The river at Wren's Crossing ran brown and slow beneath a sky the color of old pewter, and on its banks a wooden sign swung between two iron posts, the paint on its letters half-flaked to nothing. Posy Mendel drew rein first, her small cart pulling up short where the road widened into a graveled square. The hooves clopped once, twice, then stilled.
"Here," she said. She did not say it to anyone in particular. She said it to the morning, to the cold that had settled into her fingers, to the smell of wet stone and woodsmoke that hung over the town.
Behind her, Calla's mare came up alongside, its breath steaming. Calla Fenwick sat very straight in her saddle, one gloved hand resting on the pommel, the other holding a small leather-bound journal she had been scribbling in since dawn. Her dark hair was tucked under a cap, and her eyes, the color of river ice, moved across the rooftops with the slow attention of someone cataloguing specimens.
"I count seven chimneys with smoke," Calla said. "And none of the others."
"What of it?"
"It means the town is not quite dead." Calla's voice was cool, precise, as if she were reading from a field guide. "If it were abandoned, there would be no smoke at all. If it were thriving, all the chimneys would be drawing. Seven suggests something in between."
Posy turned in her seat and looked at her properly. "You're cheerful this morning."
"I am always cheerful. I simply choose not to perform it."
Posy grunted and turned forward again. She was a lean woman, brown-haired, with the kind of face that settled into lines that hinted at patience tested but rarely broken. Her hands on the reins were ink-stained even under the dirt of the road, and her lap was crowded with a roll of vellum, a case of brass drawing instruments, and a brass compass that ticked softly against her knee.
The square before them was wide and empty. A market cross stood at its center, the stone worn so that the saints upon it had lost their faces. Around it, houses of timber and plaster leaned toward one another as if sharing a confidence. Beyond them, the church spire rose into the pewter sky, its weathervane fixed at north though no wind stirred. The river ran behind the square, separated by a low wall over which gulls wheeled and cried.
But it was the clocks that stopped her.
In the square, a clock stood on a stone pedestal, its face painted blue and gold, the hands frozen at a quarter past four. Above the baker's shop across the way, a smaller clock matched it exactly. To the left, over what appeared to be a chandler's, a third hung crooked on a hook, its hands again at a quarter past four. Posy looked from one to the other, her eyes narrowing.
"That's peculiar," she said.
"Quaint," Calla said, in a tone that suggested she found nothing quaint about it at all. Her mare stamped, and the sound echoed off the empty square.
"It isn't quaint. It's wrong."
"It is not for you to say what is wrong and what is not, Posy. You make maps. You do not make judgments upon towns."
Posy gave her a long look, then smiled thinly. "Your father teach you that?"
"My father taught me many things. Among them that observation is not the same as opinion."
"Fine. Observe this, then. Every clock in this town is stopped at the same hour. That is not a thing that happens by accident."
Calla closed her journal with a snap and tucked it under her arm. "Perhaps there was a storm. Perhaps the tower fell. Perhaps the townsfolk simply do not care to know the hour. There are villages in the north where they have not wound a clock in a generation and they manage well enough."
"And yet you observed the chimneys. So you care about what towns do."
Calla's mouth twitched, the barest suggestion of a smile. "I care about wren populations. Towns are incidental."
From behind them, slow and rattling, came the sound of wheels on gravel. A cart drew into the square, drawn by a swaybacked roan whose ribs showed through its winter coat. At the reins sat a broad man with a round red face and a small black hat that sat on his head as if it had been glued there. He reined in beside them and leaned over, one arm hooked lazily over the side of his cart, the other resting on his thigh.
"Morning, ladies," he said. His voice was rough and quick, the vowels broad and flat, the consonants short and blunt. "You're not from these parts."
"No," Posy said.
"Thought not. Nobody from these parts wears gloves like those." He nodded at Calla's hands. "Bit too fine for the road, them."
Calla did not look at him. "We are looking for the inn."
"You're looking at it." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "The Wheatsheaf, right there. Best beds in the county. Only beds in the county, come to that."
Posy looked where he pointed. Across the square, half hidden by a crooked holly tree, stood a low whitewashed building with a thatched roof and a hanging sign that swung on a single iron chain. The sign was painted with three golden sheaves of wheat, but the paint had faded so badly that one had to look twice to see them at all.
"The Wheatsheaf," Posy said.
"That's the one. Run by me." He tapped his chest with a thick finger. "Osric Pell. Innkeeper, chandler, brewer, and the man who knows every soul in this town and most of their business besides."
"Do you know the road to Hollowmere?" Posy asked.
Something shifted behind his eyes. It was small, a flicker, the sort of thing one might miss if one were not in the habit of watching. Posy was in the habit of watching. Calla, too, though she pretended otherwise.
"Hollowmere," he repeated.
"Yes."
"Hollowmere," he said again, as if the word were a thing he were turning over in his mouth. He spat into the gravel. "Can't say as I've heard of it."
Posy did not look at Calla. "It's a village. A small one. To the northeast, by the marsh."
"Marshland, is it?" Pell leaned back, and his chair creaked. "There's marshland aplenty round here. Could be any of a dozen places."
"It is on the post road," Posy said. "The old one. There is a sign that points to it. A wooden sign, painted brown, on a post by the crossroads half a mile back."
Pell looked at her. "A sign, you say."
"I saw it," Calla said. She still did not look at him. Her eyes were on the church spire. "The post is rotted through near the base. The sign will fall within the year."
"Tragic," Pell said, but he did not sound like he meant it. "Well. The post road hasn't been used in some while. Could be any old thing nailed to a post by some wanderer with time on his hands."
"The sign," Posy said carefully, "points at Hollowmere."
"Then the sign's wrong." He said it with a finality, the way a man closes a ledger. "You won't find it on any map I know of, and I know this county the way a mother knows her children. Uglier, mostly. But mine."
He climbed down from his cart and stood before them. He was shorter than he had seemed sitting, but broader, and his shoulders had a way of filling the space in front of him. He hooked his thumbs into his belt and looked from Posy to Calla and back again.
"Now," he said, "you'll be wanting rooms. I've two. One over the kitchen, warm enough. One at the back, cold as a witch's heart, but the mattress is better. Take your pick."
"We'll take the warm one," Posy said.
"You'll take both, if you please. I've a rule. No two ladies sharing a room on the road. Bad for the reputation of the house. Bad for the reputation of the ladies."
Posy opened her mouth, but Calla spoke first, her voice as cool as the river.
"We will take two rooms."
"Good. That's settled then." He turned and began walking toward the inn, and after a moment Posy gathered her reins and followed, the cart wheels groaning over the gravel. Calla came last, her mare's hooves marking time on the stones.
Inside, the Wheatsheaf smelled of old smoke and damp wool and something sweeter beneath, the ghost of a kettle long since boiled. The common room was low-ceilinged and dark, with a fire laid in the hearth but not yet lit. Pell moved behind the bar and produced a key from his belt.
"Two nights, is it?"
"As long as we need," Posy said.
"And how long is that?"
"As long as the work takes."
Pell's eyes flicked to her cart, to the roll of vellum, to the brass compass that poked from her coat pocket. "Work, is it. What kind of work takes a woman out to the marsh in winter?"
"The kind that pays."
He grunted. It might have been approval. It might have been suspicion. With Pell, Posy suspected, it was both at once.
The room over the kitchen was small but clean, with a narrow bed, a washstand, and a window that looked out onto the square. Posy set her case on the bed and pushed the window open. The cold came in sharp, smelling of the river. She looked down at the clock on its pedestal. A quarter past four. She watched it for a long moment, as if she expected the hands to move.
They did not.
Calla's room was at the back, just as Pell had said. It was colder. The bed was made with a quilt of faded blue wool, and there was a single chair by the window. Calla sat in it and drew her journal from her coat and opened it to a fresh page. She wrote the date. She wrote Wren's Crossing. She wrote, in small, neat letters, seven chimneys drawing. clocks stopped. innkeeper denies knowledge of Hollowmere despite signage.
She paused. She tapped the end of her pen against her lower lip. Then she wrote, the post road to the NE is disused but not abandoned. the sign is genuine. the innkeeper is not.
She closed the journal and looked out the window. Beyond it, the marsh stretched gray and still toward a horizon she could not see. Somewhere out there, if Posy was right, was a village that did not appear on any map Pell recognized. Somewhere out there, the wrens were singing, and Calla had come a very long way to listen to them.
She wondered, briefly, whether she would ever hear them at all.
Downstairs, Pell set a pot of tea on the bar and three cups, though no one had asked for tea. He poured for Posy first, then Calla, then himself. He did not ask if they wanted it. He did not ask if they wanted milk.
"Maps," he said, watching Posy over the rim of his cup. "You're a mapmaker."
"I am."
"Then you'll be after the boundary stones. There's a dispute, they say, between the Bishop's estate and the Crown land to the east. Surveyors came through last spring. None of them stayed. None of them came back."
"Why not?" Posy asked.
He shrugged. "Couldn't say. Could be they finished their work. Could be they didn't like the company." He sipped his tea. "Could be they found what they were looking for."
"And what is that?"
Pell set his cup down. He looked at her with the flat, appraising eye of a man pricing a horse. "That," he said, "is a question for a surveyor. Not for an innkeeper." He leaned forward, and the chair creaked under him. "Now. You'll be wanting your tea. And your rooms. And your privacy, I'll wager. You'll get all three, so long as you mind my rules."
"Which are?"
"Keep to the roads. Don't go wandering where you aren't invited. Don't ask questions of folk who've no cause to answer them. And don't go chasin' after villages that don't exist." He smiled. It was not a friendly smile. "Do that, and we'll get along fine."
Posy met his eyes. She did not smile. "And if we don't?"
"Then," he said, "you'll find that the Wheatsheaf has no rooms, no tea, and no mapmaker's welcome. And the road out of Wren's Crossing is a long one when the mist comes down."
He finished his tea, set the cup on the bar, and walked out through the back door, leaving them alone in the common room. The fire was still unlit. The smell of damp wool and old smoke hung in the air. From somewhere beyond the walls came the sound of a clock ticking, then stopping, then ticking again, as if it could not make up its mind.
Calla looked at Posy. Posy looked at Calla.
"He's lying," Posy said.
"Yes," Calla said. "He is."
"Then we are in the right place."
Calla did not answer that. She looked into her tea, and the surface of it trembled, though nothing in the room had moved.
The hearth caught at the third try. Posy crouched on the flagstones, her skirts pooled in old ash, and coaxed the kindling with the brass ferrule of her pipe until a tongue of flame licked up through the splinters of pine and settled, at last, into the larger logs. The smoke that had been pooling at the ceiling thinned. The room exhaled.
She stood, brushed her palms on her apron, and looked around.
The common room of the Wheatsheaf was larger than it had seemed from the lane. Two long tables ran the length of the floor, scarred with the ghosts of a thousand meals. A settle stood against the inner wall, its back carved with initials so old the wood had begun to swallow them. Across the room, a door stood ajar on a kitchen darker than a well. Beyond that, the taproom door, and beyond that, the road.
A road, Posy thought, that was not on her map.
She set the pipe on the mantel and crossed to the window. Outside, the dusk had thickened into that particular grey that belongs only to the marshlands in autumn, when the light seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, and the horizon retreats a step further every time you look for it. A rook crossed the field beyond the hedge, its black wings slow against the pale sky. Somewhere in the village a dog barked once and thought better of it.
"Room first," Posy said. "Then work."
The stairs at the back of the common room rose steep and narrow, the treads worn into shallow bowls by generations of feet. Posy climbed with one hand on the wall, the other on the banister that was more a suggestion than a rail. At the top, a landing the size of a prayer. Two doors, facing each other. She pushed the nearer open.
The room was clean. That was the first thing, and Posy noted it as a craftsman notes the grain of an unfamiliar wood. The bed was made with linen so white it seemed to hum in the dim light from the window. A chair stood in the corner. A washstand with a chipped basin. A small hearth, swept. On the sill, a clay pot of dried lavender, its scent thin and sweet.
The second room was the same, save that its window looked out over the lane and the marsh beyond it, and its lavender had long since crumbled to dust.
Calla took the room with the view. She set her bag on the chair, unslung the leather case that held her notebook and her father's field glasses, and stood for a long moment looking out at the grey.
"I will be down," Posy said from the doorway, "when I have seen to the ink."
Calla did not turn. "Yes."
A word like a pebble dropped into a well.
Posy went down. She crossed the common room, past the hearth that was now burning well, past the settle where Pell had sat, and into the kitchen. The kitchen was empty. A pot of stew sat on the hob, the surface greying with cold. She did not touch it. She found the larder, a flag-flagged cold room behind a low door, and there, on a shelf, a stub of tallow and a tin of matches. She took one of each.
Back in the common room, she set the candle on the bar and unslung her satchel.
From the satchel she drew, first, a square of beeswax. She worked it between her palms until it softened, then ran a thin bead along the inside rim of her traveling inkpot, which she had thought to bring full from Maren. The wax set. The ink would not spoil. She had learned this from old Tomasz, the Polish surveyor who had mapped the fens in the reign of the old king. He had died in a ditch in Cambridgeshire with a brass protractor in his breast pocket, and Posy had kept his habits as a kind of relic.
From the satchel she drew, next, the map.
She unrolled it across the bar, weighting the corners with her pipe, the candle, a chipped mug, and her own two fists, which pressed down on the curled ends until the paper lay flat. The vellum was the same she had carried for three months, the same she had begun in Maren with a fresh nib and the instructions of a solicitor who had paid her eight pounds to settle a dispute between two farmers over a drainage ditch. The map was meant to show the marshes east of Hollowmere. It showed a great deal more.
The pulsing line was there.
Posy had first seen it on the road from Maren, on the third night out, when she had unrolled the vellum to check a turning and found a faint mark where no mark should have been. She had thought it a stain. She had scrubbed at it with the corner of her sleeve. The mark had not moved. By morning it had grown.
Now, in the light of the tallow candle, the line had thickened and lengthened. It began at the eastern edge of the surveyed marsh, where the land petered out into reeds and the surveyor before her had written, in faded ink, Here the world gives up . It ran westward, inland, through a country Posy had not yet walked, and it pulsed. Posy had watched it for a quarter-hour at a time. It pulsed. There was no other word. The line breathed.
And at its western end, where the line stopped, there sat a small bird.
Posy leaned down. The bird was drawn with a fineness that exceeded her own hand. It was perched on a branch, its head cocked, its tail at a tilt that Posy recognized, because she had seen wrens do exactly that in the hedges of Maren. It was no larger than a thumbnail. It was not there yesterday.
She sat back on the stool Pell had occupied.
There was a question she did not want to ask. She asked it anyway, into the empty room, in the voice she used when she was alone and thinking aloud. "What are you."
The fire crackled. The line did not answer.
She reached into the satchel and drew out a pen.
It was her best. She had bought it from a Frenchman in Truro the spring before last, and she had paid for it with two months of boundary work and a quiet regret she still felt. The nib was steel, tempered in Lyon, and it flexed under her hand like a reed in a slow wind. She had used it to draw the boundaries of half a dozen parishes. She had used it to sign her name on the deed of the cottage in Maren that she did not own but lived in. She had used it to write, once, a letter to a man she had loved, in a hand so steady it had surprised her.
She set it on the bar.
Then she took from the satchel the second-best pen, and she went to the door of the taproom, and she opened it.
The taproom was empty. The fire was out. The bar was bare. Behind the bar, on a shelf, three small glass bottles stood in a row, dusty, half full, and behind them, on a nail, hung a corkscrew and a card that read, in a child's hand, We do not serve after six . Posy walked around the bar. She did not feel that she was stealing. She felt that she was paying, in advance, for what she was about to trade.
She took the bottles. She took the corkscrew. She took the card.
In the common room, she set the bottles on the bar in a line. The ink in them was brown and blue and black, and the brown had gone thin, and the blue had faded to the colour of a winter sky, and the black was still black. She uncorked the black. She sniffed. Lampblack, and a hint of gum arabic. Serviceable. She recorked it and set it beside her pipe.
Then she went to the door that led to the yard, and she opened it.
The yard was small and square, floored with cobbles green with moss. A pump stood at the center, its handle rusted to a halt. Against the back wall, a woodpile, neatly stacked. Against the side wall, a door to a privy. And against the inn's own back wall, under the eaves, a window into the kitchen, and a second window into the common room, both shuttered.
Posy did not go into the yard. She stood on the threshold and listened. The dog in the village barked again. A door closed somewhere. A woman's voice, faint, called a name that was not Posy's and was not Calla's and was not meant to be heard.
She stepped back inside and shut the door.
She crossed to the bar, and she unrolled the map a second time, and she laid the pen beside it.
The door to the stairs opened. Calla came down. She had taken off her coat and stood in the common room in a wool dress the colour of dried bracken, with her notebook already open in her hand.
"He said three nights," Posy said, without looking up.
"Yes."
"I have the pens."
Calla came to the bar. She looked at the map. She looked at the bottles. She looked at the French pen, the good one, laid out like a tool, like a thing that had a use.
"You are going to trace it," she said.
"I am going to trace what is there," Posy said. "If anything is there."
"And if what is there is what Pell says is not there?"
"Then I will have drawn a road that does not exist, with a very good pen, and we will be three days older and no wiser, and he will have the pen."
Calla sat on the stool beside her. She opened her notebook. She took out her own pen, a steel-nibbed thing with a cracked barrel that she had owned since she was twelve, and she wrote, at the top of a fresh page, The Wheatsheaf. Wren's Crossing. The evening of the first day.
"The mist," she said, without looking up, "will come down at nine. It always does. I have been watching from the window."
"How do you know that."
"Because I have been watching from the window."
Posy did not ask more. She took up the good pen. She dipped it in the black ink from the bottle behind the bar. She drew the nib along the inside of her wrist, and a thin black line appeared, and she watched it for a moment, the way a woman watches a pulse, and then she set the nib to the vellum.
She began at the eastern edge. She set the pen down where the surveyed marsh ended, where the old surveyor had written Here the world gives up , and she followed the pulsing line westward, inland, through country she had not seen and could not, yet, verify. She drew it as it was. Thick in places, thin in places. Where the line branched, she branched. Where it curved, she curved. Where it pulsed, she did not pulse, because a pen cannot pulse, but she marked the pulse with a small tick, a notation in the margin, a sign of her own devising.
The candle burned. The fire burned. The room grew warm, and the smell of the stew from the kitchen began, very faintly, to find its way into the common room, and Posy's stomach reminded her that she had eaten nothing since the bread and cheese at noon.
She did not stop.
Calla did not speak. She wrote, in her cracked pen, in a hand so small and precise it looked like the tracks of insects on snow, and what she wrote Posy did not ask to see, and Calla did not offer.
The bird grew under Posy's hand.
She had reached the western end of the line. The branch had appeared, as she drew, as a thing that was always there, a thin diagonal scratch, and on it the bird had taken shape, not all at once but in increments, the way frost takes a window, the way a thought takes a mind. The wren cocked its head. Its tail tilted. Its eye was a dot of ink so fine Posy had to squint to see she had made it.
She sat back.
"There," she said.
Calla looked up.
The bird on the map was no larger than a thumbnail. The road was no wider than a thread. But they were there, in black ink on pale vellum, in a hand Posy had trained for fifteen years and had never used for anything but the truth, or what she could make of it.
Outside, the mist came down.
The mist pressed against the windows like a held breath, and Posy stood to stretch, her back cracking softly in the quiet. The stew smell had grown stronger, threaded now with the faint sweetness of boiled root vegetables, and her stomach answered it again, more insistent.
"Eat," Calla said, without looking up. "You have been at it four hours."
"You have been at it longer."
"I am used to going without."
Posy considered this, and did not argue, because she recognized the shape of it, the stubbornness, the private arithmetic of hunger. She had known it herself, in other rooms, in other years. Instead she crossed to the common room, found the innkeeper's wife asleep on a stool by the kitchen door, and roused her gently for two bowls. The wife brought bread as well, dark and dense, and a small dish of butter salted with something green that Posy did not recognize.
She carried it back. They ate.
For a while there was only the sound of it, the soft tearing of bread, the clink of the spoon, the small ungainly sounds of two women feeding themselves in a room full of paper and ink. Posy watched Calla over the rim of her bowl and saw, for the first time, something like ease in her face, the faint softening of a mouth that had been set, for hours, in a line of concentration. She had not realized how young Calla was until she saw her eating. The seriousness fell away from her, and what was left was a girl of four and twenty, thin and watchful, with ink on her fingers and a crust of bread in her hand.
"You draw well," Calla said.
Posy nearly dropped her spoon.
"The bird," Calla went on. "It is correct. I have been looking at it for an hour and I cannot find a fault."
"It is only a bird."
"It is not only a bird. It is a wren. I would know if it were wrong."
Posy set her spoon down. "Thank you. That is, I think, the kindest thing anyone has said about my work in some time."
"It was not intended as kindness. It was intended as fact."
"Yes. I had noticed."
Calla glanced up, and the corner of her mouth twitched, a motion so small Posy might have imagined it. "I am told I am very precise."
"I had noticed that too."
They finished the stew. Posy gathered the bowls and carried them back to the kitchen, and when she returned Calla had pushed her notes aside and was looking, with a peculiar expression, at the map.
"What is it?"
Calla did not answer at once. She was leaning forward, her elbows on the table, her chin in her ink-stained hands, and her eyes moved over the vellum as if she were reading it. Then she straightened, and the expression was gone, and what replaced it was something Posy could not name.
"There is a library here," Calla said. "I was told so by the innkeeper. Upstairs, in the east wing. He said it had not been opened in some years."
"I did not know there was a library."
"Neither did I. But he said it. And I would like to see it."
Posy sat down slowly. "Now?"
"Why not now?"
"Because it is past ten, because the innkeeper is half asleep, because we have been working for hours and your hands are shaking, and because whatever is in that library has waited this long and will wait until morning."
Calla's jaw tightened. She looked at her own hands, as if to confirm the shaking, and then she looked at Posy, and the look was not quite hostile but it was not far off. "You are not my keeper."
"No. But I am your colleague, for however long that lasts, and I am telling you that you will see nothing in that library tonight that you would not see better in the morning, with a lamp that is not guttering and a head that is not throbbing."
Calla opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "I am not tired."
"That is the most obvious lie I have heard this week, and I heard several from Mr. Pell."
The corner of Calla's mouth twitched again. This time Posy was certain of it.
"Morning, then," Calla said.
"Morning."
Posy banked the fire. She gathered her pens and put them away in their case. She rolled the map carefully, tied it with the ribbon, and set it in the leather tube, and then she sat for a moment with her hands in her lap and listened to Calla climb the steps to her room, each footfall deliberate, each one a little heavier than the last, the rhythm of a body surrendering to its own weight.
She went up herself after that. The inn was quiet. Somewhere a door creaked. Somewhere a dog turned in its sleep. She undressed by candlelight and got into the narrow bed and lay for a long time staring at the ceiling, where the shadows moved in shapes that were almost, but not quite, birds.
She slept.
She dreamed, and in the dream the wren was sitting on the edge of her map, and it was looking at her, and it had Calla's eyes.
She woke early. The mist had not lifted. It lay against the window like a skin, and beyond it the world was the color of ash.
She washed and dressed and went down, and found the innkeeper already in the kitchen, a lean man with a lean face and the careful hands of someone who has cooked for a living in a place where the living is spare. He set a plate of porridge before her without being asked, and a pot of tea so strong she could have stood a spoon in it.
"The young lady," he said, meaning Calla. "She is not down yet."
"No."
"She is up. I heard her. She is in the east wing."
Posy set down her spoon. "The library."
"Aye. I told her where the key was. She is a determined one, your friend."
"She is not my friend."
"No. Worse, I think. A friend can be managed."
Posy ate her porridge. She drank her tea. Then she went upstairs, down the corridor, past the closed door of her own room, past the closed door of Calla's, to a door at the end that was narrower than the others and hung slightly askew on its hinges. It stood ajar. Beyond it she could see a slice of dimness, and the smell that came out was the smell of rooms that have been shut for years, paper and dust and the faint sweet rot of old glue.
She went in.
The library was smaller than she had expected. Two windows, both shuttered. A single bookcase against the far wall, of dark wood, and a table under the windows with a chair pushed back from it as if someone had just risen. The shutters had been opened, but the mist was so thick the light that came through was barely light at all, a grey nothing that turned the room into a kind of photograph of itself.
Calla was kneeling on the floor.
She had pulled a row of books from the lower shelf and had them spread around her like a fan, and she was going through them one by one with a concentration so absolute that Posy did not think she had heard her come in. Her lips moved as she turned the pages. Her fingers left dark smears on the cloth bindings. Her face, in the grey light, had the look of someone who has been searching for a long time and has at last begun to suspect she might find.
"Calla."
"I have it." Calla did not look up. "Come here. Look at this."
Posy crossed the room. She knelt beside her, slowly, because her knees protested, and she looked at the book Calla was holding open on her lap.
It was a folio, larger than the others, bound in calf that had once been brown and was now the mottled grey of old liver. The spine was cracked. The boards were warped. And across the top edge of the pages, dark and unmistakable, a watermark, the tide-line of something that had been wet for a long time and had dried in a room that was not quite dry enough.
"It is a natural history," Calla said. "Of this region. Published in seventeen ninety-eight. I have seen the title page. I have not been able to read it properly. Look."
She turned the page. Posy looked.
The print was foxed and faded, but it was legible if one leaned close, and the margins were wide, and in the margins someone had written, in a small slanting hand that had bled at the edges where the water had been, notes. Annotations. Observations in a private shorthand.
Calla pointed. "Here. The margin at the foot of the page. You see?"
Posy saw. The water had blurred the ink, but the word was still there, still legible, written in that same slanting hand, and the word was Hollowmere.
"There," Calla said. "And here."
She turned the page. Another margin. Another annotation. Hollowmere again, and beside it, in a smaller scrawl, something Posy could not make out.
"There are more," Calla said. "I have found three. The whole book may be full of them."
"Whose hand is it?"
"I do not know. The ink is old. The water has not helped. But I will find out. I will find out who wrote in the margins of this book, and why, and what they knew of Hollowmere."
She turned another page, and Posy saw her hands were still shaking, but less now, and her face had the look of someone who has been given a gift she did not dare ask for. She was, Posy thought, beautiful in that moment, in the way that people are beautiful when they are wholly themselves, when the armor has fallen away and what is left is only the hunger and the hunt.
"Be careful with it," Posy said. "It will not survive another wetting."
"I know."
"And eat something. Before you go on."
"In a moment."
"Calla."
"In a moment, Posy."
Posy left her there. She went down to the kitchen and cut bread and buttered it and brought it up, and Calla ate without looking at it, her eyes on the page, and Posy sat on the floor beside her and ate her own portion and watched her turn the pages, and the mist pressed at the windows, and the room smelled of dust and old paper and the faint salt of the butter.
They worked for an hour. Then Calla stopped.
"Posy."
"Yes."
"There is a page missing."
Posy leaned closer. "What?"
"A page. Torn out. You can see the stub at the gutter. The book has been tampered with. Someone has removed a leaf."
She held the book so Posy could see. She was right. The stub of the torn page was still there, a ragged tongue of paper at the spine, and the facing page, the verso of whatever had been removed, was blank except for the watermark.
"Can you tell what was on it?"
"No. It was a plate. The verso is blank, which means the leaf was an illustration, or a map, or a frontispiece. Something without print on the back."
Posy looked at the book. She looked at the stub. She thought of the map on the table downstairs, rolled in its tube, and the bird she had drawn on it, and the bird Calla had drawn on the floor of the schoolroom, and the road that ended in a line that was not a road.
"There is something else," Calla said. "Look."
She turned back to the page with the annotations, the one with the word Hollowmere in the margin. She held it under the grey light and tilted it, and Posy saw what she had missed before. At the corner of the page, where the water had not quite reached, a small drawing. Not a print. Not a typeset illustration. A drawing, in pencil, faint and hurried, the kind of thing a person does on a scrap of paper when they are thinking and their hand needs to think with it.
A bird.
A wren.
Posy stared. The bird was rough, the lines uncertain, but there was no mistaking it. The cocked head. The tilted tail. The small fierce eye.
It was the same bird.
It was the same bird that Posy had drawn on her map last night, in black ink on pale vellum, in a hand she had trained for fifteen years.
It was the same bird that Calla had drawn on the floor of the schoolroom, in chalk, in a hand she had trained for longer.
"Calla."
"I see it."
"How?"
"I do not know."
The mist pressed at the windows. The room was very quiet. Somewhere downstairs a door opened and closed, and the innkeeper's wife called something to her husband about the fire, and the words were muffled and distant and belonged to another world.
"Someone drew this," Posy said, slowly. "A long time ago. In the margin of a book about this region. And the bird is the same."
"Yes."
"And someone tore out the page before it. The page that was a plate, an illustration. Someone wanted that page gone."
"Yes."
"And the bird is the same."
"Yes, Posy. I heard you the first time."
Calla closed the book. She held it in her lap, both hands on it, as if she were afraid it might escape. Her face had gone very still, the stillness of someone who is thinking faster than she can speak.
"The map," Posy said. "The one Mr. Pell wants. The one you drew in the schoolroom."
"Yes."
"It is not a map of the schoolroom floor."
"No."
"It is a map of something else."
"Yes."
Posy sat back on her heels. The floor was cold through her skirt. The dust stirred faintly as she moved, and she breathed it in, and it tasted of paper and old glue and the faint green of the salt butter.
"What is it, Calla?"
Calla was quiet for a long time. Then she looked up, and her eyes were very bright, and the look in them was not triumph and was not fear but was something between, something Posy had not seen before and would not forget.