Snow struck the Wrenmoor Inn like a fist.
Eleanor Ashford leaned into the wind, one hand gripping the handle of a leather suitcase that had survived three continents and one bad marriage, the other pressed flat against her skirts to keep them from whipping into her face. The road behind her had vanished minutes ago, swallowed by white. Ahead, the inn's windows bled amber into the gloom, and she fixed her eyes on that light the way a sailor fixes on a shore.
She had told herself she was not running. She had told herself a hundred sensible things on the train from Bristol, and then again in the hired cart that had abandoned her at the crossroads an hour before dusk. Sensible things, like: a week is only seven days , and grandmother's cottage needs airing , and you are thirty-one years old and no longer afraid of attics or memories or the particular silence of empty rooms.
None of it had kept the dread from settling between her shoulder blades like a cold stone.
The inn's front step appeared beneath her boot without warning. She stumbled, caught herself, and stood for a moment with snow melting against her cheekbones, her breath coming in sharp white plumes. Through the warped glass of the door she could see a fire. She could see the shape of a woman behind a counter, and beyond her, the suggestion of low ceilings and dark wood and the smell of something savory, onion and rosemary, drifting out through the cracks.
Eleanor set down the suitcase. She flexed her frozen fingers. Then she pulled the door open and stepped inside.
Heat rolled over her like a tide.
The common room of the Wrenmoor Inn was small and cluttered and smelled of woodsmoke and candle wax and the ghost of a thousand boiled dinners. A fire burned low in a hearth wide enough to roast a pig, its light catching the brass fittings on the bar, the pewter tankards hanging from hooks, the glass eyes of a stuffed trout mounted above the mantel. A tabby cat watched her from a stool by the fire with the resigned patience of a creature who had seen every kind of traveler arrive and none of them improve.
"Lord preserve us," said the woman behind the counter. She was broad and aproned and had the kind of face that looked like it had been carved from local oak. Her hair, iron-gray and pinned back with ruthless severity, showed no sign of the storm outside. "Another one."
Eleanor blinked snow from her lashes. "I'm sorry?"
"Another fool out in this weather." The woman came around the counter, wiping her hands on a towel that might once have been white. She had a voice like a wooden spoon against a pot, and the same kind of utility. "You're the third today. First was a peddler who swore he knew the pass. Second was a lad from the village who forgot his own nose was attached." She stopped in front of Eleanor and looked her up and down with the frank appraisal of a woman who had not learned to be polite and seen no reason to start now. "And you're soaked to the marrow."
"The road disappeared," Eleanor said.
"The road does that. Sit." The woman pointed to a chair by the fire. "Mrs. Pell, if you're wondering. I own the place, such as it is. My husband owns the roof, and between the two of us we keep the chimney breathing. What's your name, dear?"
"Eleanor Ashford."
Something shifted behind Mrs. Pell's eyes. A flicker, quick as a candle in a draft, and then gone. "Ashford," she repeated, in a tone that turned the name into a small stone and set it carefully down. "Any relation to the old woman up at Briar Cottage?"
"My grandmother."
"Well." Mrs. Pell drew a long breath through her nose. "Well, well. Sit down, then. I'll bring tea."
Eleanor sat. The chair was older than she was, and it received her weight with a creak of weary acceptance. She held her frozen hands out to the fire and watched the blood return to her fingers in a slow tide of pins and needles. The suitcase stood just inside the door, rainwater pooling around its wheels, and she thought of her grandmother's cottage standing empty at the top of the lane, waiting for her in the dark.
She had not been back in seven years.
The last time she had stood in Wrenmoor, she had been twenty-four and hollow with grief. Her grandmother had died in the night, alone in the kitchen with the kettle still on the hob, and Eleanor had arrived too late to say any of the things that mattered. The funeral had been brief and strange. The villagers had watched her with eyes that held something she could not name, and she had spent the long days of settling the estate half-convinced she was being haunted. Not by her grandmother, who had been too sensible for haunting. By something older. By the village itself.
She had left on the third morning, before anyone could ask her to stay.
And now she was here again, because the cottage had been left to her, and because the solicitor had written to say the roof was failing, and because a week was only seven days, and because Eleanor Ashford was the kind of woman who finished what she started, even when starting had been a mistake.
The cat dropped from its stool and crossed the room to wind between her ankles. She bent to scratch behind its ears and felt the small vibration of its purr against her shins.
"His name is Greymalkin," said Mrs. Pell, returning with a tray. "He's got no manners and a taste for cream. Don't encourage him."
"He's beautiful."
"He's a menace." But the woman set the tray down with a softness that betrayed her. Steam rose from the pot, and the smell of it was so domestic, so entirely ordinary, that Eleanor's throat tightened. "Milk? There's honey, if you want it."
"Honey, please."
Mrs. Pell poured. The cup that came to Eleanor's hands was thick and heavy and chipped at the rim, the kind of cup that had survived a hundred falls and would survive a hundred more. She wrapped both hands around it and drank.
"Up for the cottage, are you?" Mrs. Pell asked. She had settled into the chair opposite, her own cup balanced on her knee, and she watched Eleanor with the comfortable shrewdness of a woman who had been reading strangers her whole life.
"Yes. The solicitor says the roof won't last the winter."
"The roof's the least of it. That place has been empty since your grandmother passed. Damp gets in. Cold gets in. Worse things get in, if you ask the villagers." Mrs. Pell waved a hand as if to dismiss the villagers and all their nonsense. "They'll have told you, I suppose. About the cottage."
"About what?"
"The haunting. The singing in the walls. The woman seen at the upstairs window when there was no woman living in the house for a year before she died." Mrs. Pell sipped her tea. "There's not a soul in Wrenmoor who'll walk past Briar Cottage after dark. Not a one."
Eleanor kept her face very still. She had been trained to keep her face still by a mother who had learned, painfully and late, that showing surprise in front of the wrong person could cost a woman everything. "I hadn't heard."
"Hadn't you." It was not a question. Mrs. Pell's eyes, small and bright and brown as chestnuts, held something that might have been curiosity or might have been warning. "Well. You're here now. And you're an Ashford, whatever else you are, and the Ashfords have always had a way with this village. Your grandmother was a healer, you know. Folk medicine. Old remedies. Half the people in Wrenmoor owe her their lives and the other half owe her their secrets, though the second lot will never admit it."
"My mother was the healer," Eleanor said quietly. "My grandmother taught her."
"Your mother." Mrs. Pell's mouth thinned. "Ah. Yes. I remember your mother. She had a gift, that one. A real gift. And she spent it on the wrong things, if you'll forgive an old woman's bluntness."
Eleanor set her cup down. The china rattled against the saucer, a small sharp sound in the quiet room. "My mother is the reason I learned to sew."
"Is she." Mrs. Pell studied her for a long moment. Then she set her own cup aside and stood, brushing at her apron with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had said what she meant to say and saw no profit in lingering. "There's a room at the top of the stairs. Second door on the left. The sheets are clean and the window doesn't leak, much. Dinner's at seven, and if you're late you'll get the cold shoulder from me and the leftovers from the pot. There's one other guest tonight, a gentleman traveling through on his way north. Keeps to himself mostly. You'll likely not see him at all."
"Thank you, Mrs. Pell."
"Mm." The woman gathered the tray. "One more thing, Miss Ashford."
Eleanor looked up.
"Your grandmother left something for you. In the cottage, I mean. There's a box. She made me promise I'd tell you, if you ever came back." Mrs. Pell's voice had changed. The briskness was gone, and what remained was something older, and almost tender. "She said you'd know what to do with it."
The fire cracked. The cat meowed. Outside, the wind threw itself against the shutters with a sound like something begging to be let in.
"I'll go up tomorrow," Eleanor said. "First thing."
"First thing the road's clear enough to walk, you mean. Which won't be before midday, if I know this weather." Mrs. Pell nodded once, satisfied, and disappeared through a door at the back of the room. Eleanor heard the clatter of pots, the hiss of a kettle, and the low murmur of Mrs. Pell speaking to someone in the kitchen, though the words were too soft to make out.
Eleanor sat by the fire and watched the flames. She thought of the cottage, and the box, and the woman who had raised her mother and taught her the old rites and died alone with the kettle on. She thought of the village, and the way its people looked at anyone with the Ashford name. She thought of her mother, who had been brilliant and reckless and broken, who had been stripped of her name and her practice and her home, and who had taught her daughter to mend what was torn and to keep her hands busy and her mouth closed and her heart out of reach.
She thought: a week is only seven days.
She did not believe it.
The cat returned and settled on her feet, a warm and purring anchor. The snow pressed against the windows. Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard creaked under the weight of a stranger she had not yet met. And in the kitchen, Mrs. Pell's voice rose and fell in a conversation Eleanor could not hear, though she strained for it, and caught nothing but the shape of her own name, and another she did not recognize.
Margot Henley set down the glass of elderflower cordial she had been holding since dawn and walked across the room. She stopped in front of Eleanor.
"My dear girl. Sit down before you fall down. You are swaying like a reed in a brook."
Eleanor sat. She had not realized she had been swaying, but now that her legs were still she could feel the tremor in them, the deep muscular shakiness of a body that had been walking in the wind for hours. Margot sat beside her, and for a moment their shoulders touched.
"Tell me what you found," Margot said. Not a question. A request, and a permission.
Eleanor closed her eyes. Behind her lids she saw the cottage again, the door swinging in the storm, the table with its dead candle, the chest with its box.
"A letter," she said. "In a box. Under the floor."
"A letter."
"To my mother. From her grandmother."
"Ah." Margot's hand found Eleanor's knee and rested there, warm through the wool. "And you have not read it."
"No."
"And you do not know if you will."
"No."
Margot was quiet for a moment. The fire crackled. The cat purred. Outside, the snow made its small dry whisper against the glass.
"Then you will, or you will not," Margot said, "and either way, you will live through it. You are an Ashford. You are made of sterner stuff than paper."
Eleanor opened her eyes. "Everyone says that. As if it were a comfort."
"Is it not?"
"It is a way of telling me not to break. As if the not-breaking were the point."
"The not-breaking is never the point, dear. The living is the point. The not-breaking is only what allows the living to continue."
Eleanor looked at her. In the firelight Margot's face was a study in soft lines and careful composure, the face of a woman who had buried a husband and raised a daughter and run an inn and survived a war and was now, in her old age, attempting to survive a snowstorm and a girl with a letter she could not bring herself to open.
"You are very wise," Eleanor said.
"I am very old. It looks the same from the outside."
Eleanor laughed. It was a small laugh, thin and surprised, but it was a laugh, and she felt the tightness in her chest loosen by a single degree. Margot squeezed her knee and withdrew her hand.
"Now," Margot said. "Practicalities. You cannot go to the cottage today. The road is buried and the wind has not stopped. If you go out in this, you will be found in a drift by morning, and I have already buried one husband this year, thank you very much."
"Mrs. Henley. I must."
"You must do nothing of the kind. You must eat and sleep and let the storm pass, and then you must go. Today is not the day. Tomorrow may be, if the wind drops. The day after, certainly. The letter has waited thirty years. It will survive one more night."
Eleanor knew she was right. She knew it the way she knew the weight of a needle in her hand, the way she knew the smell of lavender when it was properly dried, the way she knew the sound of her own name in the voice of her mother when she was a child and her mother was still whole. She knew it, and she hated it, and she stayed.
"I will stay tonight," she said.
"Good."
"But tomorrow. First light."
"First light the road will still be impassable."
"Then second light."
"We will see about second light."
They sat together in the quiet. The fire burned down. Mrs. Pell came in with a tray of soup and bread and a small dish of butter, and set it on the table beside Eleanor with a look that was almost maternal.
"Eat," she said. "You are giddy with cold. It does no good to starve on top of it."
Eleanor ate. The soup was thick with barley and root vegetables, the bread was dark and warm, the butter was salted and faintly sweet. She ate without tasting, and then she began to taste, and then she ate more. Her body took over. Her mind floated above it, watching, and the watching was almost rest.
When she had finished, Mrs. Pell took the tray away, and Margot rose and excused herself, saying she had accounts to see to and a kitchen to supervise, and Eleanor was left alone in the parlour with the cat and the fire and the sound of the snow.
She did not know how long she sat there. The light in the room shifted, thickening toward the grey of late afternoon. The cat slept on her feet. The fire burned low. She was aware, distantly, of voices in the kitchen, of a door opening and closing somewhere deeper in the house, of the creak of floorboards under the weight of people she could not see.
She was aware, suddenly, of a man standing in the doorway.
He was tall. He was wearing a coat that had seen better days, and a scarf that was wound three times around his neck, and he was standing with one hand on the doorframe as if he needed the support. His face was windburned and tired, and his eyes, when he lifted them to hers, were the pale grey-green of sea glass.
"I beg your pardon," he said. His voice was low, with the soft lilt of somewhere west of here, though not so far west as Eleanor's own tongue. "I was told there was a fire."
"There is," Eleanor said.
"And a chair."
"There are several."
"Would you mind very much if I took one?"
She waved a hand at the empty ones. He crossed the room and sat in the chair nearest the fire, opposite her, and stretched his long legs toward the hearth with a sigh that came from somewhere deep in his chest.
"Thank you," he said. "I have been walking since four o'clock this morning. I was beginning to think I would have to sleep in a snowdrift."
"You would not be the first."
"No. I should not like to be, all the same."
He did not introduce himself. She did not ask him to. They sat in the firelit silence, two strangers in a room that was not theirs, and the snow pressed at the windows, and the cat purred on Eleanor's feet as if to reassure her that the world had not entirely lost its mind.
After a while the man spoke again.
"You are the young woman from the village, I expect. The one Mrs. Pell was telling me about."
Eleanor looked at him. "Mrs. Pell has been telling you about me."
"She has been telling the kitchen about you. I happened to be standing in the kitchen. One hears things."
"What things?"
He looked at her, and there was a flicker of something in his pale eyes that might have been amusement, or might have been apology.
"That you arrived half frozen and have been sitting by the fire since," he said. "That you are the seamstress. That your mother was the herbalist. That the village is full of people who talk too much and notice too little. That you have not had a hot meal in a week, and that you are not to be fussed over, but if a hot meal should happen to come your way, you are not to refuse it."
"That is a very complete account."
"Mrs. Pell is a very complete woman."
Eleanor looked at him a moment longer. He met her gaze without flinching, and after a moment she nodded, once, and looked away.
"I am Eleanor Ashford," she said. "And you are?"
"Declan Marlowe." He inclined his head. "I am a sort of traveling scholar. I collect things."
"What sort of things?"
"Old things. Dying things. Customs that are being forgotten. Songs that are no longer sung. Rites that are no longer performed. I write them down, and I try to remember them, and eventually I give the writings to someone who cares."
"And do you find them? The customs. The songs."
"Sometimes. More often I find the places where they used to be, and the people who remember them vaguely, and the holes they have left behind."
He spoke quietly, without self-pity, as if this were simply the nature of his work. Eleanor watched his face in the firelight, the way the shadows moved across the hollows of his cheeks, the way his mouth formed the words with a kind of careful precision, as if he were trying not to disturb the air too much.
"That sounds lonely," she said.
He looked at her. "It is."
The word sat between them. The fire popped. The cat stretched on Eleanor's feet, and she felt the small claws knead through the wool of her stockings.
"My mother used to sing," Eleanor said, and then stopped, because she had not meant to say it.
Declan Marlowe did not press. He waited, the way a man waits who knows what it is to be asked and not asked, to be heard and not heard. Eleanor looked at her hands in her lap, at the calluses on her fingers from the needle, at the small scar on her thumb from the time she had been seven and had tried to cut her own hair and had learned that some things are not meant to be cut.
"What did she sing?" he asked, very softly.
"I don't know. Old things. Things I did not understand. I have tried to remember them and I cannot."
"Not the words?"
"Not the words. Not the tunes. Only the feeling of them. Only the way the room felt when she sang. As if the walls had been pulled back, and there was more air."
Declan was quiet for a long moment. The fire burned. The snow whispered. Somewhere in the house a clock ticked, a sound Eleanor had not noticed until now.
"There is a tradition," he said, "in the villages of the west, of a figure called the Holly King. He is the spirit of the winter, the ruler of the dark half of the year. He dies at midwinter and is reborn at midsummer. His queen is the Ivy Queen, or sometimes the Lady of the Waning Year. In some places they are two faces of a single figure. In others they are lovers who meet only at the solstice and part again at the equinox."
Eleanor listened. Her hands had gone still in her lap. The cat had lifted its head and was looking at Declan with the fixed attention of an animal that knows it is being spoken of.
"There are songs for them," Declan went on. "Rites. Customs. In some places the women of the village would dress a girl in white and crown her with holly and call her the Queen, and the men would dress a boy in green and call him the King, and they would be married for a day and a night, and at dawn they would be stripped of their crowns and sent back to their ordinary lives. It was understood that the marriage was not of flesh but of spirit. That the King and Queen were not themselves but the spirits they wore."
"And what happened to the girl? The girl in white."
"She went back to her father's house. She took off the crown. She went back to her ordinary work. And she remembered, for the rest of her life, that she had been a queen for a day."
Eleanor stared at him. The fire had burned low, and the room was growing dim, and his face was half in shadow.
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Because I have spent five years walking from village to village collecting these fragments, and I have learned that they do not come to you by accident. They come when you are ready for them. They come when there is a place for them to land."
He leaned forward in his chair, and the firelight caught the pale of his eyes.
"I do not know why I am telling you," he said. "I only know that when I came into this room, I was tired and cold and thinking of nothing but my bed. And then I saw you, and the words came into my mouth, and I spoke them. As if they were not mine to keep."
Eleanor sat very still. The cat had risen from her feet and was crossing the room toward Declan, its tail high, its eyes fixed on his face. It reached his chair, sniffed at his boot, and then, with the deliberateness of an animal that has made up its mind, jumped into his lap and settled there, purring.
Declan looked down at the cat. He put his hand on its back, very gently, and began to stroke. The purr deepened.
"I think," he said, "I have been adopted."
Eleanor watched his hand move on the cat's fur, the slow, even rhythm of it, and she felt something shift in her chest, some small locked thing that gave way by a hairsbreadth.
"The cat has very poor judgment," she said.
"The cat has excellent judgment. The cat knows I am a pushover for warmth."
"Is that what you are? A pushover?"
"I am a man who has been walking in the snow for fourteen hours and who has just been told a very beautiful story by his own mouth. I think I am entitled to be a pushover for the remainder of the evening."
Eleanor laughed again. It was a slightly larger laugh than the one she had given Margot, and it surprised her less. She looked at the man in the chair opposite her, with his worn coat and his pale eyes and his cat in his lap, and she thought: this is either the beginning of something or the middle of something, and I am too tired to know which.
She did not say it aloud. She said, instead: "You must be hungry."
"Ravenous."
"I will see what Mrs. Pell has."
She rose, and her legs trembled, and she steadied herself on the arm of the chair, and she went out of the room toward the kitchen, and as she went she heard, very faintly, behind her, the sound of Declan Marlowe speaking to the cat in a low and tender voice, a voice he clearly did not intend anyone to hear, and she did not turn around, and she did not stop, and she walked faster, because her face had gone warm and she did not want him to see.
The kitchen smelled of mutton broth and woodsmoke and the sharp clean scent of rosemary Mrs. Pell had hung to dry above the stove. Eleanor stood for a moment in the doorway, letting her eyes adjust to the amber glow of the low fire, and let herself breathe.
Mrs. Pell was at the table, slicing bread.
"He is hungry," Eleanor said.
Mrs. Pell did not look up. "They are always hungry, the ones who walk in from the road. Sit down, girl, you are swaying."
"I am not swaying."
"You are swaying like a reed in a ditch. Sit."
Eleanor sat. The chair was solid and cold through her skirt and she was grateful for it. She pressed her palms flat against her thighs and watched Mrs. Pell's thick, capable hands lay the slices in a row on the wooden board.
"You have known him a long time," Eleanor said. "The folklorist."
"Known of him," Mrs. Pell said. "He came through three winters ago. Stayed two nights. Asked questions about the old well and the rowan tree and the bell that used to hang in the church porch. Wrote everything down in a little book. Very polite. Very thin."
"Did he say why he was collecting it?"
"He said it was dying out. The traditions. The stories. The songs. He said someone ought to put them somewhere safe before the snow took them."
"And did you tell him?"
"Some of it." Mrs. Pell set down the knife. She looked at Eleanor then, and her face was unreadable in the firelight, which was unusual for her; Mrs. Pell's face was usually as legible as a shop sign. "Some of it I kept back. The parts that are not for strangers."
"Which parts are those?"
"The parts that are still alive." Mrs. Pell picked up the knife again. "The parts that work only if you do them right. You know what I mean, girl."
Eleanor knew what she meant. She thought of her mother's hands over the simmering pot, of the words that were never written down because to write them down was to lose them, of the way her mother had pressed her palm against the doorpost on the winter solstice and murmured something into the wood. She had not understood it at six. She had understood it better at sixteen. She understood it now, at twenty-four, in a way that lived in her body and not in her head.
"Yes," she said. "I know what you mean."
Mrs. Pell put the bread and a crock of broth and a small jug of cider on a tray. "Take it in. Eat with him if you like, or leave it at the door. Your own business."
"Thank you, Mrs. Pell."
"Don't thank me. Thank the goat that wandered into the yard this morning and gave us a leg."
Eleanor laughed, a small surprised sound, and took the tray.
In the passage she paused. The inn was very quiet. The wind had dropped since sundown, or perhaps it had simply moved higher up into the mountains, where it could howl without bothering anyone. She could hear the low tick of the clock in the parlor and the creak of the old boards settling under her feet and, very faintly, from somewhere above her, the sound of a door closing.
Margot's door. Margot going to bed.
Eleanor stood still a moment longer. She thought of Margot's face at the window, the way it had caught the lamplight and then let it go. She thought of Margot saying I am so tired of pretending I am not afraid. She thought of the small bone-white face of the girl in the photograph in the upstairs bedroom and the way her own face had looked back at her from the glass. Two faces, one mirror. Two women, one evening, one snow.
She went back into the parlor.
Declan had not moved. The cat had rearranged itself so that its head hung upside down off his knee, which seemed to Eleanor an act of considerable trust on both their parts. He looked up when she came in.
"You brought reinforcements," he said, eyeing the tray.
"I brought mutton."
"Better."
She set the tray on the low table between them and sat down and served him first, because that was what her mother had taught her, and then herself. The broth was thick and rich and tasted of rosemary and the bones had been in it for hours. The bread was dense and warm. She ate in silence for a few minutes, and he ate in silence, and the cat purred.
"You have known Mrs. Pell a long time," he said at last, echoing her own earlier thought, though he could not have known it.
"A few years."
"She is a careful woman."
"She is."
"She gives the impression of knowing exactly where every secret in this valley is buried."
Eleanor looked at him over the rim of her cup. "Most people who live here a long time give that impression."
"Do you?"
"Do I what?"
"Know where the secrets are buried."
She considered the question. She thought of the bundle of dried rowan berries in her own room upstairs, tied with red thread, that she renewed every autumn at the equinox. She thought of the small leather pouch she wore against her skin when she worked on certain garments for certain customers, the ones who came to her in the back door and spoke in low voices about things they could not speak of in daylight. She thought of the words her mother had whispered into the doorpost.
"Some of them," she said.
He nodded. He did not press. He ate another piece of bread and offered the last piece on the tray to her, and she took it, and their fingers did not quite touch over the plate.
He set down his cup and looked at the fire.
"I should tell you," he said, "why I am here. Not the walking-collecting-stories reason. The other reason."
"You do not have to."
"I think I do. You told me yours."
She was silent.
"Three years ago," he said, "when I came through here, I heard a song. An old woman was singing it to a child by the river. I wrote it down. I went home, and I sang it to my mother, because she had been raised in this part of the country and I thought she would know it. She did not. She said she had never heard it. I thought that was strange, because the melody was one she used to hum when I was small, but the words were different. Older. Stranger. She asked me where I had heard it, and I told her, and she went very quiet."
The fire settled. A log shifted and a little cascade of sparks went up the chimney.
"She told me," he said, "that the song was a summoning. That it was sung in this valley once a year, on the longest night, and that it was sung to call something out of the wood. She said the something had not been called in a very long time, because the people who knew the words had died or gone away or been told to forget. She said I should not have heard it. She said I should not have written it down. She said that now that I had, the thing I had summoned would know my name."
The parlor was very quiet.
"I came back," he said, "because I wanted to find out if she was right."
Eleanor's pulse was in her throat. She could feel it, steady and quick.
"What did your mother tell you to do?"
"She told me to come here. She told me to find the woman who kept the rowan bush by the bridge. She told me to ask her forgiveness for taking the song down in ink, because ink is a kind of binding, and a binding is a kind of calling, and a calling is a kind of promise."
Eleanor stared at him. The cat had stopped purring. It had lifted its head and was looking at the door.
"I have not found her," he said. "The woman who keeps the rowan. I have asked. No one seems to know who I mean. Or no one will say."
He turned to her then, and his pale eyes were very steady.
"But I think," he said, "that you do."
The clock ticked. The fire breathed. The snow against the window had become a single white sheet, featureless and enormous, as though the inn were a lantern set down in the middle of an unwritten page.
Eleanor set down her cup.
"My mother," she said, "kept the rowan by the bridge."
"Yes."
"My mother was taken from here eight years ago."
"I know."
"They said she was a witch."
"I know that too."
"They were right." She looked at him, and her voice was steady, and her hands were steady, and her face felt very calm, the way a field feels calm after the last gust of a storm has passed through it. "She was a witch, and she was a healer, and she knew the song. She taught it to me when I was twelve, in the kitchen, in the dark, because she said it must be learned in the dark. She made me sing it back to her seven times. She made me promise I would only sing it once, on the longest night, and only if I meant it."
"You have sung it."
"Once."
"When?"
"Last winter."
"And did she come?"
Eleanor looked into the fire.
"Yes," she said. "She came."
The cat rose from Declan's knee and stretched and walked, unhurried, across the room and sat down precisely on the threshold of the parlor door, facing outward, as though it were keeping watch.
Declan looked at the cat, and then at Eleanor.
"I am sorry," he said, "for taking the song down in ink."
"Yes," she said.
"I am asking forgiveness."
"Yes."
"I am asking it of the wrong person, perhaps."
"You are asking it of the only person in this valley who can give it."
He waited.
"You did not know what you were doing," she said.
"No."
"Then I forgive you."
He let out a breath. She had not noticed he had been holding it.
"But," she said, and he looked up again, "you have bound yourself to something now, by taking it down. You know that."
"Yes."
"Then you will have to stay."
He looked at her for a long moment. The cat purred softly on the threshold. The fire popped and settled.
"I will have to stay," he agreed.
Outside, the snow went on falling. Inside, the inn creaked and ticked and held. And Eleanor Ashford, who had come up the road that evening expecting nothing more than a bed and a fire and the ordinary company of a winter night, sat in a low chair with a strange man and a watching cat and felt, for the first time in many years, that the locked thing in her chest had opened another notch, and that what was coming through it was not fear.
It was, she thought, the beginning of something. Or perhaps the middle. She was no longer too tired to know which.