The iron gate stood crooked against a hedge grown wild, its bars furred with rust and lichen the color of old bruises. Evangeline Moss stood on the road with her satchel across her chest and watched the taxi's red taillights shrink to nothing down the valley, two red coals swallowed by dusk.
Thornmere.
She had not spoken the name aloud in ten years. Now it hung in her mouth like a stone she had forgotten how to swallow.
The gate's latch was a twist of blackened wire, easy to unhook with a thumbnail. She unhooked it. The hinge screamed, a thin metal shriek that scattered something small and winged from the hedge, a thrush, perhaps, or just the memory of one. The sound rolled out across the field and came back to her flattened by distance, as if the valley could not decide whether to echo or absorb.
Beyond the gate, the lane unspooled through waist-high grass. On either side, the hedgerows leaned in like eavesdroppers. Somewhere ahead, a chimney trailed a wisp of smoke into a sky the color of cold tea.
The village had shrunk. That was her first honest thought, the one she had been refusing since the bus depot in Ashford. Thornmere was smaller than she remembered, or she was larger, or grief had simply eaten the margins off the world until only the center remained. The lane that had once seemed a long walk to a child now took three minutes of steady strides to cross, and she found herself stopping where the cobbles gave way to packed earth, uncertain which surface belonged to her feet.
She had told the taxi driver she was visiting family. He had grunted, a man whose curiosity had died somewhere on the M20, and had not asked another question. Good. She had no family left to visit, not here, not anywhere. The last of the Mosses had been her grandmother, and Lisel Moss had been ten years in her cold box beneath the churchyard yew when Evangeline finally turned twenty-one and felt, on a Tuesday in March, the first cold tug at her ribs, the first taste of iron on the tongue that meant the pact was waking.
A dog barked. Once, twice, then a third time with more conviction. A door opened somewhere out of sight and a voice called out a name, "Hettie, hush now, Hettie," and the bark dropped to a grumble.
She walked on. The lane curved around an old stone wall, and Thornmere opened before her like a held breath released.
Twelve houses, perhaps fourteen. A forge with its chimney cold. The pub, the Black Ram, its windows dim, a single pane lit on the upper floor where someone kept a lamp burning for no one. The lychgate of the church, leaning slightly to the east, as it had always leaned. The war memorial, its bronze soldier green with verdigris, his rifle pointing at nothing in particular.
And at the far end, where the lane widened into a kind of square, the Crooked Antler Inn, two stories of pale stone and darker timber, antlers fixed above the door, the sign creaking in a wind that did not reach the rest of the village.
The smell reached her before anything else. Woodsmoke, but underneath it something sweeter, a botanical, resinous note she could not place, and beneath that the wet-stone smell of the Embergrove, which meant the wind was coming down off the ridge and the woods were breathing out.
She stopped in front of the inn. Her reflection stared back at her from the darkened glass, a woman in a green coat too big for her shoulders, hair the color of damp wheat, eyes the color of rain on slate. She looked like someone who had come to apologize for a thing she had not yet done.
Her hand went to the satchel strap. Inside, wrapped in a square of undyed linen, lay the thing she had carried from Ashford, from London before that, from the solicitor's office in Holborn where an old man with kind, tired hands had pressed it into her palm and said, Your grandmother was a great woman, Miss Moss, and the world will ask things of you that no great woman should have to give. Keep this safe. Keep it hidden. When the Embergrove wakes, you will know.
She had known. She had known on the Tuesday in March, and again on the Wednesday, and on every night since when the iron taste flooded her mouth and the cold tug pulled and the dark behind her eyelids turned the color of deep water, and somewhere, far away or very near, she could hear the woods breathing.
The inn door was heavy, banded with iron, and it gave under her knuckles with a reluctance that felt almost personal. Inside, the warmth hit her first, then the noise of a log settling in the grate, then the smell of beef stew and onion and the yeasty ghost of bread baked earlier in the day.
The common room was low-ceilinged, beamed, lit by a handful of candles and a single oil lamp on the bar. Shelves lined the walls behind the bar, crowded with bottles and jars, dried herbs hanging in bunches from the rafters, a row of bells in a wooden frame that must have once called the staff. Now there was only one staff, and he stood behind the bar with a cloth in one hand and a pewter tankard in the other, polishing it with the slow, circular patience of a man who had been polishing the same tankard for thirty years and intended to keep at it.
Innkeeper Bramwell. She would have known him anywhere, even after ten years, even in a different coat. He was broader now, his beard whiter, his belly a little rounder beneath a waistcoat the color of dried moss. But the eyes were the same, small and bright and sharp, and when he looked up and saw her, the polishing stopped for one full beat before resuming at the same unhurried pace.
"Lord above," he said, and the words were not for her but for the tankard, which he set down with a small, ceremonial care. "Lord above, and little fishes. If that isn't the Moss girl."
"Mr. Bramwell."
"Bramwell. Just Bramwell now. Mr. Bramwell died when they put my wife in the ground, and good riddance to him, he was a dreary man." He came around the bar with the unhurried gait of a man who had nowhere else to be, which, she suspected, was mostly true. Up close, he smelled of woodsmoke and bay rum and something else, something medicinal and herbal, salve or tincture, something he had been rubbing into his knuckles. "Ten years. Ten years and a bit, if I'm counting, which I am, because I keep a kind of count. Your grandmother would have had my head on a pike if I'd forgotten the day you left."
"You remember the day I left?"
"I remember the day everyone leaves. It's a specialty of mine. Sit down, girl, sit down, you look like a scarecrow in that coat. Is that your grandmother's coat? No, don't tell me, I can see it isn't, but it's the right color, and the wrong color at the same time. Tea? I have tea. I have something stronger if your journey was the kind that needs something stronger. The roads from Ashford are murderous this time of year, the council does nothing, the council has never done anything, I served on the council once, I resigned in protest, I have resigned from many things in protest, it's a habit of mine."
She sat. The wood of it creaked, a stool with a rush seat that gave slightly under her weight, as if exhaling.
"Tea," she said. "Please."
"Please, she says. Her grandmother never said please. Not once, in forty years of knowing her. Lisel Moss said, Bramwell, tea, and I brought it, and that was the end of the negotiation." He was already moving back toward the bar, already lifting the kettle, his hands finding the familiar motions without consulting his eyes. "So. You've come back."
"For a visit."
"A visit." He set the kettle on the iron trivet over the coals, and the sound of it, the small metallic clank, traveled through the quiet room and came to rest against the beamed ceiling. "A visit. From London. In October. When the Embergrove is breathing."
She did not answer. The fire popped, a knot of resin bursting in the grate, and a shower of sparks rose up and died against the back of the hearth. The antlers above the door shifted in some imperceptible draft, casting a shadow on the flagstones that, for one moment, looked almost like antlers again, pointed and waiting.
"Your grandmother kept a cottage," Bramwell said, and his voice had changed, just slightly, the warmth still there but threaded now with something more careful. "The one past the forge, the one with the green door. I kept the roof on it. Out of respect. Out of a sort of superstition, if I'm honest. I wouldn't let a soul near it. There's folk in the village who'd have stripped the timbers for firewood by now, given half a chance, but I told them, I told them, that cottage belongs to the Moss blood, and a bargain is a bargain."
"My solicitor mentioned something."
"Your solicitor. You have a solicitor. That's modern. Lisel wouldn't have had a solicitor. Lisel would have had a cat and a very sharp knife." He laughed, a short, dry laugh that turned into a cough he smothered with the cloth. "I let the dust in, that's all. I let the cold in, that's all I could manage. The cottage is the cottage. It remembers."
"Remembers what?"
He did not answer. The kettle began, very faintly, to murmur.
"Remembers," he said, as if that were a complete sentence.
She looked around the room while he worked. A long table, empty, scarred with the rings of a thousand tankards. A smaller table by the fire, also empty. A clock on the mantel that ticked too loudly for the room. A row of pegs by the door, and on one of them a coat she did not recognize, a dark green with a copper clasp, too fine for Thornmere. On the floor beneath it, a pair of boots caked with something darker than mud.
She looked away.
Bramwell brought the tea in a brown ceramic pot and a single cup, and poured for her without asking. The tea was strong, almost black, and smelled of something she could not place, a herb, a root, something her grandmother had once called, with a certain grim amusement, the tea that wakes you up and the tea that puts you down, and you must choose carefully which you want, because the difference is mostly a matter of timing.
"I have a room," he said, setting the pot down on the scarred wood. "Upstairs, the one that faces the lane. The one that doesn't face the lane is empty, but I won't put you in that one. No reason. No reason at all, except the window sticks and the bed creaks and there's a draft that comes up through the floorboards that I cannot, for all my efforts, locate or stop. So. The lane-facing room."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet. Thank me when you leave. That's been my policy for thirty years." He settled into the chair opposite her, and the chair groaned under him with the familiarity of long acquaintance. "Now. You said a visit. I'm a gossip, Miss Moss, I won't pretend otherwise, it's the only entertainment in a village this size, and a Moss returning after ten years is the kind of entertainment that seasons the whole winter. So I'll ask you straight, and you can tell me straight or not at all, but I will ask."
He leaned forward, and the lamplight caught the small bright points of his eyes, and she saw, just for an instant, the man he had been before the village had worn him into his current shape, a man who had once known her family and possibly feared them, and possibly, in some small way, loved them.
"Why have you come back to Thornmere in October, when the Embergrove is breathing, when the woods are not the woods, when the air tastes of iron and the dogs won't stop barking and the children sleep with the lights on? Why have you come back now, and not in summer, when the sun is high and the forest is only a forest, and a young woman from away might come to walk the lanes and visit her grandmother's grave and leave again without ever once stepping off the path?"
She wrapped her hands around the cup. The ceramic was warm, almost too warm, and the heat traveled up through her palms and into the bones of her wrists.
"Because I was called," she said.
He did not move. The fire popped. The clock ticked. Outside, very faintly, she could hear the dog again, Hettie, barking at something in the dark that was not yet visible from the windows.
"Called," he said, at last. "Yes. I thought it might be something like that."
The kettle, forgotten on the trivet, began to whistle, a thin, high sound that climbed and climbed and would not stop until someone lifted it from the heat. Neither of them moved.
Somewhere out in the dark, past the forge, past the lychgate, past the cottage with the green door, the woods breathed, and the breath came down off the ridge and pressed against the windows of the Crooked Antler Inn, and the candles in the common room leaned, all at once, toward the east.
And on the windowsill, where no one had placed it, a single grey-white moth sat, perfectly still, its wings folded, its antennae angled toward the two people at the table as if it had been listening for a very long time and had only just now found something worth hearing.
The moth did not move. It sat on the pine sill between a pot of dried rosemary and a clay dish of pins Bramwell kept for mending torn hems, and it watched the room with the patience of something that had nowhere else to be.
Evangeline saw it the way one sees a loose thread on a familiar coat, the eye catching and the hand already rising before the mind has agreed. She stopped herself. She set her cup down on the scarred oak of the table, very carefully, the way her grandmother had taught her to set down anything that might carry weight.
"The window," she said. Her voice came out lower than she meant it to. "Bramwell. There is a moth on the window."
He turned. He saw it. He went still in a way that had nothing to do with his years, the stiffness settling into his shoulders and his jaw and the hand that had been reaching for the kettle, which he now drew back to his lap as if the iron handle had suddenly grown cold.
"Aye," he said. "There is."
The whistle of the kettle climbed higher. Neither of them moved. The moth's wings were the pale grey of wood ash, the pale grey of a November morning before the sun has decided to commit, and across each forewing ran a single darker line like the seam of a closed eyelid. Its body was thick, furred, far too heavy for a moth of its size. When it breathed, and she could see that it was breathing, the thorax expanded by a fraction, a slow and deliberate inflation that did not match the rhythm of the fire or the clock or her own hammering pulse.
"Do not touch it," Bramwell said. His voice had changed. The warmth had gone out of it like heat from a dropped coal, and what remained was the older thing beneath, the thing that remembered a time before the inn and the kettles and the gossip, when he had been a boy in this village and the woods at the ridge had been something his grandmother would not let him name after dark. "Do not let it see you afraid."
"It is a moth."
"Aye," he said. "It is."
He reached, finally, for the kettle. He lifted it from the trivet with the exaggerated care of a man who wants his hands to be doing something, anything, and he set it down on the stone flags beside the hearth. The whistle died. In its place, the silence seemed to lean closer.
"There is a name for them," he said, quieter now, his back to her as he poured the water into the teapot that already held the leaves. "The old folk here, the ones who lived through the long winters before the road came through and the post office opened and the world got larger, they had a name. They did not like to say it above a whisper. They said it the way you'd say the name of a debt you could not pay."
"What was the name?"
"It does not matter. What matters is that they were not moths." He turned back to her, and his eyes were the colour of river stone, and his mouth was a thin, hard line. "Not in the way you mean. They were the Embergrove's little errand boys, if you take my meaning. The ones it sent ahead to test a door."
"Test it for what?"
"For whether the door would open."
Evangeline looked at the moth. The moth looked at Evangeline. The line of its folded wings, that darker seam, seemed to her suddenly to be less like a closed eye and more like the edge of a page in a book that has been pressed shut for a very long time and is waiting to be opened by the right hand, or perhaps by any hand at all.
She thought of the letter that had arrived at the apprentice house in the city three weeks ago, the letter with no return address, the letter that had been written in a hand she had not seen since she was a child but had known at once the way one knows the sound of one's own breathing. Come home, my girl. The ridge is calling. The ridge is always calling, but this time I think it means it. The postmark had been Briarhollow. The ink had been brown.
The letter had not been signed. It had not needed to be. Her grandmother had been dead for seven years.
She had packed her satchel the same night. She had walked out of the apprentice house without a word to the master cartographer, who would be furious when he discovered the half-finished survey of the northern reaches left abandoned on the desk beside the cold lamp. She had taken the morning coach and then the evening coach and then the rattling little branch line that ran through the high valleys where the trees grew close to the windows and the conductor would not meet her eyes.
Now she was here, in the village where her mother had grown up, in the inn that her grandmother had disliked and her mother had avoided, sitting across from a man who had known her as a child and was looking at her now as if he were trying to decide whether she had come back too late.
The moth lifted one leg, very slowly, and set it down again in a different place, and the tiny sound of its foot against the wood was the loudest thing in the room.
"It came in when you came in," Bramwell said. "Or near enough. I had the windows latched since Michaelmas. There is not a gap wider than a fingernail."
"Then it came through the wall."
"Aye," he said. "Or it came through the woods."
Outside, the dog had stopped barking. In the silence that followed, there was a softer one, a kind of listening silence, the silence of a village that had decided, all at once, to be quieter than it had been a moment ago. The candles on the table, the three of them in their iron holder, leaned again toward the window, and their flames stretched long and thin as fingers pointing at something.
"Tell me about my grandmother," Evangeline said. "Tell me about the last weeks before she died. No one in my family will speak of it, and the village folk, when I was a girl, would only look at the floor."
Bramwell did not answer at once. He poured the tea. He set a cup before her. He poured one for himself and did not drink from it but held it in both hands as if he were trying to take warmth from it, or perhaps to keep his hands from doing anything else.
"Your grandmother," he said, "was the most stubborn woman I ever had the pleasure of being frightened of."
"Tell me properly."
He looked at her, and she saw that he was measuring something. He was weighing her against something in his memory, some test she did not know the shape of, and she felt the weight of his gaze like a hand on her shoulder.
"She closed the cottage in October," he said. "That was the last time anyone saw her go in. After that, she would not let anyone over the threshold. Not me. Not the doctor from the next valley, who drove over twice a week and sat in his trap for an hour before giving up. Not the minister, who had the brass to bring his wife and a plate of seedcake, and she sent them away with a look that would have soured milk in the pan." He took a sip of his tea, and she watched his throat work as he swallowed. "She had been out that morning, early, before anyone else was about. Meg Pritchard, who keeps the dairy, saw her on the lane below the ridge, walking fast, with her coat buttoned wrong and her hair not done. Meg said she looked like a woman who had been woken in the night and had not had time to think about what she was putting on."
"Walking where?"
"Up," Bramwell said. "Toward the Embergrove."
He said the name the way one says the name of a thing one does not wish to draw the attention of. The moth on the window did not move, but the seam along its wings seemed to her, in the candle's leaning light, to darken by a shade.
"Meg called after her. Your grandmother did not turn. Meg said she had the look of someone who was answering a summons she had been ignoring for longer than she should have."
The fire popped. A knot of resin burst in the pine log and sent a little fountain of sparks into the hearth, and one of them escaped and lay on the flags, glowing, until Bramwell set his heel on it without looking. The smell of singed wool rose, sharp and acrid, and was gone.
"After that," he said, "she would not come out. The windows of the cottage were shut, the chimney did not smoke, the pump handle was left up so that no one could draw water without waking her, although I do not think anyone tried. The postman left letters. They were not taken in. The baker's boy left the Tuesday loaf on the step. It sat there until the foxes had it."
"How long?"
"Three weeks, near enough. And then, on a morning in November, I went up myself, because no one else would and because I had known her since before I had any sense, and I thought, if anyone had a right to be turned away, it might as well be me, since I had a talent for it." He paused. He took another sip. "The door was on the latch. Not latched. On the latch. The way you leave a door for someone you are expecting."
He set his cup down.
"She was in the chair by the hearth, the one with the cushion that her sister had embroidered, the one with the roses and the thistles. She had been dead, by my reckoning, no more than a day. The fire was out. The kettle was on. There was a cup set on the table, with a tea leaf still unfurled at the bottom, and there was a second cup, dry and clean, set across from it, as if she had been waiting for someone who had not come."
"Mother."
"Aye," he said. "Or whoever it was she had been expecting. The cup was set for a right-handed person. Your mother was left-handed."
The candles leaned again, and the moth on the window lifted its wings, just a fraction, just enough that she could see the soft fur of its underside, the pale grey fading to a yellowed white at the edges, like the pages of a book that has been left in the sun. Then it folded them again, and the seam was once more a closed line, and the room settled back into its listening silence.
"She left you the cottage," Bramwell said. "I expect you know that."
"Yes."
"There is more she left you. I do not know what it is. I do not think I want to. But I know that the morning she was found, the door to the attic was open, and the attic had not been open in my lifetime, and the lock had been rusted shut, and there was a key on the floor in the passage, a small brass key, black with age, that I have not seen since."
The moth lifted its wings again, and this time it held them open for the space of a breath, and in the hollow of its body, where the thorax met the abdomen, she thought she saw, for just a moment, a flicker of something darker than grey, a colour that had no name she knew in any of the four languages she had been taught in the apprentice house.
Then it folded them, and the moment was gone, and the room was only a room again, and the dog had begun to bark once more out in the dark, and the candles had straightened in their holder as if they had been holding their breath and had only just now remembered to let it go.
Evangeline looked at the cup in her own hands. The tea was still warm. The steam curled up past her chin and into the cold air, and she watched it twist and dissolve and felt, somewhere beneath her ribs, in the place where the apprentice masters had told her that courage lived, a small and steady pressure, as of a hand laid gently against a door from the other side.
She thought of the attic. She thought of the key. She thought of the cup set on the table for a right-handed ghost.
"Tell me how to get there," she said. "To the cottage. Before dawn."
The moth walked two steps up the handle of the cup, then two steps down. Its feet were so light they barely dimpled the skin of her knuckles, and yet she felt each one like a small cold needle, like the kiss of frost on a windowpane in the hour before sunrise. It stopped with its head tilted towards her, and the dark of its eye was larger than any moth's eye had a right to be, and at its centre was a pinpoint of grey that was not grey but was the colour of old ash, and she thought that if she stared long enough she would fall into it the way one falls into a well, with a long slow falling that never ends.
"Lisel," it said again, and this time the name was a question, and this time the name was an answer, and this time the name was a summons.
Then it lifted from her hand. It did not fly the way moths fly, in the erratic and drunken flutter of the thing that has no spine. It drifted, on a current that was not the cold air from the hallway, on a draught that had no source in the room. It went past the candles, and the candle flames bent towards it as if it were a sun, and then they straightened again. It went past the window, and the glass went dimmer for a moment, and then it cleared. It crossed the room towards the door that stood open onto the passage and the passage that led to the garden and the garden that gave onto the line of beeches and the line of beeches that was the edge of the wood and the wood that was the Embergrove.
Evangeline stood. She did not remember deciding to stand. The chair scraped against the boards behind her and the sound was enormous in the silence. The dog barked twice, a low and worried sound, and then stopped, as if something in the passage had quieted it without touching it.
She took the lantern down from its peg beside the door. The brass was cold against her palm. She struck the match on the side of the box, and the sulphur smell of it cut through the dust and the tea and the faint green damp of the walls, and the flame leapt up, and she touched it to the wick, and the wick took, and the room was suddenly larger and smaller at the same time, full of shadows that moved when she moved and held still when she held still.
She went into the passage. The floorboards creaked under her boots, and the sound of them was a familiar sound, the sound of her own home, the sound of every night she had walked this passage since she was a child. But tonight the passage was longer than it had been last night, or she was smaller, or both, and the door at the far end, the door that gave onto the garden, was further away than it had any right to be, as if the house had decided to keep her for a moment longer, as if the house was not yet ready to let her go.
She pushed the door open. The cold came in like a wall. She stepped out into the garden, and the gravel of the path crunched under her boots, and the crunch was the only loud thing in all the world. The sky was still that deep blue that was almost black, and the stars were still out, and there was still no hint of dawn in the east, only the slow turning of the night towards the day that would come in its own time.
She lifted the lantern. The moth was there, hovering above the first of the beeches, its wings a pale blur against the dark. It did not look back at her, but it waited, and she could feel the waiting the way one feels a hand laid on one's shoulder from behind, with a certainty that did not need to turn around to confirm.
She went down the path. The lavender brushed her ankles and the smell of it rose up, sharp and clean, and somewhere in the hedge a bird shifted in its sleep and made a small disgruntled sound. The dog had not followed her. She was glad of that, and then she was not glad, and then she was something in between that did not have a name in any of the four languages she had been taught.
At the edge of the beeches she stopped. The trees rose up before her like the pillars of a cathedral that had been abandoned and had forgotten its god. The moth went between the first two trunks and was lost to sight for a moment, and then she saw it again, further in, a small pale star moving in the dark.
"Wait," she said, and her voice was thin and did not carry, and she said it again, louder, "Wait. I have not done this before. I have not walked into the Embergrove at night. I do not know what I will find."
The moth did not wait. It went on, and the dark took it again, and she lifted the lantern higher and stepped between the beeches after it.
The woods were not silent. She had expected silence, the silence of a place that was held between one thing and another, but the woods were full of small sounds. Water, somewhere, a thin trickle over stones. The creak of a branch under the weight of nothing she could see. The rustle of leaves that were not moving in any wind she could feel. And once, a sound like a child sighing in its sleep, far off, from somewhere she could not have pointed to.
The path, if it was a path, was soft under her boots, soft with a mulch of old leaves and a moss that gave beneath her weight. The lantern light did not reach far. It made a small bright circle at her feet and a larger dim circle at her shoulders, and beyond that there was only the dark and the shapes of the dark and the occasional gleam of an eye that was not her own.
The moth stopped too. It settled on a low branch of a holly tree, and she came up to it and held the lantern up so that she could see it clearly, and in the light of the lantern its wings were the colour of old paper, and its body was the colour of old ash, and its eyes were two small drops of the dark that had no name.
"The cottage is close," it said, and its voice was the sound of dry leaves turning over, of a page being turned in a book that had not been opened in a hundred years. "The one you seek is close. But the path from here is not a path that is walked alone. You will need to walk it with someone who has walked it before. You will need to walk it with me."
"I am walking it with you," she said.
"You are following me," it said. "That is not the same. To follow is to come behind. To walk with is to come beside. You will need to come beside me, Evangeline Moss, if you want to see what is in the cottage. You will need to come beside me, and you will need to do what I ask, and you will need to not ask why until the asking is over."
"What do you ask?"
It lifted its wings. The pale of them caught the lantern light and threw it back at her, and for a moment she thought she saw writing on them, the fine thin writing of an old hand, in an ink that was not ink but was the colour of the dark, and the writing was in a script she did not know and yet somehow understood, and what it said was a name that was her own name and was not her own name, was a name that had been spoken in this wood a long time ago and had been waiting to be spoken again.
"You will need to open the door," it said. "You will need to walk in before me. You will need to say the name that is written on the door, and you will need to say it out loud, so that the cottage knows who has come. And you will need to not flinch when you see what is inside, because the one who is inside is waiting for someone who will not flinch."
"Who is inside?"
It folded them, and the writing was gone, and the moth was only a moth again, perched on the holly branch, watching her with its too-large eyes.
"The one who was taken from the attic," it said. "The one whose name was Lisel, and whose name is Lisel still, in the dark that has no name. The one who will not let you rest until you have seen her, or until she has seen you. The one who is the grandmother, and the one who is not the grandmother, and the one who is both at once, in the way that the wood is both a wood and a thing that is not a wood, in the way that the moth is both a moth and a thing that is not a moth."
The words hung in the air. The lantern flame guttered once, and then steadied. Somewhere in the wood a bird sang one note and then stopped, as if it had been startled into song and then startled out of it again.
"The cottage," Evangeline said. "Where is it? I have walked these woods a hundred times. I have never seen a cottage."
"You have never walked them at this hour," it said. "You have never walked them with me. The cottage is not far. It is at the place where the holly gives way to the rowan, and the rowan gives way to the birch, and the birch gives way to a clearing that is not in any map that has been drawn of this wood. It has been there since before the house was built. It has been there since before the village had a name. It was there when your great-great-grandmother was a girl, and it was there when her mother was a girl, and it will be there when the last of your line has gone to the dark and has been folded into the dark and has become the dark itself."
It lifted from the branch. It did not fly. It drifted, on that same current that had no source, and the current took it forward, deeper into the wood, and Evangeline lifted the lantern and went after it.
The holly thinned. The rowan rose up in its place, the pale of their trunks ghostly in the lantern light, and the bunches of red berries hung heavy in the still air. The path, if it was a path, curved around a stand of birches whose bark was the colour of old paper, and beyond the birches was the clearing, and in the clearing was the cottage.
It was small. It was made of stone that was the colour of the dark, and the roof was thatched with a thatch that was not straw but was something else, something that moved in a wind that was not blowing, and the windows were dark, and the door was closed, and over the door was a lintel of oak that was older than any oak she had ever seen, and on the lintel was a name, carved in the same script that she had seen on the moth's wings, in letters that were not letters but were the shapes of leaves that had fallen a long time ago and had been pressed into the wood by a hand that was not a hand.
The moth settled on the latch of the door. The latch was iron, and the iron was rusted, and the rust was the colour of old blood, and the moth sat on it and waited.
"Read it," it said. "Read it out loud, so the cottage knows who has come."
She held the lantern up. The letters resolved themselves into a name that was her own name, and was not her own name, was a name that had been hers before she was born, and would be hers after she was gone. The name was Lisel. The name was Evangeline. The name was both, and the name was neither, and the name was the small and steady pressure beneath her ribs, and the name was the hand laid against the door from the other side.
"Lisel," she said. "Lisel Moss."