The Hollowfern Conspiracy: The Cartographer Who Lost Her Edges

The bell above the door of Helia Marrowbone's shop gave a single, clear chime, then stayed silent as though it had thought better of announcing anyone. Astrid Beckford stepped over the threshold and found herself in a room so thick with paper that the air itself seemed to have edges. Maps curled from every shelf, unrolled down every wall, dangled from clotheslines strung between hat stands. The smell was a curious thing: ink, lamp oil, the green rot of old vellum, and beneath it all something drier, like dust that had once been a living room and had forgotten how to be one.

Helia Marrowbone sat at a desk that had been eaten into shape by decades of leaning. She did not look up. Her pen moved in small, exact strokes across a chart of the high pastures, and she finished her line before she spoke.

"You have your sister's jaw," Helia said. Not a greeting. An observation. "Sit where the stool is, not where the books are."

Astrid set her pack down by the door and crossed to the indicated stool. Her boots left grey prints on the floor, the colour of the lane outside. She watched the cartographer's hands, which were broad and ink-stained and moved without hesitation.

"I came about the maps," Astrid said.

"They all come about the maps." Helia set her pen in its groove and finally raised her eyes. They were the pale blue of a sky that has decided to be quiet. "What is it you think they can tell you?"

"That my sister walked south. That she walked through Thistlehollow. That she is not in any of your charts, and that someone ought to explain why."

Helia regarded her for a long moment. Then she lifted a ledger from the desk, a heavy thing bound in green cloth, and set it on the corner nearest Astrid.

"I keep the boundaries," Helia said. "I have kept them for thirty-one years. The southern boundary of this village runs along the river, follows the elder hedge, turns at the Crooked Oak, and rises to the moor gate. That is the line. That is what I redraw each quarter when the river takes a yard and gives back a stone."

"And yet," Astrid said.

"And yet." Helia opened the ledger to a page marked with a red thread. On the page was drawn, in Helia's exact hand, a clean curve of boundary, dated, signed. Beneath it was a second drawing, the same curve, dated a fortnight later, in the same hand. Beneath that, a third. Each was identical. Each was wrong.

Astrid leaned closer. The curve in the drawings ended where it ought to end, at the moor gate, where the old stones lean together like tired friends. But she had walked that gate only yesterday. She had stood with her hand on the stone and looked south, and the line had continued. A path. A brook. The thin dark spine of the Hanged Wood. All of it present. All of it unmapped.

"The line stops," Astrid said. "Here. At the gate. As though nothing exists beyond."

"Does it?" Helia's voice was very even. "Does anything?"

"It does. I walked it. The Hanged Wood is there. The brook runs. There are sheep on the slope."

"There are sheep on the slope in your memory," Helia said, not unkindly. "There are sheep on the slope in three other cartographers' memories. There are no sheep on the slope in mine. I have walked that ground twice this winter and found it ended. A man may walk into a mist and not come out the other side, Miss Beckford. A village may walk into a mist and not know it has done so."

Astrid said nothing for a moment. She looked again at the ledger, at the careful identical lines. The same hand had drawn them, and the same hand had been wrong in the same way. Not a mistake. A refusal.

"When did it begin?" Astrid asked.

"In the autumn." Helia closed the ledger. The sound of the cloth was heavier than it should have been. "I keep my maps by the window, as I always have. Each morning I unroll the new ones to dry. Each morning I find the southern edge has been redrawn in the night. The ink is mine. The hand is mine. The line is shorter than I left it."

"You do not sleepwalk," Astrid said.

"I do not." A flicker at the corner of Helia's mouth. "I have not slept at all, for the matter of that. Not well. Not since your sister came through and did not come back."

The name of Miren settled in the room like a held breath. Astrid felt the weight of it press against her ribs. She had carried that name through three villages and two bad inns and a night in a barn that smelled of old apples, and she was not yet used to hearing it in a stranger's voice.

"Tell me," Astrid said. "Whatever you saw."

Helia rose and went to a shelf behind the desk, where a row of rolled charts stood in a wooden rack like pipes in an organ. She took one down, untied the ribbon that bound it, and spread it on the desk. It was a map of Thistlehollow drawn in three layers: the present in black, the previous season in red, the season before in a faint brown that had been reinforced here and there with a fresher line.

"Your sister came to me on a Tuesday," Helia said. "She had a letter in her pocket that she would not show me. She asked me to draw her a path south, through the wood, past the brook, to the moor gate and beyond. I told her I could not. The south is not mine to draw. It belongs to the river, and the river has been quiet of late."

"What did she say?"

"She said she would walk it anyway. She said a thing I did not like to hear, which was that the river had spoken to her, and that what it had said was true."

The shop creaked. A gust outside set the hanging maps swaying, and one of them unrolled itself an inch and then rolled back, like a creature changing its mind.

"Did you try to stop her?" Astrid asked.

"I offered her tea. I offered her a bed. I told her I would walk with her to the gate in the morning and we would see what the morning said. She thanked me, and she left. I watched her from the window. She went down the lane and turned at the stile and took the south path." Helia paused. "She did not look back."

"She never does," Astrid said, and was surprised to find her voice steady.

Helia looked at her a long moment, then drew from beneath the counter a small leather folder, the colour of old tobacco, tied with a black ribbon. She set it on the desk between them.

"I have kept a record of every map I have drawn since I was twenty-three years old," Helia said. "I keep them because a village has no memory but its ledgers. I keep them because one day someone will want to know what we were and what we lost. I have never opened this folder for anyone."

Astrid did not touch it.

"Why me?"

"Because you have her jaw. Because you walked here instead of riding. Because you did not knock."

"I did knock."

"You knocked once," Helia said. "That is not a knock. That is a habit."

Astrid felt the corner of her own mouth move, and was not sure whether it was grief or the beginning of a laugh that had no business being born in this room.

"Open it," Helia said.

Astrid untied the ribbon. Inside were three sheets of paper, each folded twice. The first was a sketch of the southern boundary as Helia had drawn it the morning after Miren left, in her own hand, in ink, with a date. The line ended at the moor gate.

The second was the same drawing, the same hand, dated two days later. The line ended sooner.

The third was dated a week after that. The line ended at the elder hedge, a hundred yards short of the gate. Beyond the hedge, on the page, was nothing. Not blank. Nothing. The paper there had a different quality, as though the fibres had been persuaded to forget they were paper at all.

"She went through," Astrid said.

"She went through," Helia agreed. "And as she went, she took the edge of the world with her. Or the edge of the world closed behind her. I do not know which."

Astrid folded the papers again. Her fingers were careful, the way her father's had been when he taught her to mend a tear in a chart without leaving a mark.

"What do the others say?" Astrid asked. "The council. The tanner. The school."

"They say a girl walked south and the river took her. They say that is what rivers do. They say it is a small thing, a thing of seasons, and we should not trouble ourselves with it in a hard year."

"And you?"

Helia drew a long breath. The breath had weight in it, the way the air in the shop had weight.

"I say a boundary is a promise a village makes to itself. I say the promise has been broken. I say I have redrawn that line nine times this autumn and nine times it has come back shorter. I say that on the ninth night I sat at this desk until dawn and watched the ink move of its own accord, and the hand that moved it was my hand, and the will that moved it was not."

Astrid looked down at the folder in her hands. Somewhere outside, a raven gave a single hoarse call from the churchyard yew, and the sound slid under the door like a black leaf.

"I am going to walk south," Astrid said. "I am going to walk where my sister walked, and I am going to find the place where the line ends."

Helia looked at her. The pale eyes did not waver.

"You will need a guide who knows the boundary," Helia said. "You will need to know what the river has stopped saying. You will need to take with you something of hers, and something of yours, and you will need to leave one of them behind at the gate."

"What thing?"

"That," Helia said, "is not mine to tell you. You will know it when you come to it."

Astrid rose. The stool scraped a small complaint against the floor. She tucked the folder into her pack, between her dry stockings and the heel of bread she had been wise enough to bring.

"If I do not come back," she said, "you will know that the line is shorter still."

"If you do not come back," Helia said, "I will draw you into the ledger with the others, and the line will go on being drawn by a hand that is not mine. That is not a comfort. It is a record."

Astrid shouldered her pack. At the door she turned.

"Was she afraid?" she asked. "When she left. Was she afraid?"

Helia was silent for a long moment. The raven called again, further off, and the sound was answered by a stillness that seemed to lean against the windows.

"She was not afraid," Helia said. "She was certain. I do not know which is worse."

Astrid nodded once, and stepped out into the lane. The bell above the door did not chime this time. It had decided she had been announced already, and there was no need to repeat itself.

The lane outside the post office smelled of wet ash and the first brave sweetness of the hawthorn that grew crooked along the Beckford fence. Astrid walked the length of it without turning back, and the lane walked with her, as lanes do when they have decided to notice someone.

She did not look toward the churchyard. She did not need to. The raven was there. She could feel the weight of its observation settle between her shoulder blades like a hand laid flat, and she let it stay there, because to brush it off would have meant admitting it was more than she could carry.

"Walk the boundary," she said to herself, under her breath, and the words came out sounding like a charm, or a spell, or a small instruction one gives a dog one is not sure one trusts. "Walk where she walked. Find the place where the line ends."

The lane curved past the forge. The forge was cold. The smith had been dead for seven years, and his daughter had married a man from the other side of the river and had not come back, and the bellows had been sold to pay for the funeral, and so the forge stood as a thing that had once been useful and was now only a roof. Astrid slowed as she passed it. She did not know why. Some doors, even empty ones, ask to be acknowledged.

The path dropped away from the lane after the forge, down through a strip of orchard where the apple trees had gone back to being trees and had forgotten they had ever been anyone's. A track ran through them, just two ruts and a strip of greener grass between. Astrid followed it because it was the only track, and because her feet knew without being told that this was a road Miren had walked more than once.

She thought of Helia's hand on the glass of the cabinet.

She thought of Helia's voice saying the Ledger, as a thing that is and is not a thing.

She thought of the word Unmapped, written in the back of the folder, and she felt the small shock of it again, the way one feels a step that is not there when one is sure of the stair.

The track came out of the orchard at a stile. Beyond the stile, the land opened. It was the lower meadow, the one that ran along the river, and it was not empty. There was a boy sitting on the top bar of the stile, swinging his legs. He was perhaps nine. He had a stick in his hand, and he was drawing in the air with it, as boys do when they are practicing a thing they have not yet been told they are not allowed to do.

He looked up when she came over the stile. He looked at her pack. He looked at her face. Then he looked at the place where the track went on, and he said, without any greeting, "You are going to the boundary."

It was not a question.

"How do you know that?" Astrid said.

"Because you have got your walking face on," the boy said, "and your walking face is the same as hers." He pointed the stick down the track. "She used to walk that way too. She used to give me a copper if I carried her satchel as far as the marsh. She has not done it for a long time."

Astrid felt the world tilt a quarter inch.

"What is your name," she said, "and what is hers, and how long is a long time."

"I am Tom," the boy said. "Tom Garret. And a long time is a long time. It is since the line moved." He drew in the air with the stick, a slow curve. "She drew it, you know. She came back from the marsh one day and she had the line in her pocket and she drew it on the kitchen table. My mother said she had to wipe it off because it was not hers to have. And she did wipe it off. But I saw it. I saw what it was."

"What was it?"

"It was a place," Tom said. "It was a place with a name, and the name was in our handwriting, but the place was not anywhere. That is what she said. That is what she said to me. The place is not anywhere. And then the line moved, and the place was not anywhere at all."

Astrid sat down on the stile beside him. The wood was cold and damp through her skirt. She did not care.

"Tom," she said, "I am looking for my sister. Her name is Miren Beckford. If you have seen her, or if anyone has told you they have seen her, I need you to tell me, and I need you to tell me true."

Tom looked at her. He was a serious boy, with the kind of face that has already learned that things have costs.

"I have not seen her," he said. "Nobody has seen her. But she has been heard."

"Where?"

"At the marsh," Tom said. "In the reeds, when the wind comes from the south. You can hear her say something, if you stand in the right place. My father heard her. He went to look. He did not find her. He found the place she had walked, and the place was not anywhere either."

Astrid's mouth was dry.

"What does she say," Astrid said, "when you hear her."

Tom drew in the air again. A curve. A loop. A line that did not end.

"She says, she says, come and find me where the line ends," Tom said. "And then she says, do not come and find me. And then she says, come and find me. And that is all. That is all she says."

The wind came from the south as he spoke, and the reeds at the edge of the meadow laid down, and there was a sound in them that might have been nothing. Astrid listened until she could not listen any longer, and then she listened a little more.

"Tom," she said, "do you know where the marsh is."

"Yes," Tom said. "But I cannot take you. My mother said I was not to go that way. She said the line had moved and the marsh was not the marsh and I was not to go."

"Then tell me," Astrid said.

Tom looked at her. He looked at the pack. He looked at her face.

"You go past the alder wood," he said, "and you keep to the left of the brook, and you go as far as the heron stands. Then you go past the heron, and you go where the heron will not go. That is where the marsh is."

Astrid stood. The wood of the stile was imprinted into the back of her skirt. She brushed it off, and the gesture felt older than she was.

"Tom," she said, "if I find her, I will send word. If I do not find her, I will send word also. That is a debt."

"I will tell my mother," Tom said. "She will tell the post office. The post office will put it in the line. The line will know." He paused. "The line knows everything. Even the places that are not anywhere."

Astrid looked at him a moment longer. Then she took the heel of bread out of her pack, and she broke it in two, and she gave him the larger half.

"Eat," she said, "and be good, and tell your mother I said thank you."

She stepped off the stile and onto the track, and the track took her down into the meadow. The boy did not watch her go. He watched the bread, and then he bit into it, and the bread was good, and the meadow was wide, and the world went on being a world even when one could not be sure of it.

The alder wood was dark. The brook ran through it, and the sound of the brook was louder in the wood than it had been in the open, as if the wood were holding a cup to its ear. Astrid kept to the left of it, as Tom had said. She watched the ground for prints, and found none, and was not surprised. Miren had been gone a long time, and the ground had had a long time to forget.

She walked for what felt like an hour, and what was, by the slant of the light, perhaps less. The trees thinned. The brook widened into a shallow place where the heron stood. The heron was very still. It had the look of a thing that had been told to wait and had taken the instruction seriously.

Astrid stopped. She did not speak. She watched the heron. The heron watched her back. Then the heron turned its head a quarter inch, and Astrid understood, and she stepped past it, into the place where the heron would not go.

The marsh began as a smell before it began as a place. It smelled of rot, and of green, and of something else, something that was neither. The reeds were tall. They came up to her hip, then to her waist, then to her chest. She waded. The water was cold and came over the tops of her boots and into them, and she felt her stockings darken and cling, and she went on.

She came at last to a place where the reeds stopped.

There was no reason for them to stop. There was no bank, no shore, no change in the water. The reeds simply ceased, as if a hand had been laid across them, and beyond the cessation there was a flat grey surface that was neither water nor land. It did not reflect the sky. It did not reflect anything. It was the colour of a closed eye.

Astrid stood at the edge of the reeds and looked at it. The wind from the south had stopped. The world had stopped. The only sound was her own breath, and the small sounds her pack made as she shifted her weight, and even those seemed to be coming from very far away.

This was the boundary.

This was the place the line had been drawn to, and then past which the line had not been drawn, and then from which the line had been drawn back.

She thought of Helia's face. She thought of the word Unmapped. She thought of the word removed.

The grey surface did not move.

She took a step into it.

It took her weight as a floor would take it, though it was not a floor. It was firm, and it was cold, and it gave under her boot with a sound like the sound of a wet leaf being pressed. She took another step. Another. She was out of the reeds, and there was nothing around her but the grey, and the grey went on, and on, and there was no end to it that she could see.

She walked.

She walked for a long time. The light did not change. The air did not move. There was no sound but the sound of her own steps, and even that seemed to come back to her from a place that was not where she was. She walked until the walking became the only thing, and then she walked until the walking became less than the only thing, and then she stopped.

In front of her, at a distance she could not judge, there was a shape. It might have been a tree. It might have been a standing stone. It might have been a post. She walked toward it. As she came closer, she saw that it was a post. A wooden post, driven into the grey as one drives a post into the ground of a field, and on the post was a sign.

The sign was painted in a hand she knew.

It said, in letters of red and white, AST. BECKFORD. HERE THE LINE ENDS.

The grey surface around the post was not empty. There were objects on it, set out as objects are set out on a table, with care. There was a cup. There was a folded cloth. There was a sprig of something green. There was a folded piece of paper, and on the paper, in the same hand, was a single word.

The word was Unmapped.

Beneath the word, in a smaller hand, was a second word.

The second word was Helia.

Astrid knelt. The grey surface pressed cold through her knees. She did not touch the paper. She did not touch any of the objects. She looked at them, and she thought of the gate Helia had spoken of, and of the two things one must bring and the one thing one must leave behind, and she thought that she was not yet at the gate, but that she was very near to it.

She knelt there, and the grey did not move, and the post stood, and the sign read its message to no one and to anyone, and the light did not change, and the air did not move, and somewhere, far off, or not far off, in the reeds, or in the marsh, or in the place that was not anywhere, a voice said her name.

The voice said her name, and then it did not say it again.

Astrid stayed kneeling. The paper did not stir. The cup did not spill. The grey did not change. She thought: if I move, it will end. If I reach for the paper, I will learn whether it is real, and I do not want to learn. She wanted to kneel in the grey until the kneeling became a place, and she lived there, and the world of Hollowfern and tanners and ravens went on without her, and she was allowed not to choose.

A drop fell onto the back of her hand. It was cold. It was clear. It smelled of nothing she could name. She watched it sink into the skin, and the place where it had been grew warm, and then it stopped growing warm, and then it was just her hand again, a hand, in a grey place, beside a cup and a cloth and a sprig.

She said, "Miren."

The grey ate the word.

She said, louder, "Miren, I am here."

Nothing answered. Nothing refused to answer. The grey simply was, and she was in it, and the post stood, and the sign read its message.

She thought: she has been here. She set the table for someone. She wrote the words and then she wrote the second word. She meant for me to find it. She meant for me to see it before I go through the gate.

She thought: or she meant for me to see it after.

She thought: or she is not here at all, and the table was set by someone else, and the hand that wrote was not hers, and I am being led by a kind hand or an unkind one, and I will not know which until I know.

She thought: the tanner.

She thought: Ask the tanner.

She thought: Vassle. Helia said Vassle, and Vassle said ask the tanner, and the tanner tans the hides of beasts, and what is the hide of a place if not its skin.

The drop on the back of her hand was dry. She looked at the sprig. It was rosemary. The smell of it reached her only now, faintly, like a letter delivered late. She thought of the bread Helia had wrapped in rosemary when she was small, when she had burned her finger on the pan and Helia had put the leaf in her mouth to stop the sting.

She stood. Her knees ached. She had not known how long she had knelt.

The grey, when she looked at it, was the same. The post, when she looked at it, was the same. The cup, the cloth, the paper, the sprig: the same. Only the light was different, or seemed different, or she thought it seemed different because she was different, having stood.

She turned to find her way back. She did not know which way she had come. The grey offered no path. She chose a direction because a direction must be chosen, and she walked, and the walking was the same as the kneeling, and the grey did not tell her she was right or wrong.

She walked for a long time, or for a short time, and then she was not in the grey.

She was in a wood. The wood was ordinary. She could hear a bird. She could see the sun through the leaves, and the sun was the sun, and the leaves were leaves, and the bird was a bird, and she put her hand on a tree and the bark scratched her palm and she was glad of the scratch.

She walked through the wood until she came to a path, and she followed the path until she came to a gate, and she opened the gate and went through, and she was in a lane she knew.

The lane went to Hollowfern.

She went to Hollowfern.

---

The shop was as she had left it. The door was not locked. She had not locked it. The light through the window was the same brown light, and the smell of paper and glue was the same, and the bell above the door gave its small, indignant ring when she pushed it open.

She stood in the doorway and she breathed the smell in, and she thought: this is what home smells like. She had not known, until she had been in the grey, that home had a smell. She had thought home was a place on a map. She had been wrong. Home was a smell, and a sound, and the weight of a door in the hand.

From the curtain that divided the shop from the back room, a voice came.

"Close the door. You are letting the draft in."

The voice was hoarse. The voice was sharp. The voice belonged to a raven who was not, at the moment, a raven. Quoth sat on the curtain rod in the shape of a small man, or near the shape of a small man, with a beak where his nose should be and feathers where his hair should be, and his eyes were black and bright and very much annoyed.

"Quoth," she said.

"The draft," he said. "Close it."

She closed the door. The bell rang again. She said, "You are in the wrong shape."

"I am in the shape Vassle asked me to be in. Vassle asked me to be in a shape you could understand. A raven is too small for the message. A raven cannot thread a needle. Be grateful I did not choose a shape that was larger."

"You threaded a needle."

"I am a familiar of a river god. I can do many things. I am not limited to being a bird. I have been a horse. I have been a fish. I have been, on one occasion, a herring. Do not ask about the herring. Close the door, I said. Did you close it."

"I closed it."

"Then stop telling me you closed it and listen. I have been sitting on this rod since dawn. The rod is thin. The rod is a cruelty to my person. I have a message for you. The message was given to me by Vassle, who received it from a source I am not at liberty to name, and it is to be delivered to Astrid Beckford, eldest daughter, apprentice cartographer, of this house. Are you Astrid Beckford."

"Yes."

"Sit down."

"I will stand."

"Sit down. The message is long. I have a sore throat. I will not be saying it twice."

She sat. The stool was where it always was. She sat on it and she looked at the small man on the curtain rod, and the small man looked at her, and his beak opened.

The message was not long. It was three words, stitched into the curtain in red thread, in a hand that was not quite a hand but that she knew.

ASK THE TANNER.

The letters were uneven. One of the S's leaned. The R at the end had a tail too long. It was Miren's hand. Miren, who could not sew a button straight. Miren, who had once tried to mend a tear in her own shirt and made a tear in the shirt and a tear in the table and a tear in her own finger.

Astrid stood up. She sat down again. She put her hands in her lap. She said, "Quoth."

"The tanner," Quoth said. "Yes. I am to tell you to ask the tanner. I am to tell you that the tanner knows the skin of the place. I am to tell you that the tanner was, in life, a person who had a name, and that the name is known to you, or should be known to you, and that you are to go to the tanner's yard and ask, and that the asking is not a small thing, and that you are to bring with you the rosemary and the cup and the cloth, and that you are to leave behind the paper."

"The paper," she said.

"The paper with the words. You are to leave it behind. You are not to bring it. Vassle was specific. Vassle used the word unbearably specific. I do not know what that means. I am a familiar, not a scholar."

She looked at the curtain. The letters were red. The thread was the kind her grandmother kept in the jar on the sill, the jar with the cracked lid. She thought of Miren at six, with a needle too big for her hand, trying to make a stitch that would hold. She had never held. She had always pulled too tight, or not tight enough, or in the wrong direction. Helia had said, patience, Miren. Patience is the muscle. Miren had said, I have no patience. Helia had said, then we will grow it.

She said, "Quoth, did she make you do this."

"I am not required to answer that."

"She made you."

"The river god is not required to answer that either."

"Vassle did not send the message. Miren sent it. Vassle delivered it."

"I am not required to answer any of this. I am required to deliver a message. I have delivered it. The rod is thin. I would like to be a raven again."

"She is using Vassle."

"Many people use Vassle. Vassle is a river. Rivers are used."

"She is using a god to send a message to her sister through a familiar in the shape of a small man on a curtain rod."

"Yes."

"Why did she not come herself."

Quoth looked at her with his black eyes. The eyes did not blink. Ravens, in any shape, did not blink.

"Vassle will not say. I will not say. The tanner will say, or the tanner will not, but the tanner is the next step, and you are to take it."

She stood. She went to the jar on the sill. The lid was cracked. The thread was red. She took a length of it and wound it around her finger, and the thread bit into the skin, and she did not loosen it.

She said, "If I go to the tanner."

"Yes."

"And I ask."

"Yes."

"And I leave the paper behind."

"The paper with the words. Yes."

"What if the paper is the only proof I have that she was there."

"It is not proof. It is a message. The proof is elsewhere."

"Where."

"The tanner."

She looked at the curtain. The letters were red. The hand was Miren's. The thread was from the jar. The jar was from the sill. The sill was from the shop. The shop was from the lane. The lane was from Hollowfern. Hollowfern was from the world.

She said, "Quoth."

"What."

"If I do this."

"You will."

"If I leave the paper behind, and I go to the tanner, and I ask, and I bring the rosemary and the cup and the cloth."

"Yes."

"What then."

Quoth tilted his head. The beak caught the light. The feathers on his brow rose, and fell, and rose again.

"Then," he said, "you will be one step closer. The gate is not a place you arrive at. The gate is a place you are ready for. You are not yet ready. The tanner will tell you what you lack. You will go from the tanner to the next. You will go from the next to the next. You will bring things and leave things. You will learn the names of things you did not know had names. And at the end, or at what seems like the end, you will stand before the gate, and the gate will be open, or it will not be open, and you will go through, or you will not."

"And Miren."

"Miren is on the other side. Miren has been on the other side for some time. Miren is, by all accounts, well. Miren is, by some accounts, not well. The accounts disagree. You will have to see for yourself."

"If I do not come back."

"Then you will not come back."

"And the shop."

"The shop will be the shop. The shop does not need you to be a shop. The shop has been a shop without you, and will be a shop without you, and is not, in the end, what you are for."

"What am I for."

Quoth looked at her. The black eyes did not blink. The feathers did not move. The beak did not open.

"You are for the gate," he said. "You are for the going through. You are for the sister at the other end of the going through. You are for the paper left behind and the rosemary carried. You are for the asking of the tanner. You are for the next step, and the next, and the next, until there is no next, and only the gate."

He hopped on the rod. The rod creaked.

"I would like to be a raven now," he said.

"Yes."

"I would like to be a raven and go back to the churchyard and sit in the yew and be left alone."

"Yes."

"You will go to the tanner."

"Yes."

"You will bring the rosemary and the cup and the cloth."

"Yes."

"You will leave the paper."

"Yes."

"You will not bring the paper."

"I will not bring the paper."

"Good." The feathers shifted. The small man was a raven. The raven was on the rod. The raven opened his beak and said, in a voice like a hinge, "The draft, Astrid. Close the draft. I am not the only one in this shop who feels it."

She closed the door. The bell rang. The raven was gone from the rod, and there was only the curtain, and the letters, and the red thread, and the jar on the sill with the cracked lid.

She stood in the shop. The shop smelled of paper and glue. The light through the window was brown. The stool was where she had sat. The curtain was where Quoth had perched. The letters were where Miren had stitched.

ASK THE TANNER.

She went to the back room. The rosemary was in a jar. The cup was on the shelf. The cloth was folded in a drawer. She took them. She put them in a bag. She did not take the paper. She left the paper on the table, where the grey had left its grey, where the drop had fallen and dried.

She went out into the lane. The lane was the lane. The sun was the sun. The bird in the wood was the bird. The gate she had come through was the gate. The path she had taken was the path.

She walked to the tanner's yard. She carried the rosemary and the cup and the cloth. She did not carry the paper.

The tanner was at the tanner's yard. The tanner saw her coming. The tanner waited.

She stopped in front of the tanner, and the tanner said, "You have come."

"Yes."

"You have brought the three."

"Yes."

"You have left the one behind."

"Yes."

"Then ask."