The morning broke grey and thin over the crooked fields, the kind of light that made everything look older than it was. Farmer Moss stood at the gatepost with his boot hooked through the lower rail, watching the mist peel off the lower pasture in slow, ragged sheets. His breath made small ghosts in the chill. The fields stretched away from him in the familiar patchwork he had walked since boyhood, the same brown furrows his father had turned, the same stone walls his grandfather had laid stone by patient stone. Fifty-three years on this earth, and most of them spent in this exact view.
He pulled his collar tighter against his neck. The wool smelled of lanolin and woodsmoke, the only two scents that had ever meant home. His dogs, old Brindle and the younger one with the torn ear he called Patch out of laziness more than affection, sat at his heels watching the treeline with the patience of creatures who understood that not every arrival meant a threat.
A cart rattled somewhere beyond the hill. Brindle's head came up. Patch's ears swiveled forward like small brown trumpets.
Moss didn't move. He rarely did, when something came up the road. Let the thing arrive or pass. Most things passed.
The cart did not pass.
It crested the rise at a walking pace, pulled by a single grey donkey whose hooves made the soft, hesitant percussion of an animal uncertain of its welcome. The cart itself was old but well-kept, the wood a deep honey colour, the iron fittings green with deliberate patina. A woman sat upright on the driver's bench with the stillness of someone accustomed to being watched and choosing, each time, to give the watchers nothing.
She had ink on her fingers. Moss noticed that first, before the face or the clothes or the leather satchel she clutched against her hip. Dark stains in the creases of her knuckles, blackened fingertips, the particular smudge at the edge of her thumb that came from pressing too hard on a nib. He had seen that mark on his wife once, years ago, when she had tried to teach their daughter her letters before the fever took them both.
The cart stopped at the gate. The donkey lowered its head and cropped at the verge with the resignation of long practice.
"You'll be Moss," the woman said. Her voice carried the clipped precision of somewhere east, somewhere with stone buildings and paved streets. Not the village. Not the marsh. Somewhere Moss had never been and had no intention of visiting. "The innkeeper's letter said you'd know the roads better than any mapmaker who ever tried to draw them."
Moss took his time. He looked at the donkey. He looked at the cart. He looked at the woman's boots, which were good boots, city boots, but muddied to the ankle in the particular red clay of the lane that led up from Hollowmere.
"That letter," he said, "would be from Crane."
"If Master Crane is the innkeeper, then yes."
"He is."
"Then yes."
Moss nodded once, slowly, the way he nodded at weather he could not change. He unhooked his boot from the rail and stood aside. "Drive in. Park by the well. The ground's softer to the left and that animal of yours won't break a leg if you keep to the high ground."
The woman gathered the reins with the careful economy of someone who had learned to drive from a book rather than from a hand on her own. The donkey swung the cart through the gate in a tight, competent arc that spoke of practice somewhere Moss could not see. Wheels found the high ground. The cart settled with a small, satisfied creak.
Moss watched her tie off the reins with a knot he didn't recognize. Too neat. Too many loops. A knot made by someone who tied knots in things other than rope.
"Brindle. Patch. Stay," he said, and the dogs sank back onto their haunches, satisfied.
The woman climbed down from the bench. She was younger than he had first guessed, somewhere on the far side of thirty, with a face built for stillness and a mouth that looked as though it had forgotten how to smile without remembering why. The leather satchel at her hip was heavy. He could tell from how she held her shoulder against the weight, from the slight tilt of her hips as she walked. Maps, most likely. He had carried survey rolls heavy as that, in his time, when the Crown's men had come through measuring the commons and pretending not to steal.
"I'm Tova Ashwood," she said. She offered neither her hand nor any softening of her tone. "I make charts of wild country. The kind that has no roads because no one has thought to put any there yet. Master Crane tells me you've freighted supplies beyond the village before. Wagons, I mean. Proper ones. Not ponies, not packframes."
"Wagons."
"Wagons."
Moss considered the word the way he considered all words, turning it over in his mind to find the weight of it. Wagon was not a small request. Wagon meant a road, or the making of one. Wagon meant days, sometimes a week, sometimes more if the weather turned. Wagon meant risk, and risk meant a man had to know what he was risking and why.
"Who's going?" he asked.
"I am."
"Just you."
"Just me and what I carry."
Moss looked past her, at the cart, at the single donkey, at the satchel at her hip. The arithmetic did not add up. A woman who mapped wild country did not travel with one animal and a satchel. She travelled with a string of packhorses and a cook and a guard at the very least, and usually a second guard besides. He knew this because his wife's brother had been such a man once, before the river took him at a crossing nobody should have attempted in spring runoff.
"Where beyond?" Moss asked.
"Northwest. Past the Briar Wood. Past the standing stones, if the stories are right about where they sit."
"And beyond the stones?"
"Whatever's there."
Moss grunted. The sound carried more suspicion than he had meant it to. He softened it, slightly, the way his wife had taught him to soften things, years ago, when she was alive to teach him and he was young enough to learn.
"That's not an answer," he said.
"It's the only one I have."
The woman, Tova Ashwood, stood very still in his yard, and the stillness had the quality of a door left deliberately ajar. She was not lying. He could tell that much. But she was not telling the whole truth either, and the shape of what she withheld sat in the set of her shoulders like a stone she carried behind her ribs.
Moss scratched his jaw. The stubble there was white and coarse, three days' worth, the length he kept through winter when the cold made a razor feel like a punishment. He looked at the farmhouse behind him, the low stone building with the chimney that needed re-pointing and the door that swelled in the wet months and the kitchen window where his wife's curtains still hung because he had never had the heart to take them down.
"Sit," he said. "I'll put the kettle on. You can tell me what you're really after while the water heats."
For the first time, something shifted in her face. Not a smile. A recognition. The look of someone who had walked into a room expecting to be sold something and had instead been seen.
"I don't take tea with strangers," she said.
"Then I'll call you Tova," Moss said. "And you'll call me Moss. And we'll see how that goes."
He turned toward the house without waiting for her answer. Behind him, he heard her breath catch once, a small sharp intake, the kind of sound a person makes when they have been expecting resistance and have met, instead, the patient refusal to be rushed. Her boots followed him across the yard at a measured three paces behind. Brindle rose and followed too, and Patch, who never missed a chance to follow anything that moved, brought up the rear with his torn ear flapping.
The kitchen was small and warm. Moss filled the kettle from the pump and set it on the iron plate above the hearth. He took down two cups from the shelf, mismatched as all his cups were, since his wife had been the one who chose them and he had inherited the collection without the taste that built it.
She did not sit. She stood with her back to the wall, her satchel still on her hip, and looked around the room as though committing it to a chart of her own. Moss watched her take in the dried herbs over the hearth, the row of knives on their hooks, the boot-scraper by the door, the chair where his wife had sat, the chair still wearing the slight depression in its cushion that fifty years of one woman's weight had pressed into the horsehair.
"You'll wear a hole in that floor," Moss said. "Sit down."
She sat. The chair creaked under her, and she did not apologize to it.
Moss set a cup before her, loose tea, the dark stuff that Crane sent down from the inn when the suppliers' carts came through, the only kindness Moss accepted without argument. He poured when the water sang. The steam rose between them like a question waiting to be answered.
"Now then," he said. "Wagons. Maps. Wild country. And you've come alone, which is either brave or foolish, and I haven't decided which."
"Both, probably," Tova said. "I'm told they often are."
Moss huffed. Not a laugh. He didn't laugh. But something close.
"Tell me what's beyond the Briar Wood," he said. "Tell me true."
The woman looked at him over the rim of her cup. The ink stains on her fingers caught the firelight and made small dark shadows on the china.
"I don't know what's beyond the Briar Wood," she said. "That's the point."
The kettle ticked on the hearth. The dogs sighed in the yard. Somewhere in the field behind the house, a crow called once and fell silent.
Moss drank his tea and thought about wagons, and roads, and the kind of woman who carried ink on her hands and secrets behind her teeth, and whether the world was wide enough for both of them to be in it at the same time without one of them getting hurt.
The kettle ticked again, the sound of metal cooling, and Moss set his cup down with the careful deliberation of a man who had learned long ago that setting things down too quickly was how you broke them.
"The Briar Wood," he said, "has been there longer than the village. Longer than the inn. Longer than my fields, and I work land that's been worked three hundred years. So when you sit at my table and tell me you're going beyond it, and you don't know what's there, what I hear is a woman who means to find out."
Tova did not flinch. She held his gaze the way she held everything, with both hands and a kind of quiet certainty that did not need to explain itself.
"I have maps," she said.
"Any fool can have maps. I had a map once, showed me a shortcut through Westfield that ended in a ditch full of eels."
"Was the ditch well-mapped?"
"The eels were not. They were very surprised."
Something shifted at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile, but the place where a smile had once lived before she'd learned to keep it tucked away.
"I have maps," she said again, "and the maps have gaps. The gaps are what interest me."
Moss grunted. He knew about gaps. He had one in his field where the soil never settled right, where the rain pooled and the seed rotted, where his grandfather had said something was buried and refused to say what. Fifty years Moss had been turning that soil and never found anything but clay and the occasional button. The gaps weren't always interesting. Sometimes they were just gaps.
"Where did you get maps with gaps?" he asked. "Proper maps don't have gaps."
"Proper maps," Tova said, "are made by people who have not been where the maps end. These maps were made by people who tried."
The fire popped. One of the dogs outside whimpered at something in the dark, a hedge creature perhaps, or the wind wearing the wrong voice. Moss listened until the dog settled.
"You'll want to leave at first light," he said. "The track through the lower meadow holds firm this time of year. After that, it's the wood's business."
"I was thinking today."
"Today, she says. Today, when the light's already gone soft and the mist's gathering in the hollow."
"I'm told the mist parts for those who know where to look."
"Then you've been told wrong. The mist in that wood is old mist. It doesn't part. It thickens, and it waits, and it puts cold hands on the back of your neck if you stand still too long."
Tova set her cup down. It made no sound against the saucer, placed so gently that even the china seemed to be holding its breath.
"Then I had better keep moving," she said.
Moss looked at her for a long time. He had the kind of eyes that took their time, brown and patient as the soil he worked, and he did not look away first. It was a habit he'd learned from his wife, who had been the only person in the world with a longer silence than his own.
"You've got something in that bag," he said. "Besides the maps."
"I have several things in this bag."
"The one that's making the bag lean to the left."
Tova's hand went to the leather satchel at her hip, a motion so quick it might have been thoughtless if not for the way her eyes stayed on his. She unhooked the clasp and drew out a folded square of cloth, oiled canvas, the kind that wagoners used to wrap precious goods against the rain. She unwrapped it on the table between them, and what lay inside was a piece of wood.
Not a branch. Not a shard. A thing made by hands. Carved.
It was a bird, or had been. A wren, by the look of it, though its beak was worn to nothing and one wing had been broken off and glued back at an angle that was never quite right. The paint had faded to a paleness that might once have been red, or might once have been something else. The wood was oak, old oak, the grain darkened by years of handling, by oil from fingers, by sweat and breath and the warmth of being held.
Tova set it on the cloth and pushed it toward him.
"It was my sister's," she said. "Before she died."
Moss did not touch it. He looked at it the way he looked at weather, with the respectful attention of a man who knew some things could not be hurried.
"Wren," he said. "The bird."
"The bird," she agreed. "And the name."
He picked it up at last, and the first thing he felt was the weight of it, which was wrong. It should have been light, a thing carved from a single piece of old oak, but it sat in his palm like something with bones. He turned it slowly. The grain ran in long lines down the body, and where the broken wing had been rejoined, the glue had yellowed but held. The faded paint, when he brought it close, smelled of linseed and something else. Something older. A smell he half-remembered from his wife's hands when she had been very young and the world had still been new.
"Warm," he said, before he knew he was going to say it.
"Yes," Tova said.
He passed it back to her, and when his fingers left the wood he felt the absence of it, a small cold spot in his palm that took a moment to fade.
"You keep it close," he said. It was not a question.
"I do."
"And the girl."
Moss stopped. Tova had not moved, had not shifted her weight, had not so much as blinked. But something in the air between them changed, the way a room changes when someone opens a door you hadn't noticed was closed.
"The girl," Moss said again, carefully, "at the inn."
"You know her."
"I know Master Crane. I know the inn. I know the girl who waits the tables and carries the kindling and does not look anyone in the eye unless she has to."
"Kitchen girl," Tova said. "Orphaned. Parents lost in the marsh seven years ago. Taken in by Crane when no one else would have her."
"Crane's soft," Moss said. "Always was. He took her because he couldn't bear to see her at the gate, and now he can't bear to let her go, and somewhere between those two things she's turned into a piece of the inn's furniture."
"That's a cruel way to put it."
"It's the true way to put it. You want me to lie, you'll have to go somewhere else."
Tova folded the cloth back over the wren, slowly, the way you fold something you are putting to bed. Her hands lingered on the oiled canvas for a moment before she tucked it back into the satchel and refastened the clasp.
"I need an assistant," she said. "For the journey. Someone young enough to walk the miles, and small enough to fit where I cannot, and stubborn enough to keep going when the going is bad."
"You've described half the children in the village."
"I've described one."
Moss sat back in his chair. The wood creaked, an old sound, the sound of his own bones settling. He looked at the fire. He looked at the door. He looked at the place on the table where the wren had been, as if the warmth of it had left a print he could read.
"She's Crane's," he said.
"Crane would let her go if he thought she had somewhere better to go. You know that. You've known Crane since before the inn had a sign."
"I've known Crane since before the inn had walls. The girl's the only thing in that building he loves without conditions. You take her out of there, you take the heart out of him. And Crane without a heart is just a man pouring ale into strangers."
Tova tilted her head. The light from the fire caught the silver at her temples.
"I'm not asking you to persuade him," she said. "I'm asking you to take me to the inn. The rest is between Crane and me and the girl."
Moss thought about it. He thought about it the way he thought about rain, which was to say he thought about whether it would do harm and whether there was any use in standing against it either way. He thought about Crane, who had buried a wife and raised a child that wasn't his and grown old in a building that smelled of grease and woodsmoke. He thought about the girl, who had never once spoken to him in more than two words at a time and whose eyes always went to the floor when he passed. He thought about his own wife, gone these eleven years, and how there had been a girl in the village then too, a girl with red hair and bad teeth who had wanted very badly to go somewhere and never had.
He thought about the wren, and the warmth of it, and how some things were carried a long time by the wrong hands.
"First light," he said. "I'll walk you down. But the convincing's yours."
"That's fair."
"It's not fair. But it's what I can give you."
Tova stood. The chair made no sound under her, as if it had decided to be polite. She moved to the door, and Moss watched her go, watched the way the lamplight bent around her as she stepped out into the yard, watched the dogs lift their heads and sniff and lower them again, accepting her as a thing that did not require barking at.
He stayed at the table a long time after she had gone. He drank the last of his tea. He turned his cup around in his hands. The fire settled into embers, and the embers settled into ash, and the ash settled into nothing at all, and somewhere in the field the crow called again, once, as if checking that the world was still there.
Then Moss got up, banked the fire, and went to bed. He did not sleep well. He rarely did. But the night passed, the way nights do, and in the morning he would walk a woman to the inn, and a girl would meet her there, and whatever was going to happen would begin.
The morning came in the way mornings come in Hollowmere at the back end of autumn, slowly and with a sort of apology, the light arriving not so much as a thing that had happened but as a thing that was still being decided. There was mist on the lower fields, and the mist had the smell of old cabbage and colder water, and when Moss stepped off his porch he stood for a moment with his hand on the newel post and let the world come to him.
He had not slept well. He had slept the way a man sleeps when sleep is the only thing left to do, which is to say badly and not long, with dreams he would not have been able to describe to anyone and that he tried not to describe even to himself.
He walked down the lane toward the woods. The lane was only a lane in name. In truth it was a pair of ruts with grass between them and a hedge on either side that had been laid in his grandfather's time and had never been properly laid since. Moss walked in the ruts because the grass was wet, and he walked slowly because he was an old man and slow was the speed of him now, and somewhere behind him a rook on a gatepost decided it had opinions about him and said so.
At the edge of the wood, where the oaks began to thicken and the light changed from grey to a darker grey with green in it, Tova Ashwood was waiting. She stood with her back against a trunk, her pack at her feet, her hood up against the mist. She looked, Moss thought, like a thing that had been put there by the wood and forgotten, except that her eyes were open and her eyes were not the eyes of a forgotten thing.
"You're early," she said.
"I slept poorly."
"I can see that. You look like a man who has been arguing with his pillow."
"I've had better arguments."
She almost smiled. Almost was as far as it went with Tova, in Moss's small experience of her, but almost was more than most people got.
"The girl," he said. "She knows?"
"She knows what I told her. She doesn't know what I didn't."
"That's most of it, then."
"That's most of it, yes."
They stood for a moment in the mist and did not say anything else, because there are mornings when the talking is done and the only thing left is the walking, and they began to walk. Tova fell into step beside him, or he fell into step beside her, or the lane made the decision for them both, and the wood came up around their shoulders and made its small sounds above them, which were the sounds of a place that was awake and did not particularly care who knew it.
They walked for a quarter of an hour without speaking. Moss listened to her boots on the track. They made a sound he had not expected, a soft sound, the sound of leather that had been treated with something he did not recognize. He thought about asking. He decided not to.
At the edge of the wood the village opened up before them, and the village was already awake in the way villages are awake when there is a market day or a funeral or any other thing that requires being looked at. Smoke from the chimneys. The baker's boy on his bicycle. A woman beating a rug over the fence of the inn yard. The inn itself, the Crooked Hare, with its sign swinging in a wind Moss could not feel.
Master Crane was in the yard. He was a tall, careful man with a face that had been arranged a long time ago into an expression of polite worry and had never been rearranged since. He saw Moss coming and he saw Tova, and the polite worry on his face arranged itself into a slightly different polite worry, which Moss read, after many years of reading the man's face, as a polite worry trying to be polite hope.
"Morning, Master Crane."
"Morning, Moss. You've brought your friend."
"I've brought my friend."
"And the girl?"
Tova stepped forward. "She is in the barn, as I asked. She has been in the barn since yesterday. She has eaten. She has slept, or so I am told. She has the small cart, and the cart has what she wants to bring."
Master Crane looked at her. He looked at Moss. He looked at the barn at the far end of the yard, where the door was closed and a thin line of light came from under it.
"You will take care of her," he said. It was not a question.
"I will take care of her as I take care of anyone I have chosen to walk beside," Tova said. "Which is to say, badly at first and better later, if she will let me."
Master Crane considered this. Then he nodded, once, and the nod had in it all the things he would have said if he had been the kind of man who said things, which he was not and never had been.
Moss found himself, suddenly, with his hand out. He did not remember deciding to put it out. The hand simply went, the way a hand does when a man has come to the end of a thing he has been carrying and needs to set it down.
Tova looked at the hand. She looked at his face.
"A handshake," he said. "For the deal."
"There was no deal."
"There was always a deal. I just hadn't said so yet."
She took his hand. Her grip was cool and dry and very sure, the grip of a woman who had held many things and dropped few of them. They shook once, firmly, the way men shake hands when the men
are sealing something that matters. Then they let go, and the morning was a little different than it had been a minute before.
Moss cleared his throat. He felt the need to say something, and then he felt the equal need not to say it, and so he stood there for a moment with both impulses fighting it out behind his teeth.
"Go on, then," Tova said, and the words were kind. "You have a farm to tend."
"I have a farm to tend," he agreed, and turned toward the gate.
He had taken three steps when he heard her voice again, quieter now, stripped of the elegant composure she wore like a coat.
"Moss."
He stopped. He did not turn around.
"The map will be in her cart by noon. She will find it under the folded blanket, in the false bottom. Tell no one where it came from. Tell no one I exist."
"You don't exist as far as I'm concerned," he said. "Never have."
"Good man," she said, and meant it, and he knew she meant it, and he walked on.
The gate latch was cold under his hand. He lifted it, eased it open so it would not squeak, and stepped through into the lane. Behind him he heard the latch fall back into its cradle, and then footsteps, light and quick, moving away toward the barn.
He did not look back at the farmhouse. He had seen enough farmhouses. He had seen enough of this one in particular, the sagging eaves, the woodpile going grey, the patch where the chimney leaked in a hard rain. He knew what was behind the door and he did not need to look at it again.
The lane stretched ahead of him, pale and rutted, bordered by the stripped hedges of late autumn. His boots found their usual rhythm on the frozen ground, left, right, left, the slight hitch on the right where his knee had never quite healed from the time the young bull had him down in the lower pasture. He had been thirty-two then. He was sixty-seven now, and the knee still remembered, and he suspected it would remember until the day it stopped remembering anything at all.
A magpie hopped along the hedge top, watching him pass. He tipped an imaginary hat to it, the way he did to most things that watched him pass. The magpie said nothing back, but hopped on a few feet and watched him again, head cocked, as if it had all the time in the world and very little else to do with it.
He reached the stile at the boundary of Crane's land and the common. For a moment he stood there with one hand on the top rail, breathing the smell of wet bracken and cold earth. Somewhere out beyond the common, past the dip where the old track used to run, lay his own fields. He could not see them from here, but he knew their shape in his mind the way a man knows the shape of his own hands in the dark.
He thought of his wife. He thought of her more often now than he had in the first years after, when the grief had been so fresh it had no name and he had walked around inside it like a man walking around inside a house with no windows. Now the grief had windows. Now he could see out of it, most days, and what he saw was the land, and what he tended, and the small handful of people he had not yet managed to disappoint.
She would have liked Tova, he thought. She would have seen through the composure in a moment, the way she had seen through him, and she would have offered the woman a cup of something and a chair by the fire, and Tova would have pretended she did not need either, and she would have taken both, and they would have talked until the candles guttered.
He smiled, and the smile felt strange on his face, as if it had been stored away in a cupboard for a long time and had come out with the dust still on it.
He climbed over the stile.
The common was wide and grey and smelled of sheep, though he had not seen a sheep on it for twenty years. He walked the path he always walked, the path his boots had worn into the turf without his noticing, the path that would be there long after his boots were dust and his dust was scattered and his scattering was forgotten.
Halfway across, he stopped.
He could not have said why he stopped. There was nothing to see. The common was empty in every direction, and the sky above it was the colour of old pewter, and the only sound was the wind in the dried stalks of the bracken and the distant complaint of a crow somewhere he could not locate.
But something had changed.
He stood still and let the change come to him. It was in the air, or in the light, or in the part of him that was older than his thinking and knew things his mind had not yet agreed to. He closed his eyes. He breathed in through his nose, held it, let it out through his mouth.
Earth. Cold. The iron tang of the bog to the north. The faint sweetness of the last blackberries, rotting on the brambles. Woodsmoke from somewhere beyond the ridge, Crane's chimney perhaps, or another farmer's, or no one at all.
And under all of it, something else. Something he did not have a name for. A faint hum, low and patient, like a wire singing in a wind no one else could feel.
He opened his eyes. The common was the same common it had always been.
"Right, then," he said to no one.
He walked on.
By the time he reached his own gate, the sun had broken through in a thin, reluctant strip along the eastern edge of the sky, and the frost on the gate hinges glittered like someone had been at it with a small brush and a pot of ground glass. He opened the gate, closed it carefully behind him, and stood for a moment in his own yard, looking at his own house, his own woodpile, his own front door with its peeling paint and its iron latch and the scuff mark at the bottom where he had caught it with his boot one too many times.
Home.
He went inside. He set the kettle on. He took down the brown jar from the shelf, the one he kept for days that required doing, and put a spoonful of the dried leaves into the pot. He stood at the window and watched the yard while the water came to the boil.
Barn. Byre. The empty pig pen he had not restocked since the last sow went to the butcher's. The well sweep, its shadow long across the stones. The apple tree, bare now, its branches black against the pale sky, the one his wife had planted the year they married and that had not borne a decent crop in five.
He thought of the girl in the barn at Crane's. He thought of the cart, and the false bottom, and the map that would be in it by noon. He thought of Tova's face when she had taken his hand, the way her eyes had held his, the way she had nodded once as if to say, yes, I see you, I see what you are, and I have decided you will do.
He thought of his wife, and then he stopped thinking of his wife, because that was a road he could not walk down and also boil the kettle, and the kettle was more urgent.
He poured the water. He drank the tea. It was bitter and warm and tasted, as it always tasted, of the fields it had come from.
By the time the cup was empty, the sun had climbed high enough to clear the ridge, and the day was properly begun, and he was a man with a farm to see to, and he went out to see to it.
The morning took him. The morning always took him. There were fences to mend and a trough to scrub and a hen that had gone broody in the wrong place and needed persuading off her clutch of nothing. There was the south field to walk, checking the drainage after the rains. There was the gate by the lower meadow that sagged on its hinges and needed lifting before it sagged itself off them entirely.
He worked until his hands were numb and his back reminded him, in its usual blunt way, that it had been carrying him around for sixty-seven years and was not above complaining about it. He ate his bread and cheese at the wall in the lee of the byre, watching a wren fuss about in the stripped hedge, a small fierce thing no bigger than his fist, making a great noise about nothing.
He thought of the other wren. He had not asked her name. He realized, with a small jolt, that he had not asked her name, and that Tova had not offered it, and that there was a reason for this, and that the reason was the same reason he had not asked where the apothecary was, or what colour the maps were bound in, or any of the other questions that had risen in him and been, one by one, set aside.
Some things you do not ask. Some things you leave to be told, in the telling, when the telling is ready to be told.
He finished his bread. He brushed the crumbs from his coat. He went back to work.
The afternoon came on slow and grey, and by the time the light began to fail he had done what he could do, and what he could not do he had left for another day, as he had been leaving things for another day for longer than he cared to count.
He stood in the doorway of the byre, listening to the slow chew of the single cow he kept now, the old roan with the torn ear that he had not had the heart to send to market. The light was going. The shadows were lengthening. Somewhere out beyond the common, beyond the stile, beyond the lane, a girl was packing a cart and a woman was making maps and a man who never spoke was standing in a yard watching the dusk come down, and the world was turning under all of them the way the world turns, and would keep turning long after they were done being turned by it.
He closed the byre door. He set the latch. He turned toward his own house, and the lamp in the window, and the cold hearth that would soon be warm.
"Deal's a deal," he said to the dark.
Then he went inside, and shut the door, and drew the bolt, and the evening closed around him like a hand.