Dawn came slow to the Thornwood corridor, the kind of slow that asked for patience and gave back fog. Maren Holloway had been awake since the third crow, sitting cross-legged beside a flat hearthstone with her sleeves rolled past her elbows and her father's old kettle balanced on three coals she refused to let die. The fire threw a copper glow across the canvas awning stretched between Willow's branch-arms, and the mist that rolled in from the wicker-pits turned that glow into something softer, something almost kind.
She watched the water. Small bubbles gathered on the bottom of the kettle, climbing in a thin chain toward the surface. She counted them without meaning to, the way her father had taught her, because a Holloway who could not read a kettle was a Holloway who would burn the tea and shame the road.
"You are staring," Willow said.
The voice came from below and behind her, low and resonant, with the grain of old wood running through every syllable. It seemed to rise through the soil itself, through the root-pad that anchored the cart to the earth, through the bundle of willow-limbs that served as her legs when the road turned rough. Maren had once asked her father whether Willow dreamed when she folded her branches for the night, and he had only laughed and said, "She dreams of the road, girl. Same as us."
"I am reading the kettle," Maren said, without turning.
"A distinction without a difference."
"A distinction with a great deal of difference, and you know it."
Willow made a sound that was not quite a creak and not quite a sigh. It came from somewhere in her heartwood frame, a slow shudder that traveled up through the branch-arms and into the woven canopy overhead. Maren felt it through the soles of her boots, a vibration more felt than heard.
"You have been awake since the third crow," Willow said.
"I have."
"And the leaves."
"And the leaves."
"And the small grey bird that lives in my third-from-top branch."
Maren did turn, then. The cart's face, if it could be called a face, was the smooth burl of an old willow-knot, set with two round knots of darker wood that served as eyes. They watched her now with an expression she could not name, somewhere between amusement and concern. Willow's branch-arms were folded loosely across her front-pad, and her root-pad sat deep in the leaf-mould of the corridor floor, sunk there overnight as she always did when she made camp.
"You have been awake since the third crow," Willow repeated, "and the leaves, and the bird, and you have not yet told me what is troubling you."
Maren lifted the kettle from the coals by its iron handle, wrapped in a rag of undyed wool. The water inside had reached the precise moment she wanted, the moment the bubbles grew large and the surface trembled like a held breath.
"Sweet-black," she said. "First cup of the morning. Father swore by it."
"He did."
"And so do I."
The kettle steamed in her hand. She carried it around to the front of the cart, where the undercarriage opened into a small service-bay, and there on the left side sat a brass dish set into a ring of shaped willow-wood. Beside the dish, no larger than a thimble, was the clay port: a tiny socket of fired red clay that Maren's father had cut into Willow's heartwood decades ago, when the cart was still young enough to remember the sound of her own growing.
Maren crouched. The morning chill had soaked into her knees through her trousers, but she ignored it. She set the kettle down and reached for the leather pouch of pressed sweet-black leaves that hung from a hook inside the service-bay. She measured by weight and feel, the way her father had shown her, two pinches loose and one pinch firm, then poured a thin stream of the just-boiled water over them into the brass dish.
The steam rose. The leaves uncurled in the hot water, slow and dark, and the scent that came off them was bitter and black and faintly sweet, the smell of every Holloway morning Maren could remember.
She waited. She counted the slow breaths of three willow-boughs overhead. She waited until the surface of the tea grew still again, until the leaves had settled to the bottom of the brass dish in a small dark heap, and then she tilted the dish gently toward the clay port.
"Ready?" she asked.
"I am always ready," Willow said, with great dignity. "It is the rest of the world that lags."
Maren laughed, then, despite herself. The laugh came out sharper than she meant it to, almost a cough, and she felt the heat rise into her face. She had not expected the laugh. She had not expected the way her eyes stung, either, or the way her hands had gone slightly unsteady on the rim of the brass dish.
"Steady," Willow murmured. "Steady, Maren. I am not going anywhere."
"I know."
"Then why are your hands shaking?"
"Because I have not done this in three months," Maren said. "Because Father did it every morning of my life, and I watched him, and I thought I knew how, and now I find my hands are fools."
"Your hands are not fools."
"My hands are fools."
"Your hands," Willow said, with great care, "are the hands of a Holloway, and that has never yet meant fool."
Maren blew out a breath. She let the tea settle one moment more. Then she tipped the brass dish, slowly, so the dark liquid ran in a thin stream into the clay port.
The port drank it down.
There was no other word for it. The clay did not leak, did not spill, did not overflow. It took the tea in a slow, deliberate motion, as a man takes a long sip from a cup held close to his mouth. Maren watched the level fall in the brass dish. She watched the empty dish. She watched the clay port, which now glistened faintly in the early light.
Then Willow shuddered.
It began at the heartwood, somewhere deep in the root-pad, and rolled outward through every branch and every limb and every woven panel of her frame. The canopy above Maren's head trembled. The service-bay creaked. The ground beneath her knees gave a small, soft thump, as the roots beneath the soil shifted in their sleep.
And from Willow came a sound. A long, slow sound, rising through her frame like wind through a hollow tree, settling at last into something that was, unmistakably, a sigh.
It went on for a full breath. It went on for two.
When it ended, the morning seemed quieter than it had been. Even the small grey bird in the third-from-top branch had gone still.
"There," Willow said, after a moment. Her voice was the same, and yet not quite the same. Something in it had warmed. "That was properly done."
Maren sat back on her heels. Her cheeks were flushed. She felt slightly dazed, as though she had been the one to drink rather than the cart. Her eyes were wet, and she was annoyed about that, and she wiped them with the heel of her hand and did not apologize for it.
"You are going to be a terrible roommate," she said.
Willow's burl-face shifted. The two dark knots of her eyes crinkled at their edges, in a way that might have been a smile if a willow-cart could be said to smile.
"I have always been a terrible roommate," she said. "Your father complained of it constantly."
"He did not."
"He did. He complained, and then he made the tea anyway, and then he drank his own cup beside me, and we did not speak for an hour, and it was the best hour of his day."
Maren's throat tightened. She busied herself with the kettle, pouring a second measure into the tin cup she kept strapped to the side of the service-bay. She did not look at Willow. She watched the steam rise from her own cup instead, and let the silence sit between them the way her father had taught her, comfortable as an old coat.
When she had drunk half the cup, Willow spoke again.
"There is rust on the second convoy."
Maren looked up. "Second convoy?"
"The carts that have attached themselves to my rear draw-bar in the night. I did not feel them arrive, which is either a failing of mine or a credit to the small creature that brought them. There are two. They are old. They are not well."
Maren set her cup down. She rose from her crouch, her knees protesting, and walked around to the back of the cart.
The Thornwood corridor opened behind them into a long clearing of packed earth and old wheel-ruts, edged by willows whose lowest branches brushed the fog like slow fingers. In that clearing, lashed to Willow's rear draw-bar by a length of frayed green rope, sat two carts.
One was a low, round-bellied thing of pale wood and tarnished copper fittings, with a single branch-arm folded neatly across its front-pad and a face-burl that was almost lost under a drift of moss. The other was taller, slimmer, with a darker heartwood and a set of branch-arms that had been broken off short and capped with iron. They sat in the grey light like two old dogs that had followed a kind stranger home.
Sapling, Maren thought, looking at the smaller one. She did not know why she thought the name. She did not know where it had come from. It had simply risen in her, the way a kettle-read rises in the hands.
Honeycomb, she thought, looking at the larger one. And that name, too, came without asking.
She crouched beside the nearest cart. The pale one. She ran her thumb along the edge of its front-pad and felt the grit of rust under the moss. The rust was old and dry, and it came away in a fine orange powder that clung to her skin.
"Wren's work," she murmured, half to herself.
"Your father spoke of an Old Wren," Willow said from behind her, "at the wicker-pits. A woman who mended what others abandoned."
"Mended," Maren agreed. "Or failed to mend, and let the rust set in."
"And now the carts have followed us."
"They have."
"With or without our permission?"
Maren looked back over her shoulder. Willow's eyes were watching her, dark and patient, and the smile, if smile it was, had deepened a fraction.
"With," Maren said. "I think with. There is rope, and rope-work, and Wren's knot in it. I would know it anywhere."
"And you do not mind?"
Maren turned back to the carts. The smaller one, Sapling, had a face-burl with no eyes at all, only two shallow pits where the knots had rotted out years ago. The larger one, Honeycomb, had eyes of dark iron, rusted shut. They both sat in the grey light and waited, the way only patient things can wait.
"I mind," she said quietly. "But my mind is not the road's mind. And the road has decided we are three."
She brushed the rust from her thumb onto her trousers. She straightened. She finished her cup of sweet-black in two long swallows, set the cup back in its strap, and went to wake the small grey bird, because there was a long day ahead, and the rust would not wait.
Maren was crouched by the small grey bird's cage, fingers working the bone latch, when she heard it.
The sound came from the south-west, thin and bright against the grey morning: a high, tinny rattle, the kind of mechanical hiccup that meant a very small engine was being forced up a hill it had no business climbing. It wheezed, caught, wheezed again. Then a voice followed it, piping and breathless, swearing at the machine in a dialect so thick it barely qualified as speech.
"Keep your sprockets on, you rust-bitten, you keep your sprockets on, I know what I'm doing, I know exactly what I'm, oh, you absolute, you absolute, I will leave you here, I will, don't you test me, you, you"
Maren stood slowly. Her hand stayed on the cage latch.
Willow had not moved, but her eyes had tracked. The smile was there again, faint and patient.
"You hear that?" Maren said.
"I hear a small tragedy on wheels," Willow replied. "With a voice attached."
The sound grew louder. A shape came up over the rise: something low, something narrow, something that should not have been moving as fast as it was moving. It was a tricycle. Not an auto-cart, not even close. A spindly frame of black iron and pale wood, two large wheels at the back and one small one at the front, lashed together with copper wire and what appeared to be strips of birch bark. A single headlamp, caked in soot, swung wildly on its bracket. The seat was a soup pot. A small figure sat in the soup pot, feet pedaling so fast the legs were a blur.
The figure was a goblin. She was perhaps four feet tall, perhaps not. She was soot-stained from the crown of her head to the soles of her boots, the kind of soot that came from crawling inside engines while they were still warm. Her ears were long and sharp. Her elbows, when she threw them out to balance on a turn, were sharper. Her hair had been braided into a single tight knot at the back of her skull, and the knot was coming undone, black wisps escaping around a face that was narrow and clever and slightly feral.
She saw Maren. She saw Willow. She saw the two dormant carts behind them. She raised one grimy hand and waved it as if she had not just crested a hill at what could charitably be called reckless speed.
"You!" she called. "You the Holloway one? The lady said the Holloway one, said look for the willow-wagon, said you'd be somewhere between here and the second marker-stone, said you'd be stopped because your, your, your wood-thing had a, a"
"Willow," Willow supplied, very calmly.
"Right!" The goblin jammed her brakes. The tricycle made a sound like a cat being stepped on, skidded sideways, and came to rest six feet from Maren's boot. The goblin swung off the soup-pot seat, landed in a crouch, and straightened. She was breathing hard. She was grinning. She was missing three teeth.
"I'm Pipper," she said. "Pipper Soot. Lady Cressida sent word. Said your cart needed, needed, she said a proper looking-at. Said you'd been letting it, and I quote, 'sleep like a corpse in a chapel,' and that if I wanted to learn the old willow-gear, this was my chance, and I am here, I am present, I have come all the way from the wicker-pits, I have not eaten since yesterday, but that is not, that is not the point, the point is"
She stopped. She blinked. She looked at Maren, then at Willow, then back at Maren, as if confirming that both were real.
"The point is," she said, more quietly, "the Lady said to look at the secondary works. Said your da used to talk about them. Said no one else would know how."
Maren did not move. Her hand was still on the cage latch. The small grey bird inside had woken, and was making a soft, complaining sound.
"Why did the Lady send a child?" Maren said.
Pipper's grin faltered. For a moment she looked her age, which was not very old at all. Then the grin came back, wider, more toothless.
"Because," Pipper said, "the Lady sends the best. And the best are small. And fast. And cheap. Also I was the only one who said yes. Also I have a wrench." She patted the small leather roll at her hip. It jingled. "Also I climbed inside a Thornwood sentinel-cart when I was six and lived to tell about it. Ask anyone. Ask the sentinel-cart. It still remembers."
"Charming," Willow murmured.
Maren exhaled through her nose. She released the cage latch. The grey bird fluttered out, circled once, and settled on Willow's front-pad with a proprietary air.
"Very well," Maren said. "Look, then. But you do not touch what I do not say you may touch. You do not pry what I do not say you may pry. And if you find something you do not like, you say so to me first, and not to anyone else, until I have decided who else may hear."
Pipper's eyes went round. She nodded three times, very fast, as if sealing a contract.
"Yes," she said. "Yes. I can, I can do that. I can absolutely do that. I will be, I will be a stone. I will be a very quiet stone with a wrench."
She was already moving. She crossed the space between them in quick, birdlike steps, and came to rest at Willow's near flank, where the willow-wood panels met the undercarriage in a seam of pale, fibrous bark. She crouched. She ran her fingers along the seam with a tenderness that seemed out of place in hands so small and so dirty.
"Oh," she said, very softly. "Oh, you are, you are a beauty, you are an old one, you are a first-leaf, you are"
"Pipper," Maren said.
"Right. Working. Sorry. Working."
She produced a flat blade from her roll, no wider than a finger, and slid it into the seam. The panel resisted. She tilted her head, listened, slid it deeper. There was a soft click, and a section of bark-backed wood swung outward on hidden hinges, revealing the layered interior of the cart's lower workings.
The smell hit Maren first. It was the smell of old iron and older wood, of oil gone to varnish, of a place that had been closed for a long time and was not pleased about being opened. Pipper did not flinch. She leaned in, and her face changed.
The grin was gone. The chatter was gone. In its place was something Maren had not expected to see on the face of a soot-stained workshop-child: a stillness, a focus, a kind of listening that went past the ears.
Pipper's tiny hands went into the opening. They moved with a precision that was not careful so much as devout, each finger finding its place, each motion completing the one before it. She did not speak. She did not even seem to breathe.
Maren watched. The watching made her uneasy in a way she could not have named. There was something about the way Pipper worked that suggested a familiarity, a kind of homecoming, as if the inside of Willow's chassis was a room Pipper had been looking for all her short life.
After a long minute, Pipper withdrew her hands. She sat back on her heels. She looked up at Maren, and her eyes were very bright.
"Secondary gear-works," she said. Her voice had gone flat and careful, the brogue thickening around the edges. "The little ring-teeth behind the main drive. The ones your da would have called the, the, the whisper-train."
"I know what they are," Maren said.
"Right." Pipper nodded. "Right. So. Someone's been sleeping very hard and very badly. Twenty years of, of, of not-sleeping-sitting-on-them. They've gone to powder in places. The, the housing is bowed. There's a, there's a crack along the third tooth from the, from the, you don't want to know from where. The lubricant has, has turned to, to something you could roof a house with."
She swallowed. She looked back at the open panel as if she had said something unforgivable inside it.
"I can, I can mend some of it," she said, more quietly. "I can, I can brace the housing. I can, I can re-tooth two of the ring-teeth if I have, if I have the right stock. I cannot, I cannot give you back what was. No one can give you back what was. But I can, I can make her, I can make her go. For a while. For a good while."
Maren looked at Willow. Willow was looking back at her, dark and patient, the smile faint, the eyes steady. She said nothing. She did not need to.
"Willow," Maren said. "Did you know?"
Willow was silent for three heartbeats. The grey bird on her pad ruffled its feathers.
"I knew," Willow said, at last, "that there were mornings I woke slower than I used to. I knew that some hills cost more than they once did. I knew that the road asked more of me than it asked of your father, and that I gave it anyway, and that I would give it again."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only answer I have."
Pipper had gone very still. She was looking between them, her small face pinched with a thought she was trying not to have. Then she looked down at her own hands, at the rust and the soot under her nails, and made a small sound in her throat.
"I can start now," she said. "If you, if you let me. The Lady said, the Lady said you'd want to make the crossing by week's end, and I can, I can do that, I can make that, I just need, I need an hour, maybe two, and I need, I need a fire, and I need, I need you to not, to not watch me like that. Please. It, it makes my hands forget what they're doing."
Maren looked at her for a long moment. The morning was grey. The road was grey. The two dormant carts sat behind them, patient as stones. The rust on her thumb was gone, but she could still feel the grit of it, faint and warm, against her skin.
"Start, then," Maren said. "I will make the fire."
Pipper nodded. She turned back to the open panel. She placed her hands, one on each side of the seam, and bowed her head, and for a moment she looked, in the pale light, like a child at prayer.
Then she went to work, and the small sounds of her craft filled the morning, and Maren went to gather the wood.
The work took longer than Pipper had said it would, and shorter than Maren had feared. By the time the sun began to lower itself through the bare branches of the Thornwood, Sapling was breathing again, faint and wheezy as a kitten pulled from a ditch, and Honeycomb was sitting up on her haunches with her front legs crossed in front of her like a lady waiting for tea. Willow had not spoken much through the afternoon. She had watched Pipper work with an expression Maren could not quite read, which was saying something, since Willow had spent thirty years teaching Maren how to read her.
"He is a clever little scrap-moth," Willow had said, once, around midday, when Pipper had coaxed a reluctant cog into spinning with a song Maren did not recognize. "I will give her that."
"She," Maren had said.
"What."
"The child. She."
"Ah." A long creak of consideration. "She. Yes. She is a clever little scrap-moth, and I will give her that."
They made the last stretch of road in a loose column, Sapling wheezing at the rear, Honeycomb trotting alongside with the stiff, surprised gait of a creature not yet certain she is allowed to trot. Pipper had gone on ahead, because Pipper always went on ahead, and by the time Maren brought Willow through the crooked gate of the wicker-pits the child was already unlatching the door of the workshop she seemed to think of as her own, which was technically the property of a man named Soot, who was technically no relation to her but had let her sleep on his floor since she was five.
The workshop smelled of rust and lamp oil and the sweet-rotten perfume of willow-bark left too long in a damp corner. Maren eased Willow through the door with care, because Willow did not like being asked to fit through small spaces, and because the doorframe had been built for carts half her age.
"It will do," Willow said, in the tone of one who has decided it will not do but has chosen to be gracious about it.
Maren set the brake. She fetched the bundle from Willow's boot, which was the leather pouch her father had fitted under the seat for emergencies and which now contained, among other things, a half-loaf of bread, a tin of rendered fat, three needles, a spool of waxed thread, and a small square of grey felt that she had bought from a hedge-witch in Ash Lane two autumns ago for no reason she could then have named.
She sat on the upturned crate by the cold forge and began to knit.
The evening came down slow. Pipper lit the lamp, then another, then a third, and the workshop filled with a kind of amber dusk that was warmer than the real one outside. The child moved between the dormant carts and the wall of tools with the quick, darting certainty of a weasel in a hedgerow, laying out pieces, fitting pieces, occasionally holding a piece up to the light and making a small disappointed noise.
Maren knit. She was not, strictly, knitting. She was felting. She had a needle, and she had the square of grey felt, and she was working it over a small wooden form shaped like a teardrop, which was the shape of Willow's glass eye when it sat in its housing. The old pad had gone thin. The old pad had gone thin some time ago, and Maren had been meaning to replace it for, she reckoned, close to a year.
She did not think about why she had not replaced it. She thought about the needle, and the felt, and the even small rhythm of her hand.
"You are quiet," Willow said, from across the workshop.
"I am working."
"You are always working. That is not the same as being quiet."
Maren did not answer. She made three more stitches. The felt began to take the shape she wanted, soft at the edges, firm in the middle, with a slight cup to it that would seat the glass properly.
"The child," Willow said, after a while. "The scrap-moth. You are thinking about her."
"I am thinking about the felt."
"You are thinking about three things at once. I have known you since you were four. Do not insult me."
Maren drew the needle through. She looked up, and across the workshop, and Pipper was crouched at the base of Honeycomb's chassis with a screwdriver between her teeth, humming something tuneless and fast, and her hands were black to the wrist, and the lamplight caught in her hair where it had come loose from its tie.
"She is small," Maren said.
"She is," Willow agreed.
"And she is alone."
"She is."
"And tomorrow we put her on a road she has no business being on."
"Yes."
Maren drew the needle through again. The felt was almost the right shape. She held it up, turned it in the lamplight, set it down, and picked it up again.
"Tell me something true," she said to Willow, softly, so that Pipper would not hear.
"I have told you many true things today."
"Tell me another one."
Willow was quiet for a long time. The workshop creaked around them. Outside, something small moved through the wicker-pits and away. Pipper hummed.
"There were more of us," Willow said, at last, very low. "Before. There were more of us, and we were not always alone on the roads. There were three of us on the Bramblewell run, and five on the Hollow Bend, and there was one, there was one old lady on the Mossway who carried the post for forty years and never once complained about the weather."
"What happened to them."
"I was told they were retired. After the Fog-Eater. After the, the trouble. I was told they were retired for their own good."
"Were they."
"I do not know. I was told it, and then I was told nothing else, and that was ten years ago, and in ten years I have not seen one of them on a road, and the roads have been very quiet, and I have been very alone, and I have not asked the question I should have asked."
Maren set the felt down. She looked across the workshop at Pipper, who had stopped humming and was now sitting back on her heels, staring at a small brass plate she had unscrewed from Honeycomb's flank.
"You," Maren said, and her voice carried, because she had meant it to. "Pipper."
The child startled. The screwdriver slipped from her teeth and clattered on the floor, and she snatched it up again with a quick guilty motion, as though the tool itself might scold her.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, ma'am. I am here. I am listening. I have been listening the whole time, only, only I was not sure if I was allowed to say so."
"You are allowed. Come here."
Pipper came. She came the way she did everything, quickly and with a kind of sideways darting motion, and she sat on the floor at Maren's feet with the screwdriver across her knees and her hands still black, and she looked up with that sharp small face and those sharp small eyes.
"The carts," Maren said. "The ones that are not on the roads anymore. What happened to them."
Pipper's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"They was, they was, well," she said. "They was put away. After the Fog-Eater, the, the old Council of Togs, the ones before Lady Cressida, the ones before all the new ones, they made a, a, a kind of order, only nobody, nobody was supposed to know about it, only I found, I found the paperwork, in a, in a skip behind the registry, and it said that the carts was, was powered down, every, every one of them, and that the, the willow-taps that fed them the, the magic was to be, was to be buried, so that they could not, could not wake up on their own. They was not, they was not destroyed. They was just, just retired. Put to bed. Like, like you would put a, a grandmother to bed who had had a, a bad shock."
Maren's hands had gone still in her lap. The felt sat, half-finished, on the crate beside her.
"Who buried them," she said. "The taps. Who did it."
"I do not, I do not know her name," Pipper said. "She is not a, a Tog, she is not a, a registry person, she is just, she is a woman who was, was trusted, and she did it, and then she, then she kept, she kept one, I think, I think she kept one of the taps, and she has been, has been asking, asking very pointed questions in the market since Tuesday, and the, the Togs do not like it, the Togs do not like it at all."
"Since Tuesday," Maren said, softly.
"Since Tuesday," Pipper said. "And I thought, I thought you should know. Because of, because of Willow. And because of, because of the others. And because I, because I think, I think they should not be in the ground. I think they should be on the road. I think, I think they have been on the road for a hundred years and that is where they, they belong, and if you, if you would let me, if you would let me help, I would, I would find them, every one, I would find them and I would, I would bring them back, and I would not, would not ask for anything, I would just, I would just like to see it done."
The lamp guttered. Somewhere outside, a bell rang once, far off, and then was still.
Maren looked at the child. She looked at the half-finished felt. She looked across the workshop at Willow, who was sitting very still in the amber light, with her glass eye turned toward them both, and who said nothing, and whose silence was louder than anything Maren had heard from her in a long time.
"Do you know her name," Maren said, to Pipper, after a while. "The woman who buried them."
"No," Pipper said. "But I know where she stands. She stands by the, the second well on the, the west side of the market, on, on Thursdays, and she has been, has been asking about a Holloway, and I thought, I thought that was, was you, so I thought, I thought I should tell you."
She looked up. Her face was very small, and very serious, and very tired, and very certain.
"I have been waiting," she said, "for someone to, to be the person who would, would do something about it. And I think, I think it is you."
Maren did not answer. She picked up the needle. She picked up the felt. She drew the thread through, once, twice, three times, and the pad took the last of its shape, soft and firm and ready.
"Willow," she said, without looking up.
"Yes."
"Hold still."
She crossed the workshop. She knelt at the housing. She lifted the glass eye from its socket with care, and the felted pad from beneath it, and she set the new pad in place, and then the eye, and then she pressed the housing shut with both thumbs, gently, the way her father had taught her, and the eye seated with a small sound like a kiss.
"There," she said.
Willow did not answer for a moment. The glass eye turned, once, in its new cushion, and the lamplight caught it, and the workshop was, for one breath, the kind of place where someone might have been happy.
"Better," Willow said, at last, very softly. "That is better. Thank you."
Maren stood. She looked down at the child on the floor. She looked at the dormant carts. She looked at the door, and at the dark beyond it, and at the road she had not yet taken.
"Tomorrow," she said. "You will show me the well."
"Yes," Pipper said.
"And the woman."
"Yes."
"And then we will see."
The lamp steadied. The workshop settled. Willow hummed, very low, a note that was not quite a song, and Pipper began, very quietly, to put her tools away. And outside, in the wicker-pits, the night came down like a hand laid gently over a sleeping face, and the road waited, and the buried taps waited, and the woman at the well waited, and the morning of Thursday waited, too, with the patience of a thing that has waited for ten years and does not mind waiting for one more.