Sunlight caught the corked amber bottle and turned it briefly gold. Wren set it on the cluttered worktable between the pestle and a chipped saucer of dried yarrow, and the glass clinked with a small, satisfying sound. She flexed her fingers, smudged with the residue of three mornings' grinding, and studied the row of preparations lined up before her like soldiers awaiting orders.
The Truly Excellent Dream-Soothing Tonic came first. She had brewed the base from chamomile and a whisper of valerian, sweetened with honey from Old Man Thistle's hives and finished with a single drop of crushed poppy seed. Eight bottles stood ready, corked and waxed, each one labeled in her best scribe-hand with directions and a tiny drawing of a sleeping crescent moon. Cordelia's recipe, that one. Wren's chest pinched, a small involuntary contraction beneath the ribs, and she breathed through it the way her sister had taught her: in for four, hold for two, out for six.
"The moon looks more like a bent finger," observed Butterball from his customary post upon the windowsill, one cream-colored paw tucked beneath his considerable chest. His voice carried the unhurried cadence of a cat who had never been troubled by urgency in his entire, well-fed life. "Cosmetically, I mean. Hardly inspires confidence in the contents."
Wren glanced at the label and saw that he was quite right. She picked up the quill and adjusted the crescent. "No one is buying dreams from an artist, Butterball. They are buying sleep."
"Semantics. One cannot underestimate presentation. I should know. I once refused a sardine on grounds of insufficient garnish."
He had not. Butterball's standards were theatrical and entirely invented after the fact, a habit Wren suspected he had cultivated to cover his deep and genuine cowardice. She loved him for it anyway, fiercely and without reservation, which was the only sensible way to love a creature who had been named for his kitten girth and had never entirely slimmed down.
The satchel waited by the door, a sturdy traveling bag of brown leather she had mended twice and oiled that morning with rendered beeswax until the surface gave back her reflection in a soft, dark blur. She packed methodically. Yarrow poultices wrapped in muslin. A pot of calendula salve for road rash. Three lengths of clean bandage rolled tight. A small jar of honey-and-thyme cough syrup. Two stoppered vials of tincture of willow bark, for headaches and the kind of dull joint ache that came upon her grandmother toward evening. A bundle of dried sage for burning, should she need to clear a room of ill humors. A sheaf of clean paper, the quill, the inkpot wrapped in felt, and three coppers she had been saving for a year toward a proper sealing wax. She made a small disgruntled sound at the sight of the coppers and put them in regardless.
The bottles of Tonic went in last, cushioned by a folded shawl so they would not clink together and crack each other's seals. Wren paused with her hand on the satchel's flap. She had left a space, a deliberate gap, for the thing she had not yet decided to bring.
In the cupboard beneath the windowsill sat a small wooden box, no larger than a prayer book. She knew exactly what was inside. A braid of Cordelia's hair, dark and fine, wound with a sprig of dried rosemary. A single embroidered handkerchief with a sprigged pattern Wren had always liked because the stitches slanted a little, as though her sister had been laughing when she worked. A folded note in Cordelia's hand, read so often that the creases had gone soft and white. And the ring. A plain silver band that their grandmother had given to Cordelia on her sixteenth nameday, plain enough that Wren had once mistaken it for tin until she saw the small maker's mark inside.
She took the box down, opened it, and looked at the things inside for a long moment. Butterball's tail, draped over the edge of the windowsill, went still.
"You are going to bring the braid and the handkerchief," he said, in the tone of one laying out a comfortable truth. "You will leave the ring. It is too important to lose, and you are already carrying too much."
Wren blinked. "I didn't say anything."
"You didn't have to. Your shoulders have a particular set when you are deciding whether to be sentimental or sensible. Sensible always wins, but it always looks exhausted afterward."
She did laugh, and was annoyed at herself for it. Butterball permitted himself a slow, rumbling purr of satisfaction, and Wren slipped the braid and the handkerchief into the satchel, leaving the ring in its box. She did not look at the note. Not yet. There would be time on the road, perhaps, when the rhythm of walking made her brave.
She set the box back in the cupboard, closed the door, and crossed the cottage in three quick strides to fetch her boots.
They were not, despite the chapter heading of any hypothetical future chronicler, sensible. They were old leather boots softened by a year of moss-scuffing and barn mucking, and the left one had developed a small but persistent leak at the seam that Wren had attempted to remedy with a smear of pine pitch. The pine pitch had hardened into a dark, shiny patch that looked, she had to admit, rather like a continent on a map. The right boot pinched at the toe in a manner she had elected to ignore. Together they carried her through the door and onto the stone step outside the cottage, where the morning smelled of cut grass and the bread Aunt Tilly was baking three cottages down the lane.
The sky over Wren Hollow was that particular early-summer blue that looked painted on, the kind of blue that older villagers said meant a fair day for miles. Wren squinted up at it, decided it was probably lying, and set off down the path anyway.
The path ran south along the boundary of the Hollow, past the old apple press and the common well where the women gathered at dusk to gossip in lowered voices about Mr. Pell's sheep. At the fork where the main track bent west toward the village proper, a smaller trail peeled away into the bumble-fen. It was this trail Wren followed, because the fen held the brier-road she needed, the old green track that wound between the standing stones and out into the wider world beyond Wren Hollow.
Butterball traveled in the side-pouch Cordelia had sewn onto Wren's satchel two winters ago, a custom pocket of quilted cotton with a drawstring top and a small ventilation hole embroidered with a fish. He had complained about the fish at the time, on aesthetic grounds. He had been using the pouch as his personal carriage ever since, which meant his opinion had shifted considerably without his ever admitting it.
He emerged just far enough that his head and shoulders cleared the pouch's mouth, ears cocked forward at the rustle of the long grass on either side of the trail.
"Pheasant," he murmured approvingly. "Or grouse. Possibly a moderately ambitious vole."
"Probably just a thrush."
"Hush. Let a cat dream."
They walked in comfortable silence for a quarter-hour, the only sounds the crunch of Wren's boots on the path and the distant lowing of cattle in a pasture they could not see. The fen opened around them in soft sweeps of green and brown, dotted with stands of yellow flag and the occasional sentinel alder. Dragonflies stitched the air in short, glittering runs. The morning grew warmer as they went, and Wren felt the small, familiar pleasure of being out of doors with purpose after too many days bent over her worktable in the cottage.
The bumble-fen had its own particular smell at this hour, a mixture of wet reed and sun-warmed peat and the faint, sharp note of bog myrtle that grew in clumps along the path's edge. Wren gathered a sprig as she walked, more from habit than need, and tucked it behind her ear for later. The world, she thought, was very large, and she was walking into a portion of it that her sister had once walked and never returned from.
The thought arrived uninvited and sat heavily in her chest. She let it sit. She did not have the energy to chase it away this early in the day.
Butterball shifted in his pouch, resettling his weight with the practiced ease of a creature accustomed to conveyance. "You have the map."
It was not a question, but Wren answered anyway. "Yes."
"And the recommendation letter from Mistress Gilly."
"Yes."
"And the Tonic."
"Eight bottles."
"And the small but impressive quantity of coins."
"Three."
He considered this. "Then we are nearly poor. I approve. Poverty lends a certain moral clarity."
"It lends an empty purse, is what it lends."
"Same thing."
Wren smiled despite herself and ducked beneath a low-hanging branch of alder. Beyond it the path curved around a small rise, and atop the rise she could just make out the dark, still shape of the Scarecrow of Lower Bumble, his long arms lifted against the pale sky as though he were addressing some slow congregation of crows.
She had spoken with him twice before, both times in the company of older villagers who treated him as a kind of local landmark rather than a conversationalist. Wren had been the only one, on both occasions, to hear him say anything back. She did not know whether this was because he chose his auditors carefully, or because the others simply did not expect answers from a thing made of straw and an old shepherd's coat. Either way, she liked him. There was a patience about him that reminded her of the more forgiving hours of her grandmother.
She approached the rise at a pace that was almost casual, and would have been entirely casual if her hand had not strayed once to the strap of her satchel to make certain the clasp was firm.
"Good morning," she said, when she was near enough that she would not have to raise her voice. "I am going to Mossgate. I wondered whether you had a thought for the road."
The Scarecrow did not move in any visible way, and yet somehow, without his shifting, the quality of his attention turned toward her. It was as though the air between them had quietly aligned itself along a new axis. His head, which was a sack of straw with two stitches of black thread for eyes, inclined a fraction. His mouth, a single stitched gash, did not open.
Then it did.
"The road will have its road," he said, in a voice like a barn door swinging slowly on a hinge. "And you will have your shoes, whatever shape they are. What do you want of it?"
Wren took a breath. "The shortest way to Mossgate that does not run through Brierwell proper. I am told there is a brier-road through the fen that comes out near the market gate. I would like to find it before nightfall, if I can."
"You can. If you keep your feet beneath you and your temper in your pocket."
"That is two ifs."
"There are always two ifs. The road asks for the small one and the small one is yours."
Butterball, who had been listening with the regal indifference of a cat who had decided that what he was hearing might, in extremis, be of use, narrowed his eyes. "Is there a fish at the end of this road?"
The Scarecrow considered him for a long moment, during which a single crow settled on his left shoulder and considered them both in turn. "There is a stream," he said at last, "with a small brown fish in it. It is not a flattering fish. It tastes, however, of itself."
Butterball purred once, low and decisive. "Acceptable. Proceed."
The Scarecrow's stitched mouth twitched in what might, in a face with more features, have passed for amusement. He lifted his right arm, slowly, and pointed with a hand that had been carved with surprising delicacy by some long-ago hand.
"South-southwest, child. Through the alders until you find the standing stones. Count them. Seven in a ring, one apart. Pass between the apart one and its neighbor on the right. The path will be there, though you will not see it at first. Trust your feet."
Wren nodded, committing the instructions to memory with the easy precision of a girl who had spent three years copying documents for the village scribe. Seven in a ring. One apart. Pass on the right.
"Thank you," she said. "I will bring you a bottle of something from Mossgate, if I can find a thing worth bringing."
"Bring nothing," the Scarecrow said. "Bring yourself back. The Hollow will want you, after a time."
It was not a pleasant thing to hear, and yet it sat more gently than she had expected, like a stone smoothed by the river. Wren dipped her head in a small bow, more of acknowledgment than formality, and turned her steps south-southwest.
The alders closed around her within minutes, their leaves whispering in a wind that did not seem to reach the open ground she had left. The path narrowed, then narrowed again, until she was walking in a green tunnel with only the pale slice of sky above and the soft give of moss beneath her boots. Butterball rode with his ears pricked forward, his whiskers twitching at the small rustlings of birds and insects along the way.
"Seven in a ring," Wren murmured under her breath, testing the numbers against her tongue. "One apart. Pass on the right."
The alders thinned. The standing stones rose out of the fern like the teeth of some patient buried thing, gray with lichen and patient with age. Wren counted them as she approached, heart lifting and falling in the strange rhythm of small discovery. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And there, to the east of the ring, one more standing alone, with a small cairn of stones gathered at its base as though in tribute.
One apart. Pass on the right.
She passed between them, and the world on the other side of the gap was not the same as the world she had left.
The standing stones had not looked so tall from the path, but once she stepped between them the granite seemed to swell around her, close and breathing. Wren held her breath without meaning to. Butterball's purr stuttered, then resumed, lower and uncertain. The smell of the air changed: the green wet of alder and moss gave way to something older, dust and warm stone and the faint mineral tang of underground water.
She did not feel different. That was the strangeness. The books she had read promised vertigo, or the ringing in the ears that old Willum swore came to him when he crossed the standing stones of Upper Bumble. She felt only the small ordinary ache of her feet and the ordinary weight of Butterball against her shoulder and the ordinary worry that she had forgotten to lock the cottage door.
"Seven in a ring," she said again, and her own voice came back to her from somewhere she could not place, as though the stones had repeated it in a whisper of their own. "One apart. Pass on the right."
The gap between the seventh stone and the eighth lay behind her now. Ahead, the path opened into a low country she had never seen: flat and pale under a sky the color of old linen, with hedgerows running in crooked lines and a scatter of sheep at the middle distance, white as dropped handkerchiefes. No village. No road she recognized. A heron lifted from a ditch and went away with slow dignity, its shadow traveling the ground like a second bird.
Wren stood very still and tried to remember what she had been told, in pieces, over the years. The brier-roads, the old woman at the edge of the village had called them when Wren had been small and asking after her sister. Brier-roads because the thorns grew up wherever they were walked, and the thorns remembered who walked there. But the woman had said another thing too, the part that had lodged in Wren like a splinter: that the roads did not always go the same place twice, and that a traveler who lost her nerve halfway would come out wherever she most feared to be.
Wren had been afraid, then, of the dark behind the byre where the chickens had been taken. She had been afraid of the cellar under the Applewhistle house, where the cold came up the stairs in winter. She had been afraid, mostly, of the places her sister had gone and not come back from.
She was not a small child now. She set her jaw, adjusted Butterball's weight on her shoulder, and chose a path.
The hedgerow ran away to the south-southwest, which was the direction she had meant to travel before the stones had swallowed her. She followed it. The grass underfoot was fine and silvery and made no sound when she stepped. The heron, somewhere ahead, gave one long bugling call and fell silent. Butterball's ears swiveled.
"You are thinking," the cat observed after a time, in the slow rumbling voice he kept for important pronouncements, "that you ought to have brought more bread."
"I am thinking," Wren said, "that I ought to have brought less cat."
"Hmph." Butterball resettled himself, his bulk a warm complaint against her neck. "You will miss me when the wolves come."
"There are no wolves in the bumble-fen."
"There are no bumble-fens in the bumble-fen, according to the kind of person who is surprised by wolves."
She almost laughed, and the almost made her chest loosen. The path bent, and the hedgerow bent with it, and presently she came over a low rise and saw, laid out below her like a quilt folded over a knee, the village of Lower Bumble.
It was smaller than she had expected, and quieter. The houses crouched along a single street of packed earth, their thatch deep and dark, their chimneys breathing a thin blue haze into the still air. A dog barked once, far off, and was hushed. At the near edge of the village a field lay open, and in the middle of the field, on a single tall pole, a scarecrow turned its head toward her as she came.
Wren stopped. She had seen scarecrows all her life. She had made them herself from hazel rods and sacking, and had set them up among the cabbages to frighten the rooks. She had never seen one look at her.
The thing on the pole was old. Its sacking had faded from its original tan to a gray the color of dried bone. Straw poked from the sleeves of its coat and from the crown of its battered hat. One button eye had come unfixed and dangled by a thread. The other, a black wooden disk, regarded her with an expression she could not quite read. The wind did not seem to be blowing, and yet the scarecrow moved: a slow, creaking pivot on its pole, its head tipping, its dangling arm swinging wide.
"Wren Applewhistle," it said, in a voice like a gate swung open after a long winter. "From the hollow. The one with the cat."
Wren's hand went to the strap of her satchel before she could think better of it. "How do you know my name?"
"I have been here a long time," the scarecrow said. "I know the names of those who pass. I do not always remember why I know them. That is the trouble with old fields and old guardians." The wooden eye tipped toward her. "You are looking for the brier-road."
It was not a question. Wren swallowed. "I am. I was told you might show me the way."
"I might. I might also hiccup. I have been hiccupping for three days, and it is very lowering." The scarecrow's chest hitched, and a small dry sound escaped it, half cough, half creak. "I should be above such things. I should be dignified. The crows are losing respect."
Butterball had gone very still on Wren's shoulder. His ears flattened. His eyes had gone wide and yellow, the pupils narrowed to slits.
"I can try," Wren said. "To help with the hiccups, I mean. If you will let me come closer."
"What manner of help?" The scarecrow's voice was wary. "I will not be blessed, or sprinkled, or sung at. The last hedge-witch came through here and sang at me for an hour about the harvest and I have never been the same."
"I will not sing," Wren said. "I will look, and I will think, and I will probably tell you something you already know. That is the worst of being a hedge-witch. Most of what we know, the field already knows."
"Hmph." The scarecrow considered this. Its chest hitched again, the sound escaping like a small dry belch. "You may approach. Slowly. The cat may stay where he is."
"He is staying whether I ask him to or not," Wren said, and that was true; Butterball had dug his claws lightly into her collar and would not be moved.
She crossed the field on the fine pale grass. The sun was warm on the back of her neck. The hedgerow at the field's edge whispered a little, as though remarking upon her to its neighbors. When she reached the pole she stood looking up at the scarecrow, and the scarecrow looked down at her, and for a moment neither of them said anything.
"Hold still," Wren said. "I am going to put my hand on the post."
"You will not find anything by putting your hand on the post."
"Probably not. Hold still anyway."
The post was rough and warm under her palm. It smelled of dry wood and of the soil it had been sunk into, and under that, faintly, of something greener. Wren closed her eyes and did not try to do anything. That was the trick her mother had taught her, and her mother's mother before her, in the hedge-tradition of the hollow: that looking was a kind of listening, and listening was a kind of waiting, and waiting was not the same as doing nothing.
She waited. The post did its small creaking. The scarecrow's chest did its small hitching. Under her palm she felt the wood move, a faint shudder, and then a slower pulse beneath it, like a second heartbeat.
"Oh," Wren said softly. "You have a root."
"I beg your pardon?" The scarecrow's voice had lost some of its creak.
"A root. From the rowan at the field's edge. It has grown up inside the post, and it has grown through you." Wren opened her eyes and looked up at the scarecrow's wooden face. "It is not hiccupping. It is drinking. The rowan is thirsty. It has been pulling at you every time it takes a draught, and the pull goes through your chest and out your mouth, and that is what you are calling hiccups."
The scarecrow was silent for a long moment. The wind, which had not seemed to be there at all, came through the field and stirred the hem of its sacking coat.
"Well," the scarecrow said at last. "That is mortifying."
"It should not be. It is only a tree being a tree."
"It is mortifying," the scarecrow said firmly, "to have spent three days believing I was coming apart at the seams, when in fact I was being used as a drinking straw by a rowan."
Wren bit the inside of her cheek to keep her face straight. "May I speak to the rowan?"
"You may try. It is a rowan. It will pretend not to hear you."
She walked to the field's edge, where the rowan stood among the older hawthorns, its bark smooth and pale, its leaves a darker green than the hawthorn's. She put her hand against it and waited again, and this time the waiting was shorter. The tree did not pretend; it simply ignored her with great deliberateness.
"Rowan," Wren said. "You are thirsty."
No answer. The leaves did not stir.
"You are using the scarecrow as a way to drink, and the scarecrow does not like it, and the scarecrow is the only thing keeping the crows off the field, and if the scarecrow comes apart the crows will come, and if the crows come there will be no seed left for you to drink from next year."
A leaf turned over, showing its pale underside. It might have been the wind.
"I am going to put water at your roots," Wren said. "I am going to do it now, while the scarecrow is watching and I cannot be embarrassed about it later. If you would prefer to keep drinking through the post, you are welcome to, but I would rather you did not."
She unslung her satchel and took out the small flask she carried for such purposes, and the cup that folded into its lid, and she poured the water slowly onto the dark earth at the base of the rowan. The earth drank it, and drank it, and drank it. She poured again. The flask was nearly empty before the earth at last refused.
She capped the flask and put it away and sat back on her heels with a sigh. The rowan did not say anything. It was a rowan. But the leaves, when she looked up, were a little less sullen, and the small shudder in the post, when she laid her hand on it again, had gone quiet.
"It has stopped," Wren said, surprised.
"Of course it has stopped," the scarecrow said from the middle of the field. "You embarrassed it into stopping. Rowans are proud little things." Its chest rose and fell, slow and easy. The wooden eye regarded her with what she was almost prepared to call approval. "You will have a turn with the brier-road, then."
"I would be grateful."
"Walk south through the village. Take the left-hand path at the well. When the path forks a second time, take the narrower fork. Where the thorns grow thickest, the road is widest. You will know it by the smell."
"Smell of what?"
The scarecrow considered. "Of where you are going," it said, "and of who has gone before you."
"Thank you," Wren said again, though she suspected she was talking to the air. The scarecrow had not moved, but its wooden eye had turned, and was now fixed on some middle distance beyond her shoulder, the way a person looks when they have already gone somewhere inside themselves and the body is merely being polite by remaining upright.
She stood and brushed the dirt from her knees and shouldered her satchel and turned back toward the village. The brier-roads, then. Whatever they were.
---
She walked the way the scarecrow had told her: south through the village, past the well where old Meg Tarry once kept her bees, left at the well, and then the narrower fork where the thorns grew thickest. The light was already leaning toward amber when she left the last of the cottages behind, and by the time the path forked a second time the sun was sitting on the rim of the hill to the west, and the air had begun to taste of metal and woodsmoke, the way air does when dusk is only an hour or two away.
Butterball had gone quiet in his basket. Not asleep, she thought, but watchful. She could feel the weight of him against her hip, the warmth of him, and once, when the path narrowed between two elder bushes, she felt his ears prick forward against her side.
"I am taking you somewhere strange," she said, low, into the wicker. "If you would like to get out and walk, you are welcome to."
No answer. Butterball's breathing, slow and even. He had decided, evidently, that if he could not see the strange thing, it could not see him. This was a philosophy that had served him well in his previous life as a barn cat, and he saw no reason to abandon it now.
The thorns grew thickest, and then thicker still. Bramble, hawthorn, things she did not have names for: dark-leafed, with small hooked spines that caught at her cloak and held on with a patience that felt almost personal. She walked slowly, one hand up to push the worst of it aside, and the smell the scarecrow had spoken of was there before she saw anything.
It was a green smell, and a cold one, the smell of cellars and of stone that has never seen the sun, and beneath it something sweeter, something almost floral, like hawthorn blossom but older, bluer. She stopped breathing through her nose, and then she thought that was foolish, and breathed through it again, because she was going to need all her senses for what came next.
Where the thorns grew thickest, the road was widest.
She stepped through a curtain of last summer's bramble, and the world on the other side was not the world she had stepped out of.
The path was wide here, wide enough for a cart, and paved with something that was not quite stone and not quite packed earth. It was pale, and faintly luminous in the failing light, as if it remembered being walked on by people who carried lanterns. To either side the thorns drew back, but did not vanish; she could feel them at the edge of her vision, a wall of dark hooks that the road had been cut through, or that had opened to let the road be.
The air tasted of moss and of old rain, and of something she could not name.
"Well," she said, very quietly, to Butterball. "Here we are."
---
She walked for what felt like a long time, though her body told her, later, that it had not been so very long. The dusk thickened. The pale road held its faint glow. Twice she passed openings in the thorn wall to her left, where smaller paths branched off into darkness, and she did not take them, because she had been told to go south and south was the way the road bent, gently, like a river remembering the hill it came down.
And then the trees drew back, and the road broadened, and she saw Mossgate.
It crouched on the low side of a hill, as if it had been trying to hide behind the hill and the hill had refused. The houses were stone, and slate-roofed, and clustered tight as if for warmth, and at the top of the hill a tower rose, dark against the darker sky, with a single yellow eye of light near its peak. A wind came down off the hill and smelled of cold water and of something burning, and she pulled her cloak closer and stood for a moment at the edge of the town, trying to take it in.
There were people. She had not expected so many people.
They were coming up the road toward her, and then turning off it, toward the foot of the hill, in a slow procession that she watched, at first, without understanding. Hooded, most of them. Dark cloaks. They walked two by two, and each pair carried between them a pole, and on the pole hung something she could not, for a moment, see clearly.
Then she could.
It was a person. Each pole carried a person, slung from it like a deer from a hunter's stretcher, arms bound at the elbows, ankles bound at the ankles, head lolling. Their faces she could not see; their cloaks were pulled over their heads, and the hoods shadowed what little was visible. But the way the figures moved, when they moved, was not the way a sleeping person moves.
It was the way a bound person moves.
She stepped off the road and into the shadow of the last of the thorns, and she made herself small, and she watched.
A pair went past. A third. A fourth. The hooded bearers did not speak, and did not look at one another, and their feet made no sound on the pale road, which she thought, distantly, was the most unsettling thing of all, because her own feet made a sound, and she had not noticed it until she noticed that theirs did not.
A fifth pair came up the road, and the figure on their pole lifted its head.
It was a young woman, or near enough. The hood had slipped a little, and Wren saw a thin face, a mouth stopped with a strip of dark cloth, and eyes, above the gag, that were wide and pale and staring straight ahead at nothing.
And then the eyes moved, and found Wren in the shadow of the thorns.
The world went very quiet. The wind dropped. The procession, which had been a low murmur of sound, became the only sound in the world, and the young woman's eyes held Wren's across the width of the road, and the look in them was not a plea, exactly, and not a question. It was a recognition.
I see you , the eyes said.
You see me , Wren thought, and could not look away.
A hand. One of the bearer's hands, gloved in dark leather, came up and pushed the hood back over the young woman's face, and the eyes were gone, and the pair moved on toward the foot of the hill, and the next pair came behind them, and the next, and Wren stood in the thorn shadow and watched them go, and did not move, and did not breathe.
Then the last pair had passed, and the pale road was empty again, and the wind came back, and she found that her hands were shaking.
"Butterball," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. "Butterball, did you see."
No answer from the basket. She slid her hand down to feel for him, and he was there, a tight warm knot against her hip, and the knot was trembling.
"All right," she said. "All right. We are going to be all right."
She did not believe this. She said it anyway, because she had found, in her life, that saying a thing aloud sometimes made it more true than it had been before.
---
She let the last of the procession get ahead of her, and then she followed, at a distance, up the hill. She kept to the shadows of the stone walls that lined the road. She did not know this town. She did not know these people. She knew only that the young woman's eyes had been the color of the sky just before snow, and that they had looked at her as if they had been waiting.
At the top of the hill the tower stood, round and windowless except for the one lit eye near its peak, and the procession filed toward a door at its base, a door of dark wood banded with dark iron, that stood open to receive them. One by one, the hooded pairs went in with their burdens, and the light from within did not reach her, but she could feel it on her face, a thin dry heat, like the heat of a kiln.
She could not go in. She knew this with a certainty that sat in her chest like a stone. Whatever was in that tower, she was not meant to walk in through the door. Not tonight. Not yet.
But she could wait.
She found a hollow in the stone wall across the road from the tower door, where the shadows were deep and the angle of the wall hid her from the light that spilled, occasionally, from the open door. She crouched. She unslung her satchel and took out the small spyglass she had brought, more from habit than from any expectation of use, and she put her eye to it and looked, across the road, into the thin slice of the tower's interior that the open door allowed her.
Stone walls. A staircase spiraling up into the dark. And figures, hooded, laying their burdens down on a floor she could not quite see.
She could not, from this angle, see faces. She could not see whether any of the burdens moved. She could only see the slow movement of the bearers, and the way the light shifted, and the way the yellow eye of the tower's upper window seemed, every few minutes, to pulse, just slightly, as if something behind it had drawn breath.
She stayed until the last of the procession had gone in, and the door had not closed behind them. She stayed until the light from within had steadied, and the figures inside had gone still, or had gone out of her sight. She stayed until the dusk had become night, and the stars had begun to prick through the thin sky above the tower, and the wind had dropped to nothing.
Then she sat back against the cold stone of the wall, and she let out a long breath, and she felt Butterball uncurl in his basket against her hip, and begin, very softly, to purr.
"We are here," she whispered, to him, to the tower, to the young woman's eyes that still seemed to be looking at her from somewhere in the dark. "We have arrived. And tomorrow," she said, "tomorrow I will find out what is in that tower, and I will find out who that young woman was, and I will find out what they are doing with her."
She did not know, yet, that this was a promise she would be asked to keep in ways she could not, tonight, imagine. But she made it anyway. She made it to the dark, and to the purring cat, and to the absent sister whose name she carried with her like a coal in her pocket, warming her, warning her, asking to be held.
The tower's yellow eye held steady above her. The door remained open.
Somewhere inside, the bound woman waited to be seen again.