The lock on the tin was cold under Astrid's thumb, colder than the October air seeping through the shop's warped floorboards. She had found the tin tucked behind a tower of unsold almanacs in the back room of her father's cartography shop, half-buried in dust and the brittle husks of moths that had eaten their fill and died. The tin itself was unremarkable, a coffee tin from before the war, its label faded to a smear of sepia. What had made her stop and reach for it was the sound: a faint, papery rattle from inside, as though something inside had shifted of its own accord.
She turned the tin over in her hands. No maker's mark she recognized. The lid resisted, then gave with a soft metallic sigh.
Inside, wrapped in a square of oilcloth gone yellow with age, sat a book.
Astrid's first thought was practical: inventory. Her father had taught her to catalogue every acquisition, every scrap of paper that crossed the threshold of Beckford Maps and Mercantile. She unfolded the oilcloth and let it fall to the counter, where it settled with a dry whisper. The book beneath was leather-bound, hand-stitched, the color of old blood left too long in a cupboard. Its spine bore no title, only a thin line of stamped symbols she did not recognize, repeating in a pattern that made her eye slide sideways if she looked too long.
She lifted it.
The leather yielded under her fingers with a suppleness that suggested it had been handled often, or oiled with something that kept it from cracking across decades. A smell rose from the opened cover, not the must of old paper but something greener, wetter, like peat freshly cut and left to bleed into a pan of dark water. Beneath that, faint, came a trace of something floral that she could not name.
She opened the book to the first page.
The handwriting was not ink. Astrid knew ink. She had spent three years apprenticing under her father, copying coastlines and contour lines in India ink thinned with walnut oil, in the iron-gall brown that her grandmother had favored. What lay before her on the page was a script the color of foxfire, a faint green-white luminescence that seemed to pulse when she tilted the page toward the grey light from the shop window. The letters were precise, small, and crowded, written in a hand that did not belong to any century she could date.
She touched the page with the tip of her index finger.
The letters brightened where her skin made contact. A coldness climbed her finger, not unpleasant, more like the first touch of a stone step in a cellar that has never seen sun. The glow spread outward from her fingertip in a slow ripple, as though the ink were waking, and the names on the page grew clearer. She could read them now.
Eleanor Voss. One fathom of hempen rope, never delivered. Balance owing: a winter's worth of truthful dreaming.
Astrid's breath caught. She turned the page.
Thomas Reddaway. Three firkins of milk, paid in full. Witness: a stone in the shape of a tooth.
Another page. Names she had never heard of, names she half-remembered from village gossip, names that belonged to families whose graves stood in the churchyard with lichen-eaten headstones. Debts beside them, tallies in an unfamiliar currency. Some entries were marked settled in a small, neat hand. Others bore a single symbol at the margin, the same symbol that ran down the spine of the book, and beside that symbol, a date, or what looked like a date, and the words unfinished or unsealed or, once, witness fled .
She turned more pages, faster now, the green-white light following her fingers as though it had been waiting. The shop's back room smelled of camphor and old wool and, beneath it, the dark wet tang of the book itself. A bell rang distantly at the front of the shop, the door her father had installed to alert him when a customer entered, but she did not move. She could not.
There, three pages in, in a hand slightly different from the others, a name she knew.
Miren Beckford. Bargain struck: passage through the Hollowfern peatworks, one-way, against a debt of three years' service to the ledger's holder. Witness: the standing stone at the Beckford well. Status: UNFINISHED.
The room tilted.
Astrid pressed both palms flat against the counter, the book open beneath them, and felt the luminescence creep up the heels of her hands like cold water rising in a boot. The letters of her sister's name glowed brighter than the rest, a soft green halo around the strokes of ink. She read the entry again. She read it a third time, mouthing the words, tasting the cold metal of each syllable.
Three years' service. One-way passage. Hollowfern.
Three months ago, Miren had set out from the cottage at first light, a satchel over her shoulder, a jar of rendered fat for the lantern, and a kiss left on Astrid's sleeping forehead. She had said she would be back before the week was out. She had said the peatworks owed the village an explanation for the cough that had taken their grandfather and their uncle both. She had said she had found something in the ledgers at the church, something that did not add up.
She had not come back.
Their father had ridden to the peatworks and returned with the foreman's denial and a shake of the head. The constable had walked the fen roads and found nothing. The villagers had set candles at the shrine of Saint Brigid and muttered about girls who wandered where they had no business wandering, and life had gone on, the way life did, the way it always did in a place like Hollowfen, where the land swallowed secrets the way the bog swallowed cartwheels.
Astrid had not gone on.
She had spent three months at the counter, drawing maps of places that did not exist, charting coastlines for clients who would never sail them, and all the while she had been looking. She had gone through her sister's room with a lamp and a steady hand. She had pried up the loose board beneath Miren's bed and found a thimble and a folded letter that said only ask the well, it knows . She had walked to the Beckford well at the standing stone at the edge of the property and stood there in the wind until her ears ached, and nothing had spoken, nothing had stirred but the water and the wind.
Now she stood in the back room of her father's shop with a book in her hands that knew her sister's name.
She lifted her palms. The luminescence dimmed where she had broken contact, then steadied at a faint, sullen glow, as though the ink were sulking. She turned back to the entry and read it again, slowly, aloud to the empty room.
"Miren Beckford. Bargain struck."
The words tasted like iron.
"Who struck it?"
The room offered nothing. The bell above the shop door rang again, insistent, and she heard her father's voice in the front hall, the particular rumble he used when a customer was being tiresome. He would come looking for her in a moment. He would want to know why the back room smelled of peat and old magic. He would want to know why his eldest daughter was standing white-knuckled over a thing that should not exist.
Astrid closed the book. The leather resisted her, a soft reluctance, then yielded. She wrapped it again in the oilcloth, tucking the edges in with fingers that did not quite obey her, and slid it back into the tin. She pressed the lid down. The metallic click of the seal sounded louder than it should have.
She tucked the tin under her arm and went to find her father.
The shop smelled of dust and beeswax and the faintly sweet rot of the camphor wood her father used to keep the silver moths from the specimens. A customer stood at the counter, a farmer from up the valley, asking after a survey of his boundary line, and her father was nodding in that careful way he had when he was already calculating the cost. He glanced up as Astrid passed, and his eyes went to the tin under her arm.
"That was in the back," he said, not a question.
"It was," she said.
He looked at her for a long moment. He was a man who did not ask questions he did not want the answers to. He had buried a wife and nearly a daughter, and the cost of asking had been exacted from him in the particular currency of sleepless nights and meals eaten standing up. He nodded once.
"Supper at seven," he said, and turned back to the farmer.
Astrid carried the tin up the narrow stairs to her room at the back of the house, where the roof sloped low over the bed and the window gave onto the yard and, beyond it, the dark smear of trees that marked the edge of the Beckford land. She set the tin on the small table beneath the window and stood over it with her hands at her sides.
She knew where she had to go. She had known since the day Miren had not come home, and the knowing had sat in her chest like a stone she could neither swallow nor spit out. The well. The standing stone. The place her sister's note had pointed to, the place that had given her nothing but wind and the smell of wet stone.
But now she had the book. Now she had the name in her own hand.
She sat on the edge of the bed and drew the tin toward her. She opened it. She drew out the book and laid it on the table, and the leather creaked softly, like the spine of an old dog settling into a favored spot. She opened it to the page with Miren's name and laid her palm flat across it, feeling the cold rise into her hand, the green-white light bloom beneath her skin.
She began to read.
One name at a time. One debt at a time. One unfinished entry at a time. She read until the light in the window dimmed and the lamp on the table threw her shadow long across the wall and her father called up the stairs that supper was on the table and getting cold.
She did not go down.
She read until the entries began to repeat themselves in a soft, singsong rhythm behind her eyes, until the cold of the pages had crept up her arms and settled in her chest, until the names blurred and sharpened and blurred again. She read until she found, two-thirds of the way through the book, an entry in a different hand from the others, cramped and hurried, the ink so faint it was barely more than a memory on the page.
Astrid Beckford. No bargain struck. No debt recorded. Note added by order of the holder: the eldest daughter is to be offered the choice at the standing stone, should she come asking. Witness: the Wellwife. Status: PENDING.
She lifted her hand from the page.
The cold stayed.
Outside, the wind had risen. She could hear it in the chimney, a low, hollow sound, and beneath it, fainter, the sound of water moving in the well at the edge of the property, though the night was still and there was no moon.
She closed the book. She wrapped it again. She put it back in the tin.
Then she went downstairs to tell her father she would not be home before morning.
The kitchen smelled of boiled cabbage and tallow. Her father stood with his back to her at the sink, washing the supper dishes in the dark, and he did not turn around when she came in, though she saw the set of his shoulders change.
"I have to go out," Willow said. "I may not be back before morning."
The dish in his hand paused under the water. He set it down in the rack without looking at it.
"Where."
"To the Hall. To see Miren."
This time he did turn. The lamp on the dresser behind her threw his face into shadow, but she saw enough of it, the lines drawn tight around his mouth, the tiredness in his eyes that had been there every night for three months and showed no sign of lifting.
"She is not well, Willow."
"I know. I have read the letter."
"Then you know she has not seen anyone. She will not see you."
"She will see me."
He considered this. He dried his hands on the cloth that hung over the rail of the stove, slowly, as if he were thinking about something else entirely, something far away. The fire had died down to a sullen red. Outside, the wind creaked the frames of the kitchen window.
"If you go," he said at last, "you take the lantern. And you do not go near the well."
"I will not go near the well."
"You say that."
"I say it, and I mean it."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he went to the cupboard over the dresser, took down the storm lantern, and set it on the table. He trimmed the wick. He lit it. He carried it across the kitchen and pressed it into her hands.
"I will leave the door on the latch."
"Thank you."
He did not kiss her. He did not say to be careful. He only stood in the doorway while she went out across the yard, and she heard the door close softly behind her, and then there was only the wind, and the lantern, and the dark.
The track up to the Hall ran along the edge of the northern wood, and the trees leaned over it so that even by day the way was dim. By night it was a tunnel of moving shadow, the branches creaking above her like the timbers of a ship, the smell of wet earth and leaf-rot thick in her nostrils. She kept her eyes on the small bright ring of lantern light that traveled with her across the dark, and she did not think about what waited at the end of the path. She thought instead about her sister's face, which she had not seen in three months and which she had begun, in the small hours of the night, to forget the precise shape of. She tried to call it back. The cleft in the chin, the two brown eyes set a little too far apart, the small mole on the left temple. The way her sister had laughed, low and quick, at a jest not sure. The way her sister had held a book open on her knee, her thumb pressed to the page to mark her place, even when she had been called away to do something else. She thought about all of this, and the path unwound beneath her, and the lantern swung, and the dark pressed in.
The Hall stood at the head of the valley in a clearing of its own, walled on three sides by the wood and on the fourth by the long, slow slope of the fell. She had never been inside it. She had seen it from a distance often enough: a long, low building of grey stone with a slate roof that always looked darker than the sky above it, and chimneys that did not seem to smoke even in the coldest weather. Now she stood at the gate and looked up at it, and the lantern threw the lower walls into a wavering orange, and above that the stone went up into the dark.
The gate was not latched. It swung open at her touch, silent on its hinges, as if someone had been before her and oiled them recently. Beyond the gate, the path ran up to the front door between two borders of something she could not make out in the dark, low and dense, smelling sharply of box. The front door, when she came to it, stood ajar. A thin line of lamplight lay across the step.
She knocked.
There was a silence. Then a voice from within, an old woman's voice, low and dry as paper turning.
"You are expected. Come in."
The door swung inward at her touch. She stepped over the threshold into a long, low hallway hung with coats and cloaks, the air inside cold and faintly scented with dried rosemary. At the far end of the hall, a door stood open, and through it came the lamplight. She walked toward it, the floorboards cool and faintly resonant under her boots.
The room beyond was a bedchamber, plainly furnished, the bed set against the inner wall beneath a window that had been shuttered from within. Miren lay in the bed. She lay very still, on her back, her hands outside the coverlet, her face turned a little toward the door as if she had been listening for a long time for the sound of footsteps in the hall. She looked at Willow when Willow came in. She did not speak. Her eyes were very bright.
Willow set the lantern down on the chest at the foot of the bed. She crossed the room. She stood at the bedside and looked down at her sister, and her sister looked up at her, and neither of them spoke for a long moment.
"You got my letter," Miren said at last. Her voice was a thread.
"I got your letter."
"Then you know I could not write it sooner."
"I know."
Miren smiled, or tried to. The smile faltered and did not quite arrive. She lifted one hand from the coverlet, slowly, as if the hand weighed more than it should, and laid it on Willow's wrist where her hand rested on the bedpost. Her fingers were cold. Her grip was not strong.
"Sit down," Miren said. "I have to tell you, and I do not think I will be able to tell it twice."
Willow pulled the wooden chair out from the wall and sat. She did not let go of Miren's hand. Miren looked at her for a moment, and then she looked up at the ceiling, and she began.
"You have heard of the Ledger," she said. "I do not mean the one the parson keeps in the vestry, the one with the marriages and the christenings. I mean the other one. The one that is kept in the tin under the floor in your father's room."
"Yes."
"You have read it."
"Yes."
"Then you have seen that it is not like other books. You have seen that the entries are not ink on paper. They are something else. They are the record itself. They are what was done, set down in a form that cannot lie."
Willow said nothing. Miren went on.
"It is not only a record. It is a witness. It is bound, by something older than the binding of any book, to the place where it is kept. It is bound to Thistlehollow. Every charm that is worked within the borders of the parish, every pact that is struck, every binding and unbinding, every debt of any kind that is owed by anyone within the bounds, is written into the Ledger as the thing is done. Not by a hand. By the place itself."
"The place itself," Willow said.
"Yes. By the land. By the water under the land. By the stone at the well, which is older than anything else here. The Ledger is not a book that keeps a record. The Ledger is the record that has taken the shape of a book, so that it can be read."
Miren paused. She seemed to gather herself, as if what she had to say next cost her something. Willow waited.
"I have known this for a long while," Miren said. "Longer than I ought. I found out by accident, when I was a girl. There was a thing I wished for at the well. I was eleven. I did not mean it. I did not know what I was doing. And when I came home that evening and looked into the tin, because I had heard my father speaking of the book to someone and I was curious, I saw my own name written there, and the wish set down beside it in a hand I did not know."
"What was the wish?"
"It does not matter now. It was a small thing. It was granted, and I was sorry for it almost at once, and the entry was crossed out, or so I thought, by my father's hand. I did not look at the Ledger again for years. I had no reason to. I was busy. I grew up. I left home. I came back. I did not look."
She stopped. Her eyes closed for a moment. When she opened them again, they were brighter than before, and Willow saw that her sister's face, in the lamplight, was thinner than it had been three months ago, and that the bones of her cheeks stood out under the skin.
"Then I began to hear the stories," Miren said. "About the peatworks. About the things that were being asked for there. About the bargains that were being struck, in the sheds at the edge of the diggings, at the back of the public house, at the doors of cottages where no one had knocked in years. I heard that children were being kept home from the fair at the Hall. I heard that a man had come back from the diggings with a face like his own grandfather's, and that his wife had put him to bed and bolted the door. I heard that the Wellwife had been seen, three nights in a row, at the peatworks, though no one had ever seen her leave her own door."
She stopped again. She drew breath.
"I went to see her."
"You went to the Wellwife."
"Yes. I went to her cottage. I knocked. She opened. She let me in. She sat me down at her table, and she made me a cup of something that smelled of boiled herbs, and she did not drink any herself. She asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted to know what was happening at the peatworks. She did not answer me at once. She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, 'You are the middle one. You have not been offered the choice. Sit still, and do not speak, and I will tell you what I can.'"
"And she told you?"
"She told me that someone had been coming to the standing stone at the well. She did not say who. She said that someone had been making offerings there, and striking bargains, and that the bargains were being written into the Ledger as they were made, but that after they were made, they were being altered. The names were being kept. The debts were being kept. The purposes were being changed. Someone was going back into the Ledger and rewriting the entries after the fact, so that what had been asked for was no longer what was owed."
Miren's grip on Willow's wrist tightened. Her voice did not change, but her hand shook.
"And," she said, "I have been to see for myself. I have looked at the Ledger, in the tin, in the room under your father's floor. I have read it through, the way you have. I have read it for as long as I could bear to. And I have seen what she described. There are entries in the book that contradict one another. There are names that appear twice, with different debts beside them. There are bargains that read one way on one page and another way on the next. The ink has been changed. The paper has been scraped. The entries have been erased and rewritten, and the rewriting has been done so that it is almost invisible, but it is not invisible to me, because I know what I am looking for."
"Who?" Willow said. "Who is doing it?"
Miren shook her head.
"I do not know. I have looked, and I cannot tell. The hand is not one I recognize. It is careful. It is patient. It has been at work for a long while. I think, Willow, I think it has been at work for years."
The lamp on the chest guttered in some draught that Willow could not feel. The shadows in the room shifted and resettled. Miren lay still, looking up at her sister, her hand still closed around Willow's wrist, her face very thin and very bright in the wavering light.
"That is why I could not write sooner," Miren said. "I was watching. I was waiting. I was trying to see the hand. And then I was seen, and I have been kept in this room, and I have not been able to write to anyone, and the hand has gone on with its work, and I do not know how many entries have been changed since I lay down here."
"Who has kept you here?"
"The Wellwife."
"Why?"
"Because she found me at the standing stone, three months ago, with my hands on the stone, and the bargain I had gone there to strike half-made, and she would not let me finish it. She would not let me strike it. She brought me back to this house, and she has kept me here, and she has watched me, and she has not let me write."
"What bargain were you going to strike?"
Miren looked at her. For the first time since Willow had come into the room, something moved in her sister's face that was not exhaustion. It was something closer to fear. It was something closer to shame.
"I was going to offer myself," Miren said, "in exchange for the name of the one who is rewriting the Ledger. I was going to stand at the stone and say that I would be bound, if the stone would tell me who had been at the stone before me. And the Wellwife would not let me speak the words."
She closed her eyes. Her grip on Willow's wrist slackened.
"She said it was not a bargain the stone would have honored. She said it was a bargain the other one would have taken, and that if I had spoken it, I would not be lying here. I would be down in the diggings, with the rest of them, with my face changed, and my name changed, and my debt rewritten."
She opened her eyes again.
"Do not go to the stone, Willow."
"I will not."
"Do not go to the peatworks."
"I will not. Not tonight."
"Not at all, if you can help it. Not until you know whose hand is in the book."
Miren lifted her sister's hand, and pressed her lips to Willow's knuckles, briefly, and then let her hand go.
"You must go now," Miren said. "It is late, and the wind is up, and the path is dark. Come back to me tomorrow, if you can. Come back when the light is in the sky."
"I will."
Willow stood. She picked up the lantern. At the door she stopped and looked back. Miren lay very still in the bed, her face turned toward the door, her hands outside the coverlet, her eyes bright and open.
"Miren," she said. "What did you wish for, when you were eleven?"
Miren smiled, faintly.
"I wished," she said, "that my sister would always find what she was looking for."
The lamp guttered. The wind rose in the chimney. Willow went out into the dark and pulled the door to behind her.
The wind off the Hollowfern took the lantern flame and flattened it against the glass. Willow cupped her hand around it as she walked, and the light she made was small, a coin of yellow tossed at the dark.
The path down from the croft was a thing she knew in her feet. She had walked it since she was small. The left turn where the rowan stood, the right where the ground fell away into the bracken, the long slope where the heather grew over the stones and you had to feel your way. Tonight the heather smelled of cold and of iron, and somewhere lower down, where the peat diggings had not yet reached, the air was sweeter, the old sweet rot of moss and slow water.
She did not let herself think of the diggings. She set her feet down and counted her steps, the way she had counted them as a child when the dark had been too large.
When she came at last to the bottom of the slope and saw the lantern of Rook Salters waiting by the broken stile, she had counted nine hundred and forty-two. The number stayed with her, as numbers did, lodging itself somewhere behind her teeth.
Rook lifted the lantern higher as she came down the last of the slope. His face was turned toward her, and the light made it strange, all hollows and bright edges. He looked older than his years. He looked, she thought, like a man who had been waiting in the cold for longer than an hour.
"You are well," he said, as a question.
"I am well enough."
"Did she speak?"
"She spoke. She spoke more than I had hoped. She spoke more than I had feared."
He nodded, as if this were the answer he had expected, and yet not the answer he had wanted. He held out his hand and helped her over the broken stile, and they stood for a moment in the lee of the hedge, the wind not quite reaching them, and the smell of the turned earth strong in their nostrils.
"We will go to the well," Willow said. "Not tonight. Tomorrow, in the morning, when there is light. There is something I must do first."
"What is it?"
"I must find a name that is not in the book."
He looked at her.
"The book has no name for the second holder of the debt. The book has no name for the one whose hand wrote after Quent. There is a hand in the book that is not Quent's hand. I must find who that hand belongs to, before I go to the well."
"And how will you find that?"
"I will go to the vellum makers."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Renwick," he said.
"Renwick Vellum," she said. "Yes. He is the only one I can think of. He is the only maker left who would know the hand of every apprentice he ever taught, and the only one who would tell me, if I asked him in the right way."
"You have not asked him before."
"I have not had reason to ask him before."
The wind pressed against the hedge, and a thin cold rain began to fall, not enough to soak them but enough to bead on the wool of her cloak and on the brim of his hat. He shifted his weight, considering.
"Willow," he said, and then stopped.
"Say it."
"I have been thinking about the names that are not in the book. I have been thinking about it since I sat down at the table and saw the empty column. There is one name that I have not said to you."
"Say it now."
He did not look at her. He looked at the dark, at the rain, at the place where the path bent away toward the village.
"The name that is not in the book," he said, "may be my own."
She was very still.
"Rook."
"Listen to me. I have been a clerk in Hollowfern for eleven years. I have written for Quent. I have written for the holders who came before Quent. I have written in the book. I have made my hand into the shapes that Quent wanted. If he needed a hand that looked like his own hand, he could have used mine. If he needed a hand that no one would question, he could have used mine, because my hand has written in that book for eleven years, and no one would have looked twice."
"But you would have known."
"I would have known," he said. "But he would have known that I would have known, and that is not the same as saying he would not have done it."
She looked at him, and at the rain on his face, and at the way he held himself, as if he were bracing for a weight.
"Why do you say this to me now?"
"Because I would rather you heard it from me than from the well. Because I would rather you went to the well knowing the worst thing I can offer you, and finding it not true, than went to the well not knowing it, and finding it true."
"Rook."
"I am not finished. There is something else. I do not believe it was my hand. I believe it, Willow, as I believe the ground under my feet. But belief is not proof. And if you are going to the well to ask the standing stone who wrote in the book, then the stone may answer you, and the answer may be my name, and I would rather you were ready for that than broken by it."
She took his hand. His fingers were cold. She held them in hers, and felt the shape of them, the calluses at the second knuckle where the pen had rested for eleven years.
"If the stone says your name," she said, "I will not believe it."
"You will have to."
"I will have to believe the stone. I will not have to believe that you did it knowingly. There is a difference, Rook. There is a difference between a hand that wrote and a hand that was used."
He was quiet for a long moment.
"You are a stubborn woman, Willow Greave."
"I am a stubborn woman. Yes."
He turned his face away, and she saw him press his mouth against the back of his own hand, briefly, the way a man does when he is trying not to show what he feels. Then he turned back, and his face was his own again, closed and watchful.
"We will go to the vellum makers in the morning," he said. "Before the well. We will find the hand, and then we will go to the well. That is the order."
"That is the order," she said.
They walked back through the village in the thin rain, past the dark houses, past the place where the lane bent toward the peatworks, past the standing stone that did not speak to her, and she did not look at it, because she had promised Miren, and because some promises are the kind you keep by not turning your head.
She let him go at the corner of the lane, where the path to his lodgings turned away from hers. He lifted his hand once, and she lifted hers, and then he was gone into the dark, and she was alone with the rain and the sound of her own boots on the wet stone.
The cottage was cold when she came in. She set the lantern on the table and did not light the fire, because the fire would take too long, and because she was not ready to be still. She set her hands flat on the table, on either side of the book, and she stood there, and she breathed.
In the morning, she would go to Renwick Vellum. She would ask him, in the right way, whose hand it was that had written in the book after Quent. She would hold the page under his lamp, and she would watch his face, and she would know.
In the morning, after that, she would go to the well. She would stand over the dark water. She would speak to the Wellwife. She would ask the riddle that was owed her, and she would give the answer that was owed it, and she would ask her one true question of the standing stone.
And in the morning after that, if she lived, she would go back up the hill to Miren, and she would tell her what she had learned, and they would decide together what was to be done.
But that was the morning.
Tonight she stood at the table with her hands flat on the wood and the rain ticking against the window, and she let the silence be the silence, and she did not try to fill it. The book lay closed under her palms. The ledger remembered what it remembered. She would remember, in her turn, what it told her.
She lifted her hands at last. She turned down the lamp. She went to the narrow bed in the corner of the room, and she lay down with her coat still on, and she pulled the coverlet up to her chin, and she closed her eyes.
Behind her closed eyes, she saw the two columns. The column of the owed, with its four names written plain. The column of the held, with its three names and its one great blank.
She would not sleep yet. She knew that. She would lie in the dark and listen to the rain, and she would turn the riddle over in her mind like a coin in her fingers, and she would wait for the light to come.
The light would come. It always came.
And when it came, she would rise, and she would set her feet on the path, and she would go to find the name that was not in the book.
The rain went on. The dark held. Somewhere far off, down in the peat diggings, a lantern moved, and was gone. Somewhere closer, in the croft on the hill, Miren Beckford lay awake with her hands outside the coverlet and her eyes on the door.
And in the cottage by the lane, Willow Greave lay still, and breathed, and waited for the morning to remember her.