The cartwheel caught a rut Posy did not remember, and the whole conveyance lurched sideways hard enough to wake the roosting wren from its wicker cage.
Calla Fenwick swore, low and precise, in the manner of a young woman who had been educated past the point where such language became unladylike but not past the point where it lost its usefulness. She braced one boot against the buckboard rail and steadied the birdcage with her free hand. The wren, a male she had named Pippin for reasons she had not explained and Posy had not asked after, ruffled his feathers and regarded them both with the particular indignation of a creature whose nap had been interrupted for the third time since dawn.
"Sorry," Posy said, and meant it in three directions at once.
She pulled the reins taut and brought the pony to a halt. The animal, a stout grey mare called Moth by Calla's father for the dusting of white across her flanks, lowered her head and blew through her lips as though she, too, had grown weary of being asked to negotiate terrain that refused to stay still.
They were on a road.
That was the first difficulty. It was plainly a road. It had the width of a road, the camber of a road, the ruts and puddles and strewn pebbles of a road much used by carts whose drivers had opinions about proper drainage. Willow saplings leaned in from either side, and the sky above was the pale, particular grey of late spring in the marshlands, the sort of grey that meant no rain for an hour or so but no promises beyond that. By any sane accounting, Posy had ridden this stretch of road before. She had charted it herself, two summers past, when the dispute between the Hollowmere eel-fishermen and the upland shepherds had first come to the attention of the Guild, and she had walked its full length with her brass-bound theodolite and her leather journal and the very specific patience required to argue with bog.
Her map sat folded in the pocket of her oilskin satchel, and she had been consulting it no less than a quarter-hour past, when the stone bridge had still been a stone bridge and the willows had grown along the eastern bank in a configuration she could have sworn to under oath.
The stone bridge was gone.
In its place stood a wooden span, newer than anything else on the road, its planks still carrying that yellowish stain of sap that fades by the second winter into the proper grey of weathered timber. Posy stared at it from the driver's seat until Calla, without looking up from the notebook in which she was sketching Pippin's wing-bars, said, "I believe that is the third bridge today."
"It is not," Posy said. "It is the fourth. The first bridge was stone, the second was a ford, the third was wood, and now we have wood again, which is not the same wood."
Calla turned a page with the careful deliberation of someone who had learned to record facts before reacting to them. "You are certain."
"I am a cartographer. Certainty is the commodity I sell."
"And yet."
"And yet," Posy agreed, "the road has apparently decided to take its custom elsewhere."
She climbed down from the buckboard. The mud came halfway up her boot and clung there with the particular enthusiasm of marshland mud, which had always seemed to Posy to possess more character than mud ought to. She walked to the verge, where the willows thinned enough to let her see the water below, and stood for a long moment studying what the water had to say.
The stream beneath the wooden bridge ran clear and shallow over a bed of pale sand. It was perhaps four feet across. It was not the stream she remembered. The stream she remembered had been eight feet across, brown as tea, and slow as a man with a bad knee climbing a staircase. This stream moved with the quickness of a thing that had somewhere to be, and the stones along its margins were sharp-edged in a way that suggested they had not been tumbled long.
She crouched and drew out her pocket-compass. The needle settled on north with the quiet confidence of an instrument that did not care what she thought of the road. She checked it twice. She checked it a third time because the first two answers had been identical and that, in her experience, was when one ought to be most cautious.
North was still north.
That was something, at least.
Behind her, she heard the creak of the buckboard as Calla shifted her weight. The wren sang a few notes, experimental, as though testing whether the world still warranted the effort.
"Posy."
"Mm."
"If the road is not the road, and the stream is not the stream, and you are consulting your compass with the expression of a woman who has been personally insulted by the cardinal points, then perhaps you might tell me where, in any of the many useful vocabularies available to us, we presently are."
Posy straightened. Her joints protested; she had been crouched too long, and the cold of the marsh had a way of settling into the hinges of a person. She dusted her knees with one gloved hand and looked back at Calla, who sat very upright in the passenger seat with her notebook balanced on her knee and her pen poised in a manner that suggested she was about to commit a great many inconvenient observations to paper.
"We are," Posy said, "on a road between Hollowmere and the upland grazing, which is exactly where we ought to be, which is the problem."
Calla's mouth thinned. She was a young woman whose face had been built for coolness, and she used that coolness now the way other people used a raised voice. "You are not, I trust, about to suggest that the road is enchanted."
"I am about to suggest nothing of the sort. I am about to suggest that the road is wet, and that wet roads in the marshlands have a habit of rearranging themselves whenever the eel-fishermen and the shepherds fall to arguing over culverts. It may be that someone has diverted the stream. It may be that someone has rebuilt the bridge. It may be that my map is six months out of date, which it is, and I am aware of that, and I will thank you not to look at me as though I have brought this upon us through professional negligence."
"I was not looking at you in any particular way."
"You were looking at me as though you were about to. I saw it coming."
Calla closed her mouth. The wren, who had been attending this exchange with the alertness of a small professional critic, offered a single bright chirp that might have been applause.
Posy turned back to the road.
The trouble with roads in the marshlands was that they were not, properly speaking, roads at all. They were the result of long negotiation between the folk who used them and the ground that did not wish to be used. A proper road had a maker and a date and a council warrant and sometimes a milestone with the miles carved into it in a clerk's careful hand. A marshland road had a cow. The cow found a place where her hooves did not sink, and the next cow followed, and after enough cows the path became a road in the sense that everyone agreed to call it one, and that agreement held until the next flood, at which point the cows held out elsewhere and the road held out elsewhere too.
Posy had been mapping such roads for nine years. She had mapped them in three counties. She had eaten her dinners out of a tin and slept in a bedroll beneath her cart and learned the names of more eel-fishermen and shepherds than she had ever expected to need, and she had done it because the work was good and the Guild paid fairly and because there was a particular satisfaction in pinning a place down on paper so that other people, later, could find their way to it.
She had never before had a place refuse to be pinned.
The second difficulty was that she could not, in good conscience, call this a haunting. Hauntings had signatures. They left marks. A haunted road would be cold in summer, or warm in winter, or grow mist in a particular shape, or carry the smell of something burned, or produce a sound that did not belong to the living landscape. This road was doing none of those things. This road was simply being a road, thoroughly and without apology, except that it kept changing its mind about which road it preferred to be.
She walked to the bridge and set her boot upon the first plank. The wood was solid. The nails were new. Someone had built this bridge within the past fortnight, and she had not heard of any such building, and she made it her business to hear of such things.
"Come on, then," she said over her shoulder. "If the road has decided to be something, we may as well let it be something and see where it gets us."
Calla climbed down from the buckboard with the careful economy of a woman who intended to have words about this later and preferred to choose them in private. She set Pippin's cage on the driver's seat and tied the leather strap through its handle so that a sudden stop would not send the bird into the ditch. Moth, the pony, regarded the bridge with the long-suffering patience of an animal that had seen worse and was content, for now, to reserve judgement.
Posy took the reins and led the pony across. The bridge held. The planks did not bow. The stream beneath went on with its business of being the wrong stream, and the willows on the far bank stood up out of the water like the ribs of a drowned cart, which was exactly what she remembered, and that was the first thing all morning that had agreed with her map.
She stopped on the far side and unfolded the map.
The leather was soft from years of handling. The ink had faded in places, particularly along the western margin where the paper had been exposed to damp, but the lines were still legible: the road as a double stroke, the stream as a single wandering one, the bridge marked with the small square symbol she used for stonework. Beside the square, in her own cramped hand, she had written the date and the depth and the name of the eel-fisherman who had told her, with considerable emphasis, that the bridge had stood since his grandfather's time and would stand until his grandson's time and that any cartographer who said otherwise could take her brass-bound theodolite and herself off to perdition.
She had liked that man.
She looked up from the map at the road ahead.
It curved away between two low hills towards a stand of alder that she had not noted in her original survey but which might, she conceded, have been there in some earlier form and might have grown since. A heron rose from the reeds to her right, ungainly and enormous, and beat its way westward with the slow determination of a creature that had appointments to keep. The marsh smell came in on a shift of air: green, peaty, underlaid with the faint mineral tang of bog-water and the sweeter rot of last year's reeds breaking down into next year's mud.
She folded the map and put it away.
"The road forks ahead," she said. "Or it does not fork. It may yet decide."
"Posy."
"Mm."
"You are being evasive."
"I am being a cartographer. The two are occasionally indistinguishable."
Calla made a small sound, neither agreement nor dissent, and climbed back into the buckboard. Posy gathered the reins, clicked her tongue at Moth, and set the pony forward.
The road unrolled before them like a sentence that had not yet decided its own ending.
Smoke rose from a low stone chimney before the shrine itself became visible.
Posy saw it first as a smudge against the slate-grey sky, thin and pale as a breath held too long, then as a column, then as the thatched roof it issued from. The shrine stood in a hollow where the road dipped between two shoulder-high banks, half-swallowed by elder and bracken, its whitewashed walls stained green at the base where the damp lived. A small bell hung beneath the eaves, green with verdigris, motionless in the still air. The door stood ajar.
"Halt," Calla said, before Posy had reached for the reins. Her voice carried the particular flatness it acquired when she wished to be obeyed without discussion. "This is not on your survey."
"It is not on any survey. That is precisely why I wish to look at it."
"You wish to chart it. You wish to add it to your collection of misbegotten margins."
Posy drew Moth to a stop. "I wish," she said carefully, "to determine whether it is on the road at all, or whether the road has merely decided to pass near it. There is a difference."
Calla did not argue further. She was tired enough, Posy suspected, to recognise the shape of a disagreement she would lose, and wise enough not to spend the remainder of her energy on it. They had been travelling since the early fog, and the fog had taken something from both of them, a sharpness, a clarity, though Posy could not have said precisely what.
She climbed down from the buckboard and stretched, feeling her back complain in the particular dialect of a woman who had spent too many hours on a sprung seat. The cold of the marsh evening was settling into the hollow like water into a cupped hand. Somewhere a wren scolded, a small furious sound, and was answered from further off. Calla's head turned at once, her attention snagged, then released.
Inside the shrine, a lamp burned.
Posy pushed the door wider with her knuckles and went in.
The interior was small enough that the two of them nearly filled it. A flagged floor, uneven, mossy at the edges. A wooden table against one wall bearing a chipped basin, a folded linen cloth, and a book so swollen with damp that its covers no longer met. Above the table hung a single dried sprig of rowan, and beside it a small painted icon of a saint whose name Posy did not know, whose face had been reduced by time and woodworm to a kind of patient abstraction. The lamp stood on a bracket near the door, its flame guttering in the draught that followed them in.
An old man sat on a three-legged stool in the corner, his hands folded over the head of a walking stick that appeared to be older than he was. He was very thin, very upright, and very much awake, though his one remaining eye regarded them with the mildness of a creature that had long since made its peace with being surprised.
"Good evening," Posy said. "I am sorry to intrude."
"You are not intruding," he said. "You have been expected, in one form or another, for some days now. Whether in this form I cannot yet say."
He had a soft voice, slightly hoarse, the voice of a man who had spent a great many hours talking to himself or to creatures that did not require answers. It carried a lilt Posy recognised without being able to place, a music of hills and small chapels, of words worn smooth by repetition.
"I am Brother Idris," he continued, when neither of them spoke. "I keep this place as well as I am able, which is not very well, and I welcome you to it, and I will not ask your business unless you wish to tell it."
"We are travelling to Hollowmere," Posy said. "Or near to it. The road is uncertain."
"The road is always uncertain here. That is its nature."
Calla had remained in the doorway, her shoulders against the frame, her face turned partly away. She spoke without looking at the old man. "The road remembers itself, ordinarily. It is its defining quality."
"Ordinarily, yes."
"And here it does not."
"Here it forgets, and is forgotten. It has done so for some while. I will not say how long, because I do not precisely know, and because the answer would distress you."
Posy set down her satchel. "Brother, may we shelter here for the night? The light is going, and my companion is not fond of the dark."
"You may shelter here, and welcome. There is a loft above the stable, if you can abide the smell of old hay. There is also, if you prefer, a corner of this room, and I will move my stool."
"The loft will do very well. Thank you."
"It will do," he agreed, in a tone that suggested he wished neither to praise nor to condemn it.
He rose, with the cautious deliberation of a man whose joints no longer permitted surprises, and took down the lamp from its bracket. The shadows rearranged themselves around the room, growing taller and thinner. Calla stepped back to let him pass, and as he moved into the doorway, Posy saw that his left eye was not merely closed but absent, the lid sunken into a socket that had healed long ago into a seam of pale tissue. He did not attempt to conceal it, and she did not stare.
"Bring your beast in," he said, over his shoulder, to no one in particular. "The ditch has a liking for ponies, and I would rather it did not have a liking for yours."
Outside, the air had thickened. Moth stood with his head low, his ears working, his breath coming in pale jets. Posy took him by the bridle and led him, without difficulty but with a great deal of patient clicking, into the lean-to stable that opened off the shrine's side wall. The smell of old hay was, as promised, considerable. Moth appeared to consider it and to find it acceptable, which was more than Posy had dared to hope.
When she returned to the shrine, Calla had gone up to the loft, and Brother Idris was setting a kettle on a small iron trivet beside the lamp. He did not look up as Posy came in, but he spoke.
"Your friend does not care for chapels."
"Chapels are not her particular interest. Birds are her particular interest."
"Ah. I had thought as much. She has the look of one who listens for things."
"She does. She hears more than most."
"And you?"
"I listen also. Less attentively, perhaps."
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh, and set out two cups, and then, after a moment's consideration, a third.
The kettle began, after a while, to whisper. The shrine settled around them with the small sounds of an old building accepting its evening: a creak from the loft, a settling of thatch, the faint scurry of something in the thatch that might have been a mouse and might have been, Posy suspected, something else. She did not mention it. Brother Idris poured the water through a small strainer into the cups, and the smell of the herb he rose to the ceiling in a slow curl.
"May I ask you a question?" Posy said.
"You may ask. Whether I will answer is another matter, and one we shall discover together."
"Hollowmere. Have you been there?"
He was silent for long enough that she thought perhaps he would not answer at all. Then he lifted his cup, and breathed across it, and spoke.
"I have been to its edge. Once. Some years ago, when I was less careful with myself."
"And?"
"And I came away again. That is the substance of it."
He drank, and she drank, and the taste of the infusion was faintly bitter and faintly sweet, like the memory of something she had never actually tasted.
"You ask," he said, after a while, "because you are making a map."
"I am making a map. Yes."
"Of the marshlands. Of the disputed ground."
"Yes."
"And your map will say, where Hollowmere is, that there is something there. Or your map will not say, and that will say something also."
"Yes."
He nodded, as though she had confirmed something he had already suspected. "Then I will tell you what I can, and you will do what you will with it, and I will not be responsible for the consequences, because I am not responsible for the road, and the road is what has brought you here."
Posy waited.
"Hollowmere," he said, "has been removed from three maps in my time. I do not mean redrawn. I mean removed, as a name, as a mark, as a settlement. The first was a road-map, some years back. The second was a survey of the region done by a man from the capital who came through with a great many questions and left with very few answers. The third was a local map drawn by a schoolmaster for his pupils, which I myself saw drawn, and which I myself saw, three weeks later, with the village gone from it. The man wept. He could not say why."
"Removed by whom?"
"By the road, I think. Or by whatever the road has become."
Calla's voice came from the loft, sharp and distant. "You are saying the road is acting with intent."
"I am saying nothing so definite," Brother Idris said, mildly, to the ceiling. "I am saying that the road has forgotten itself, and that forgetting has a shape. I am saying that a thing which forgets where it goes will, in time, forget where it has been. I am saying that there are places the road will no longer name, and that Hollowmere is one of them. Whether the road intends this, I do not know. I am not in the road's confidence. I am a hedge-priest, not a road-keeper."
He paused. Somewhere above them, a moth had found its way into the loft, and was batting softly against the underside of the thatch. He lifted his head and spoke to it, very quietly, in words Posy could not quite make out. The moth settled.
"And our map," Posy said. "The one we carry. May that be why the road hesitates? Because it knows itself to be described?"
Brother Idris looked at her then, fully, with his one eye, and the look was not unkind but it was not comforting either. It was the look of a man who had seen this kind of question before, and had not enjoyed seeing it.
"It may be," he said. "A map is a kind of memory. If a thing has chosen to forget, it does not love to be reminded. A map carried into such a country may be, to that country, an injury."
He set down his cup.
"I will say no more on it tonight. The loft is cold, but the hay is dry. In the morning, if you wish, I will tell you what I can of the road as it now goes. What I will not do is advise you to go on, because I do not advise. I keep this chapel. I do not keep the road."
He rose, with the same cautious deliberation, and took himself off to a small doorway at the back that Posy had not, until that moment, noticed. The door closed behind him, and the lamp burned on, and the moth in the thatch above continued its small, persistent argument with the night.
Posy sat for a long time with her hands around the cooling cup.
She did not, she told herself, believe in the malice of roads. She had spent too many years upon them to afford such beliefs. And yet.
She thought of the brass-bound theodolite, and the eel-fisherman, and the bridge that had stood since his grandfather's time. She thought of the map in her satchel, folded, weighted, patient. She thought of Calla above her, listening for wrens that might no longer be there to answer.
She climbed the ladder to the loft, and found Calla already lying down, her back to the room, her coat pulled over her shoulders. Posy lay down beside her, and the hay rustled and sighed, and the night came in from the marsh in long cold breaths.
In the morning, she would ask Brother Idris about the road.
The moth in the thatch settled at last, and was still.
The morning came in grey and still, with a mist so fine it barely qualified as weather. Posy woke first, stiff from the hay, and lay for a moment listening to the silence below. No sound of Brother Idris. The chapel felt hollow when a body was absent from it, the way a glove feels after the hand has been withdrawn.
She rose and climbed down, finding the lamp still burning low in its saucer of oil. On the table where the cups had stood, a plate of bread and a small crock of butter had been laid, and beside them a folded paper. She read:
The road from Stone Bridge ford goes as I last walked it, in the spring of this year. To the village it goes true, by the river path and through the alder wood. Beyond the village I cannot say. I have not walked beyond in twelve months, and I will not walk beyond again. I have put down what I remember. There is a smithy on the left after the ford, a stile on the right after the wood, and a gate that does not latch. I will be in the chapel until midday, and then I will not be in the chapel. Go with God, or with whomsoever you trust.
B.I.
Posy turned the paper over. On the back, in a slightly different ink and a much more hurried hand, was a single line:
P. There is a wrong turning after the third pasture. I did not put it on the map. Keep to the higher ground.
She folded it carefully and put it in her pocket, and ate a piece of bread standing, and then another, and then she climbed back up to wake Calla.
The descent from the ridge was gentler than the ascent had been brutal. The path, such as it was, ran between two old field walls built of the local slate, stacked without mortar and leaning gently inward like tired old men. Mist pooled in the hollows, and the small silver birches that grew along the edges looked like the masts of ships becalmed in a white sea.
Calla walked ahead, and Posy walked behind, and neither of them spoke. After a quarter of an hour the path joined a proper cart track, rutted and strewn with the droppings of some patient draft animal, and the going improved. Calla stopped at a low stone stile and turned, and Posy saw that her face had resumed its customary composure, as though the night in the hay loft had been a stain she had managed to wash out.
"You were awake," Calla said. It was not a question.
"I was. Did you sleep?"
"No."
"Nor I, properly."
They climbed the stile. Beyond it the track ran down through a small copse of hazel, the nuts still green and tight on the branches, and into a wider valley where a stream ran beside the path over a bed of flat stones. Posy heard it before she saw it, a clear small voice, and she felt something in her own throat ease in response. Water that went where it ought. Water that was not consulting its own inclinations.
"Calla."
"Mm."
"Why did you come?"
The question came out before Posy had quite decided to ask it. She had been turning it over since the chapel, since the confession and the bread, since the moment when the young woman had said twenty-three wrens in a voice like a stone dropped into a well. Now the asking had outrun the thinking, and Calla had stopped on the path, and was looking at her with an expression Posy could not quite read.
"I have told you why," Calla said.
"You told me why you say you came. You told me the cover story. You have not told me the real one."
Calla's mouth thinned.
"You presume a great deal."
"I am a mapmaker. I presume nothing. I observe, and I record, and sometimes I ask. You came to Hollowmere looking for something. You did not come to count wrens. You have not looked at a wren since we crossed the first stile."
The stream went on talking to itself. A thrush began somewhere in the hazel, and stopped. Calla stood with one foot on a higher stone than the other, her balance precarious, her colour high.
"My sister," she said at last. "I came because of my sister."
Posy said nothing. She had learned, in many villages, that the space after a confession is best left wide.
"Ailie," Calla said. "Her name was Ailie. She was two years younger than me. She was, in every way that mattered, the better one. She was kinder, and she was braver, and she had a way with birds that I could never match. When she was nine years old she found a wren's nest in the thatch of our stable, and she sat three hours in the straw to watch the parent come in, and she came back to the house with straw in her hair and a look on her face like someone who has seen a vision. From that day she was a naturalist, and I was the one who copied out her notes and sharpened her pencils."
She stopped. The thrush tried again, and succeeded.
"She came to Hollowmere three years ago. She came because she had heard, from a man who had heard from a man, that there was a book to be found in the village. Not a book like other books. A book that was written in the margins of other books, or so the story went. A book that contained the true names of the birds. The wren's true name. The robin s true name. The name that the birds call themselves when they are alone in the dark."
Posy's hand, without her permission, went to her satchel.
"She read to me from it," Calla said. "Once. Before she went. She sat on my bed and she read me three pages, and I could not afterwards remember a single word. But I remember the sound of her voice. I remember it as though it were happening now."
"What was the book called?"
"It had no title on the spine. The cover was blank. She said the man who gave it to her said it would not keep a title, that the title was part of the forgetting."
Calla's eyes were bright, but her voice did not break. Posy respected this, and did not look away.
"She went to Hollowmere to return the book to wherever it had come from. She wrote to me from the village. She said she had found the place it belonged. She said she would be back within the week. She was not back within the week. She was not back at all."
"How long?"
"Three years. Three years in October."
"And no word."
"None."
"Have you been before?"
"Three times. I went the first time myself, in the winter after. I went the second time with a man from her university who said he knew the country. I went the third time with a woman who said she could find anything. The first time I could not find the village. The second time I found it and could not stay. The third time I found it and she was not in it."
Calla looked down at the stream, and then back up at Posy.
"This is the fourth time."
Posy was quiet for a long time. The stream did not wait. It went on, as streams do, over the flat stones, in the direction it had always gone.
"Then we are not going to Hollowmere for the wrens," Posy said at last.
"No."
"We are going for the book."
"Yes."
"Calla. I must tell you something. And you must hear me out, and you must not strike me, because what I have to say is not a blow though it may feel like one."
Calla set her shoulders, the way she had set them in the chapel. Posy reached into her satchel, past the folded maps, past the theodolite case, and brought out the volume she had wrapped in oilskin against the rain. She unwrapped it now, in the grey morning, with the stream running beside them and the thrush practising its five notes in the hazel.
She held it out, and Calla did not take it.
"Look at the cover," Posy said.
Calla looked. The cover was blank. Posy opened the book, and Calla saw that the pages were blank also, the cream of the paper unmarked, uncreased, unstained. Posy turned the pages, one by one, and Calla saw the blankness repeat itself, page after page after page, like snow falling in a country that had forgotten how to stop.
"Yesterday morning," Posy said, "this book had a title on the spine. It was The Marginalia of the Lesser . It was in a box in a locked room in the house of a man who is now dead, who took it from your sister three years ago last spring, in the village of Hollowmere, where he had been sent to find her and could not bear to bring her home."
Calla did not move.
"The book is forgetting itself," Posy said. "The words are going. The title went first, and then the chapter heads, and then the marginalia, and now the body. I have been watching it for three weeks, and I had not the courage to tell you what I was seeing, because I thought if I told you I would have to stop, and I could not stop."
She held the book out, and at last Calla took it.
She held it in both hands, and she stood in the path, and the mist came around her ankles. Posy saw her open the book to the first page, and then to the second, and then to the twentieth, and then she stopped, because on the twenty-first page there was, at the very centre of the otherwise blank leaf, a single faint line.
It was not ink. It was not pencil. It was the colour of old blood, and it pulsed, very slightly, as though it had a heartbeat of its own.
Calla made a sound that was not quite a word. Posy stepped closer, and looked over her shoulder.
The line was a curve. It began at the lower left of the page, rose gently, and curved up toward the upper right, and it was the shape, if you looked at it for any length of time, of a river.
"Calla," Posy said, very quietly. "The road is not the only thing that is trying to remember itself."
The thrush in the hazel gave up its five notes and flew away. The stream went on over its stones. Calla stood with the book in her hands, and the line pulsed on the page like a small, stubborn heart.