The moth's wings caught the last copper light of evening as it slipped through the gap between the standing stones at the edge of the Embergrove. Evangeline Moss stood at the threshold, one hand pressed flat against the rough granite of the eastern marker, and felt the cold of it soak through her palm and into the bones of her wrist. The iron taste was already there, faint but unmistakable, coating the back of her tongue as though she had been sucking on a coin. She had grown up on stories told by her grandmother about this border, the place where the mapped country ended and the older country began, where the cartographer's ink turned to something else. Lisel Moss had drawn that line in three of her surviving sketchbooks, always with a small red annotation in the margin: Here be no names. Evangeline had copied those words a hundred times as an apprentice without understanding them. She understood them better now.
The moth paused on a low branch, wings tilting, and she saw for the first time that the bark beneath it was not bark at all but a pattern of tightly furled leaves pressed together so closely they resembled scales. She stepped forward. Her boot found soil that gave a fraction too much, the loam of centuries compacted beneath her weight, and somewhere below that compression something shifted, settled, adjusted to her presence. She did not look down. The moth lifted again, a small pale lantern moving between the trunks, and she followed.
Within twenty paces the straight rows of the outer forest had given way to something the surveys of her apprenticeship had never described. The trees of the Embergrove grew in spirals. Each trunk curved in a slow helix around an absent center, and the trees behind them curved in turn, so that the wood itself was a coil of wood, a green nautilus shell hundreds of yards across. The canopy above was so dense that the evening light came only in thin coins through the interstices of leaf and branch, and those coins moved as the branches moved, never quite settling on any patch of ground. Evangeline's shadow was everywhere and nowhere. The air tasted stronger now, a true iron, the taste of a blade held between the teeth, and beneath it something older, something like cold tea left to steep in a copper pot. She swallowed and the swallow felt scraped.
She had promised herself she would be cautious. The pact she had taken in the ruined chapel three nights ago had not specified its own geography. She knew only what the old woman who had pressed the wafer into her hand had whispered as the candle guttered: Follow the pale moth when the last light is on the standing stones. Do not call its name. Do not let it see you weep. Evangeline had not wept. She had been too angry for weeping, too raw with the discovery that her grandmother had died leaving debts instead of inheritances, and that the last descendant of Lisel Moss had been required, by some older law than any she had studied, to walk into a wood and find out what was owed. Her grandmother's sketchbook was tucked inside her coat, its leather warm against her ribs, the pages inside heavy with maps drawn in an ink that faded at the edges. One map in particular she had folded small and kept separate: a spiral, annotated in a hand she did not recognize, marked only with the single word here.
The moth banked left around a trunk whose helix wound so tightly that the bark cracked along its outer curve, exposing pale wood that smelled faintly of anise. Evangeline followed, ducking beneath a low branch that had grown across the path in a perfect arch. As she passed beneath it, the branch dipped toward her, a deliberate motion, the patient curiosity of something that had all the time in the world to watch. She held her breath. The branch lifted again. She moved on, and her pulse moved with her, a steady drum against the collar she had buttoned tight against the cold.
She had walked perhaps a quarter mile when the sound began. It was not a sound she could name, though it pressed at the edges of half a dozen names she knew. It came from below and within the trees at once, a low vibration that rose through the soles of her boots and into the bones of her ankles, then up through her shins and into her knees. The trees themselves were producing it. The wood was humming. Not loudly, not the way a hive hums or a kettle sings, but in the way a long-held note hums in the throat of a singer who has learned to keep the note steady without effort. It was the hum of something that had been sounding for a very long time and had no intention of stopping. She felt the pitch in her molars. She felt the pitch in the soft flesh behind her ears. She stood very still and let the hum move through her and tried to listen for its shape.
It had a shape.
The hum was not uniform. It rose and fell in slow waves that passed through the grove from one side to the other, and each wave arrived at her position at a slightly different interval. As the intervals changed, so did the way the trees leaned. The lean was small, perhaps half an inch in a trunk as thick as a man, but it was there, a slow genuflection toward a center she still had not found. The whole grove was listening to something, and the listening bent the wood toward what it heard.
She made a note of it in the pocket ledger she kept separate from her grandmother's sketchbook, writing by touch now because looking down meant losing the moth. Trees lean to center. Hum is keyed to something central. Time intervals vary. The pencil felt warm in her hand. She did not think about why.
The moth had risen higher, and it moved among the higher branches where the canopy was thickest, a small pale scrap of wing against dark leaves. From time to time it paused on a leaf that curled around it briefly, as though tasting it, before moving on. Each time it paused, Evangeline paused too. Each time it moved, she moved. She had the strange and growing sense that the pauses were not for the moth's rest but for her, that it was waiting for her in the patient way the branch had waited, and that if she failed to stop when it stopped, something about the wood would change in a way she would not enjoy. So she walked carefully, stepping where it stepped, breathing when it breathed. The iron taste had grown so strong now that her tongue felt furred. She licked her lips and found the taste of salt there too, though she had not been weeping.
The path, if it was a path, curved more tightly as she went deeper. She could feel the spiral tightening around her, the radius of the wood shrinking as she advanced toward whatever the trees leaned toward. The light was different here. The coins of evening had given way to a softer, more even glow, as though the air itself had become faintly luminous, a pale green-gold the color of birch sap held up to a candle. In this light the bark of the trees showed its true color: not the gray-brown of the outer forest but a deep, blood-russet red, the color of old iron, the color of the taste on her tongue. She thought of her grandmother's annotation. Here be no names. The names of trees had always been the first thing a cartographer learned. Names were how the land was held. If there were no names here, then what the trees were could not be held. They were only themselves, and themselves was a thing her apprenticeship had not prepared her to draw.
A sound like a great stone being eased aside came from somewhere ahead, low and grinding, and the moth stopped on a branch and folded its wings. She stopped too, a few paces behind it, and waited. The sound came again, and now she saw what had made it. A section of the wood before her was opening. The spiral parted along a seam she would not have seen if it had been still, a vertical crack that ran from the canopy to the roots, widening by slow degrees as the trees on either side leaned further apart. Through the crack she saw a space that was not wood and not clearing. It was a hall, a vaulted space formed by trees whose trunks had grown together overhead into a roof of woven branches, and the floor of it was bare earth, packed smooth as a dance floor, and at the center of it, on a stone that looked as though it had grown there rather than been placed, stood a figure.
He was tall, taller than any man she had seen, and his head was crowned not with hair but with antlers, a great rack that branched upward and outward in a dozen tines, each tine tipped with a small tuft of moss that moved in a wind she could not feel. His face was the color of the bark too, the deep russet iron of the trees around him, and his eyes were pale and did not blink. He wore no clothing that she could see, only a garment of leaves and small pale moths whose wings were still, a robe that seemed to be a colony rather than a tailoring. He stood very still, his hooves planted on the stone, and he watched her from across the open space with an attention that had weight.
The Antlered Man. Her grandmother's sketchbook had a small drawing of him in the back pages, drawn in the same fading ink, annotated in the same small hand: The Warden. Neither enemy nor ally. A judge of debts. She had studied the drawing for a long time the night before, memorizing the set of the antlers, the slope of the shoulders, the way the leaves of his robe fell to the ground and continued into the leaf-litter of the floor. She had copied the drawing into her ledger, and now she closed her hand over the pocket where the ledger lay, as though to confirm its presence. It was warm. It was warmer than her body should have made it.
The moth lifted from its perch and flew across the open space toward the Warden, and as it approached him one of the moths on his robe lifted its own wings and answered it, and for a moment there were two pale lanterns hovering near his shoulder. Then the small moth from outside settled onto the stone at his feet and folded its wings again, and the robe-moth settled back into its place among the leaves, and the Warden's pale gaze did not move from Evangeline's face.
She understood that she had been brought. The moth had not been guiding her toward the center of the wood because she had asked to be guided. The moth had been conducting her, the way a clerk conducts a debtor into the room where the ledger is opened. She had been expected. The debts her grandmother had left had a name, and the name had led to this place, and the place had sent its pale moth to fetch her. She felt the anger rise in her again, the old anger, the clean anger she had carried since the morning she had knelt by the cot where Lisel Moss had died and found, in the folded paper beneath the pillow, not a blessing but a bill. For services rendered. For services to be rendered. For the wood that is owed a name. She had carried the anger all the way from the cottage to the chapel to the wafer to the wood, and now it sat in her chest like a stone.
She stepped across the threshold of the opened spiral and onto the packed earth of the hall. The hum of the trees followed her in, a sound that pressed against her ears like the pressure of deep water. The Warden did not move. She walked toward him across the open floor, her boots making no sound on the earth, and when she was five paces from the stone she stopped, because she had been taught that five paces was the correct distance for addressing a person of rank, and her apprenticeship had not entirely left her.
The Warden's mouth opened. The voice that came out of it was the sound of a tree being bent slowly to the point of breaking, a sound of fibers complaining, a sound that carried the cold of autumn nights in it and the patience of centuries.
"Lisel Moss was here," he said. "Lisel Moss was here and she was not here. The descendant of Lisel Moss is here. Speak, and be exact, for the wood is listening and the wood does not forget what is said inside it."
Evangeline set her jaw. She had not come to be examined. She had not come to answer questions in a hall of russet trees under the gaze of something that was not a man. She had come because the wafer under her tongue had dissolved and left a taste that was not iron but obligation, and because the debt had a geography, and the geography had led her here.
"Speak," she said, and her voice came out steady and low and a little rough, the voice of a girl who had learned to give reports in a room of men twice her age. "I have not been summoned to be questioned. I have been summoned because my grandmother's name is on something that belongs to this place. I would like to see the ledger. I would like to see the entries in my grandmother's hand. I would like to know what she bought and what she failed to pay for. Then I will decide what is owed."
The Warden's pale gaze did not change. The moths on his robe were still. The hum of the trees shifted a fraction of a tone, a sound like a held breath being drawn in deeper.
"Lisel Moss," he said, and the name came out of him the way a name comes out of a trunk that has held the name for a long time, "was a cartographer of the border. She drew the line between what is named and what is not. She drew it true for forty years. In the forty-first year she drew it false, and the wood has been owed a name ever since."
He lifted one hand, and the hand was not a hand at all but a branch that had grown in the shape of a hand, bark and all, and in the cup of the branch lay a leaf, and on the leaf was writing, and the writing was in her grandmother's hand.
The branch-hand lowered itself toward her. The leaf in its palm turned once, as though a wind from nowhere had touched it, and the ink caught the greenish light that filtered down through the canopy and showed her what her grandmother had written.
It was not a sentence. It was a list.
Margin of Mossfen. Stile at Thorn Latch. Ford by the Whispering Stones. Grove at Three Brothers. The Elm That Stood Alone. The Woman in the Reed.
Maren Renn knew three of those names. She had walked past the Whispering Stones on market days as a girl; her father had once taken her to see the Woman in the Reed, a cairn by a stream that the eldest villagers still left bread for. The Elm That Stood Alone had stood in the south field of the Renn farmstead for as long as anyone could remember, until it had not stood there anymore. Her father had told her it had fallen in a winter storm. She had been nine. She had cried about it for a week and had drawn a picture of it in charcoal on a piece of bark and kept the drawing in a drawer in the map-room with the other treasures of her childhood.
She had not thought about that drawing in a long time.
"These are the places my grandmother walked," Maren said. "These are the places she mapped. Why is this a debt?"
The Warden did not answer. He lifted the branch a fraction higher. The moths on his robe stirred, and a single one detached and drifted toward her and settled on her wrist, and its feet were very cold, and where they touched her skin the skin went numb in a small precise circle.
"The line she drew false," he said, "is the line you now must redraw. The places she walked were walked as payment. Each step was a stitch in a binding. The binding kept the Embergrove from the border of your grandmother's kitchen. The binding kept the wood from walking into the village while your mother slept in her cradle. The binding has come loose. You have come because the wafer dissolved. You are here because the place that was once owed a name is now owed a name again."
He lowered the branch. The leaf drifted down and settled on the moss at her feet, and the moss around it darkened, and the darkening spread a little way in either direction, as though the ground were drinking something.
"I did not ask for this," Maren said.
"No," he agreed. His voice, when he said it, had the quality of a thing repeated so often that it had worn smooth. "She did not ask for it either. Lisel Moss, when she was younger than you are now, walked into this wood and was given a wafer and told that one day the wafer would dissolve and her daughter would come, or her daughter's daughter, and the debt would be called in. She did not ask for it. She took the wafer. She went home. She raised her daughter. She drew the line true for forty years and the wood was patient. In the forty-first year she drew it false, and the wood is not patient now."
"She made a mistake," Maren said. "My grandmother made one false line. That is a human thing. I am not here to pay for it. I am here to understand what she bought and what she failed to pay for, and I would like to see the ledger."
The pale gaze did not flicker. The hum of the trees did not change. The Warden stood in the bracken the way a stone stands in a river, and the river parts around it without comment.
"There is no ledger," he said.
"There is always a ledger. You just showed me a leaf with her hand on it."
"A leaf is not a ledger. A leaf is a witness. I am the ledger. The wood is the ledger. You are the next entry."
The words landed in her the way a coin lands in a deep well. She heard them strike something far below and felt the strike through the soles of her boots.
"I am not a line on a page," she said. "I am a person. I will not be entered."
"You were entered the moment the wafer dissolved under your tongue. You have been entered since before you were born. The question is not whether you are entered. The question is what is written against your name, and by whose hand, and at what cost."
The Warden moved then. It was the first time he had moved since she had seen him, and the movement was wrong in the way that a movement by a tall thing in a low room is wrong, in the way that a movement in a mirror is wrong, a quarter-beat late and a quarter-beat too long. He stepped forward, and the bracken closed behind him where he had stood as though it had only been waiting for him to leave. He came and stood before her, and he was much taller than she had thought, and his antlers went up into the canopy and the canopy bent a little around them, and where his eyes looked, her skin prickled in return.
"You have her jaw," he said, and the voice was almost gentle, and the gentleness was the worst thing about it. "You have her stubbornness. You do not have her patience. She learned patience from the wood. The wood is not offering to teach you."
"Then what is the wood offering?"
"To let you walk out. To let you take the path back through the bracken. To let you reach the village by nightfall and to let the wood remain where it is, on the far side of the boundary, and to let the boundary hold for one more year, and for the year after that, and for the year after that, until the wood decides that it has had enough of being bounded and walks down into the valley in its own time, and finds the Renn farmstead, and finds the place where a girl once slept in a cradle under a roof that her grandmother drew true."
The wood around them seemed to lean in. She felt it at her back, a pressure like the pressure of a great crowd that is silent and waiting.
"And if I do not walk out," she said, and her voice was steady and low and a little rough, and the roughness was not fear, it was the grit of a girl who had been raised by a cartographer and who had learned that the line you draw is the line you live inside, "if I do not walk out, then what does the wood ask?"
The pale eyes regarded her. The moths were very still.
"The wood," the Warden said, "asks that you walk into it. The wood asks that you go to the places on the leaf and put your name to each one. The wood asks that you learn the line your grandmother drew and that you draw it true again, and that you keep it true for as long as you live, and that when you die the line be passed on in turn. The wood asks that you become what she was. The wood asks that you be the cartographer of the border. The wood asks for forty years."
Forty years. The number sat down inside her and would not get up. Forty years was the age her father had been when he died. Forty years was older than she had ever imagined being.
"My grandmother lived for eighty," she said. "She kept her bargain for forty of them. The wood let her go at the end."
"The wood let her go because she drew the line false. The wood does not forgive the false line. The wood is offering her debt to you instead, at the price she would have paid. Forty years. The wood is patient. The wood is willing to be patient again, if you are willing to walk where she walked."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then you walk out. Then the wood waits. Then the wood walks down into the valley in its own time. Then the village is not your concern, and the farmstead is not your concern, and the line you might have drawn is not your concern. The wood will find its own name for itself, and the name it chooses will not be kind."
He lifted the branch-hand again. The leaf was still on the moss at her feet. He gestured, and the leaf lifted and came and settled on her open palm, and the writing on it was warm, and the warmth was her grandmother's hand, and the warmth was a memory of a kitchen in winter with a kettle on the hob and a woman bending over a map and a small girl watching from a stool.
"The wood will wait one turn of the moon," he said. "At the end of the turn you will give your answer. You may give it here, in the bracken, under the antlers. You may give it at the Elm That Stood Alone, in the south field of the farmstead, where the stump is still in the ground. You may give it at the threshold of the Crooked Antler, where the innkeeper keeps a fire for travellers who come in from the cold. The wood does not choose the place. You do."
He stepped back. The bracken closed around him again as though it had been rehearsed. The hum of the trees shifted a fraction of a tone higher, and the shift was almost a note, and the note was almost a word.
"Go now," he said. "Take the leaf. Walk the path. Speak to no one until you have walked the path. When you reach the village you will know what to ask, and to whom."
The pale eyes closed. The moths lifted from his robe in a slow spiral and went up into the canopy and were gone. The bracken sighed and settled. The Warden was no longer there. Where he had been there was only a clearing, and at the centre of the clearing a young ash tree had thrust itself up out of the moss, and on the ash there was a single leaf, and the leaf was trembling, and the trembling was the only sound in the wood.
Maren Renn stood a long time in the clearing. She did not weep. She did not speak. She looked at the leaf in her palm and she read the list of places again, and the names came up off the leaf and hung in the air in front of her in a faint green script that she could read with her eyes closed.
She put the leaf inside her shirt, against her breastbone. The warmth of it was still her grandmother's hand. She turned and walked back the way she had come, and the bracken parted for her, and the path was easier now than it had been, and she did not know whether the ease was a kindness or a warning.
The path was a long one and she walked it as Lisel Moss had walked it, with her hands at her sides and her eyes on the ground and the leaf pressed warm against her sternum. The bracken rose to her waist on either side and then, as the afternoon aged, to her shoulders, and the light through the canopy went the colour of weak tea. She stepped over roots. She ducked under branches. She did not speak. The wood did not speak either, but it moved around her in small ways, a fern unfurling as she passed, a beetle pausing on a leaf to watch her go by, a spider dropping on its thread and then climbing back up again as though it had changed its mind about where it meant to be.
She came out of the treeline at dusk.
The village of Briarhollow lay below the slope in a shallow bowl of meadows, and the smoke from the chimneys went up into a sky that was already going to stars. She could see the inn from here, the Crooked Antler, its sign creaking on its iron arm in a wind she could not feel at this distance. She could see the smithy. She could see the small dark church at the far end of the green, and the lychgate, and the row of cottages with their lamp-lit windows.
She stopped at the treeline. She looked at the village for a long time.
She had been afraid of this place once. She had been afraid of the way the old women looked at her when she walked down the street, the way the children fell silent when she passed, the way the innkeeper always had a cup of something warm ready for her and a chair by the fire and never seemed to expect her to pay. She had thought it was because she was poor. She had thought it was because her father was the man who had been dead. She had not known that the whole village had been holding its breath for twenty years, waiting to see what kind of woman the last Moss would turn out to be.
She went down the slope. Her boots were muddy. Her trousers were torn at the knee. The thorn in her palm ached when she closed her hand, and when she opened it, the green light pulsed faintly, and the faintness was almost a word, and the word was almost her grandmother's voice, and the voice was almost a warning.
She went through the lychgate. She went past the church. She went up the lane to the inn, and the sign of the Crooked Antler swung above her head and the brass antlers caught the last of the daylight.
She pushed the door open.
The taproom was half full. A merchant and his drover at one table, two women from the dye works at another, a boy asleep by the hearth. The fire was low. The lamps smelled of mutton fat. Innkeeper Bramwell was behind the bar, polishing a glass with a cloth that had seen better days, and he looked up when the door opened and his hands went still on the glass and his face did a thing she had never seen a face do, a thing that was half relief and half terror, and the terror was for her and not of her, and she understood then that he had known, that he had always known, that he had been waiting for this door to open for twenty years and dreading it.
"Maren," he said. His voice was not the voice he used for customers. It was the voice of a man speaking to someone who had come back from somewhere he could not follow. "Maren Renn. Sit you down. There's a fire. There's a cup. There's bread."
She sat. The fire was warm. The cup was warm. The bread was warm. She held the cup in both hands and did not drink and did not speak and the innkeeper stood on the other side of the bar and did not press her and the merchant and the drover and the two women from the dye works finished their drinks and paid and left, and the boy by the hearth slept on, and the lamps burned down and were trimmed, and outside the sign of the Crooked Antler creaked in a wind that had finally found its way down into the bowl.
The innkeeper came round the bar and sat at her table. He put a cup down for himself. He did not drink from it either.
"Child," he said. "What did the wood give you?"
She set the cup down. She looked at him. The thorn in her palm ached. She thought of lying. She thought of saying it had been nothing, that she had got lost, that she had come back the long way round. The thought of the lie formed in her throat like a stone.
She opened her hand. The green light came up through the skin and threw a faint pool of colour across the table between them, and in the pool of the colour the leaf on her breastbone answered, and the two of them together were a small green sun in the dim of the taproom, and the innkeeper looked at it the way a man looks at a thing he has been warned of all his life and hoped would never come.
He did not flinch. He set his cup down.
"Drink your broth," he said. "It will do you good. And then I will tell you what I know, which is not enough, and what I do not know, which is most of it, and you will tell me what you have promised, because I think you have promised something, child, and I think the wood has taken something in exchange, and I think you know what both of those things are, and I think you are going to have to live with them for a long time."
She drank the broth. It was hot and it was salted and it tasted of thyme and of the slow dripping of bones into a pot, and the warmth of it went down into her and met the warmth of the leaf and the two warmths were not the same and did not fight each other and she was, for the first time since she had stepped into the wood, in a room with another living soul who knew her name and what her name meant.
The innkeeper told her what he knew.
He told her that Lisel Moss had come to the inn on the night Tobias Renn had gone into the wood and not come back, and that she had come in through that same door and sat at that same table and held a cup in both hands the way her granddaughter was holding one now, and that she had asked for a room for the night and a key to the yard and a promise that no one would come to her door until morning, and that the innkeeper had given her all three and had sat up himself in the chair by the stair until the small hours, and had heard nothing, not a footfall, not a sob, not a word.
He told her that in the morning Lisel Moss had come down the stairs with a face like a woman who had done a thing she could not undo, and that she had sat at that same table and eaten a piece of his bread and drunk a cup of his small beer and then she had gone out the door and down the lane and into the wood, and had not been seen in the village again for seven years, and when she had come back she had brought with her a girl-child of three with hair the colour of bracken and eyes the colour of the wood in winter, and the child had been the image of her father, and the village had known, and no one had said a word.
He told her that Lisel Moss had lived in the cottage at the edge of the village for the rest of her life, and that she had taught the child her letters and her numbers and the names of the trees and the way to read a map and the way to make a map, and that she had never once spoken of the wood and never once gone back into it, and that the child had grown up and had been called Maren Renn and had been the quietest girl in the village and the best with a pen, and that the innkeeper had watched her grow and had said nothing, because Lisel Moss had asked him, with her last breath, to say nothing.
"What did she ask you for, child," he said. "At the end. What did she ask you to carry into the wood?"
"She asked me to carry the list of places," Maren said. Her voice was steady. Her hand was steady. The green light in her palm was steady. "And she asked me to speak to the Alder King. And she asked me to come back."
"And will you?"
"I don't know," she said. "I think the wood will decide. I think the wood has been deciding for a long time. I think my grandmother made a pact with it before I was born and the pact had a price and I am the price and the price is a list of places I have never seen and a man who is not a man and a path that opens when I am on it and closes when I am not."
The innkeeper looked at her for a long time. Then he reached across the table and put his hand over hers, the one with the thorn in it, and the green light pulsed once, gently, under his palm, and did not burn him.
"You will sleep in the room above the bar," he said. "It is the room your grandmother slept in. The bed is made. The ewer is full. There is a lock on the door and I have the key and I will sit in the chair by the stair and I will not sleep, and in the morning I will make you a breakfast and I will send for the constable and I will send for the clerk of the parish and I will send for the woman who keeps the records at the hall, and you will sit at this table and you will tell them what you have promised and you will let them write it down, because the wood does not trust paper, child, but the village does, and the village will need to know that you have come back, and that you are not alone."
She looked at him. The green light pulsed again.
"Why?" she said. "Why would you do this for me? You don't know me. You only knew my grandmother."
"I knew your grandmother," he said. "I knew your father. I knew your mother when she came to the village with her hands full of bracken and a face like a woman who had walked a long way and was glad to stop. I have known the Moss women of this village for three generations, and I have buried two of them, and I will not bury the third, not if I can help it, not if a fire and a cup and a chair by the hearth will keep her above ground for one more winter."
She did not say thank you. She was not sure she had the word. She stood up and he stood up and she picked up her cup and drank the last of the broth and set the cup down and went to the stair. The stair was narrow and the treads were worn in the centre and her boots left mud on the wood and she did not stop to wipe them. The innkeeper watched her go. He did not follow.
She went into the room. It was small and low and smelled of lavender and of old wool. The bed was made with a quilt of small blue squares. The ewer was full. There was a window that looked out over the green and over the church and over the dark mass of the wood on the far side of the valley. She stood at the window for a long time.
She took the leaf out from inside her shirt. She laid it on the sill. The green light in her palm answered it, and the two of them together made a small constellation in the glass of the window, and in the constellation she could see, if she looked very hard, the faintest outline of a path that began at the sill and went out over the green and went up the far slope and went into the wood and was lost.
She did not sleep that night. She sat on the bed with her boots off and her feet on the cold floor and her hand in her lap and the leaf on the sill and the green light pulsing between them, and she listened to the innkeeper settle in his chair below and to the creak of the sign outside and to the small sounds of the village going to bed around her, and she thought of her grandmother at this same window twenty years ago, and of her mother at this same window thirty years before that, and of all the Moss women who had stood at this window and looked out over the wood and wondered what the wood wanted.