down instead of up. Yours will carry you the other way."
Astrid sat with the tin in her lap. Outside, the light was going. The afternoon was thinning at the edges. The bell in the weathervane tower of the village of Thistlehollow, three miles to the south, would ring at dusk. She knew the sound. She had heard it all her life. She had never thought to listen to what it was ringing for.
"How long has she been down there?" Astrid said.
"Three months," the Wellwife said. "Three months and eleven days."
"And the equinox?"
"Eleven days."
Astrid closed her eyes. She could see, behind her lids, the map she had been drawing on the parlor floor. The cut. The river. The hill. The bend where the water ran backward. She could see, overlaid on it, the path Miren would have taken. Down the moor path. Past the second marker. Past the third. To the place where the river went under. She could see the stone in Miren's hand. She could see Miren kneeling at the water's edge. She could see Miren listening.
She could not see what Miren had heard.
"I will read it," Astrid said.
"Not tonight," the Wellwife said. "Tonight you rest. Tonight you take the tin to your room and you do not open it. Tomorrow you take the train to Thistlehollow, and you walk up to the moors, and you find Old Bram at his goat-fold, and you ask him about the man in the river, because Old Bram was the one who found the body in '68, and he has never spoken of it to anyone, and he will speak of it to you because you have the look and because your sister once did him a kindness he has not forgotten. You will need what he knows. You will need it before you open the tin."
Astrid opened her eyes.
"And the bell?" she said.
"If it rings while you are in Thistlehollow, you do not answer it. If it rings at your name, you do not answer it. If it rings in a voice that sounds like your sister's, you do not answer it. You cover your ears. You say the rowan prayer. You wait for the third ring to fade. Then you go on with what you are doing. Do you understand?"
"I understand."
"Say it back to me."
"If the bell rings, I do not answer. If it calls my name, I do not answer. If it sounds like Miren, I do not answer. I cover my ears. I say the rowan prayer. I wait for the third ring to fade. Then I go on."
The Wellwife nodded. She reached out and took Astrid's free hand. Her grip was stronger than it looked. Her hand was cold and her fingers were like the twigs of the rowan at the gate.
"Your sister is alive," she said. "Hold that. Whatever else you learn, hold that. She is under, and she is cold, and she is tired, and she is afraid, but she is alive, and she will stay alive until the equinox, because Vassle is a river god and river gods are bound by their bargains, and the bargain is not yet paid. Hold that. It is the only clean thing you will have for the next eleven days."
Astrid held it. She held it the way she had been taught to hold a contour line on a map: firm, clear, drawn through.
The Wellwife let go of her hand. She lay back against the pillows. The exertion of the telling had taken something out of her. Her eyes were closing.
"Leave the candle," she murmured. "I like the light. And take the chamomile when you go. The goats will drink it, but they will not mind."
Astrid stood. She tucked the tin under her arm. She straightened the quilt over her grandmother's knees. The brass clasp was cool against her ribs.
At the door she turned back.
"Grandmother."
"Mm."
"The man in the river. The one Vassle was. The one who drowned. Who was he?"
The Wellwife did not open her eyes.
"He was a Beckford," she said. "He was your great-great-uncle. He was the one who made the first bargain. He was the one who went down. He has been down for a hundred and twelve years."
The cottage was quiet. The candle burned. The draft had stopped.
Astrid went out into the yard. The chamomile was in her hand. The tin was under her arm. The rowan at the gate was just beginning to turn at the edges of its leaves, the first red of the autumn coming up through the green like a slow flame.
She did not open the tin.
She walked to the goat-fold, and poured the chamomile into the trough, and the goats came to drink, and the sound of their drinking was small and many and alive.
Then she went inside, and put the tin on the table in her room, and sat down on the bed, and took out her notebook, and began to draw the map of what she had learned.
The bell in the weathervane tower of Thistlehollow rang three times at dusk. She covered her ears. She said the rowan prayer. She waited for the third ring to fade.
It faded.
She went on.