Larkspur Meadow woke early on market day, and it woke loudly.

Linn could hear it from her bed before the light had properly come. It began as a murmur somewhere beyond the hill, the creak of carts and the clank of poles, and swelled by degrees into a great cheerful racket of hammering, shouting, haggling and hens. By the time she had dressed and tied back her hair, the whole green sweep of the meadow below the inn had blossomed into canvas: striped awnings, red and yellow and blue, and trestles heaped with cabbages, and a line of painted wagons drawn up along the hedge like a row of fat sleepy cats. Smoke rose from a dozen cookfires. Somebody had a fiddle already, and was not yet very good at it.

Umber had settled at the meadow's eastern edge, with his great shoulder against a bank of gorse and his legs folded under him, in the way he liked best. He was in a fine mood. She could tell by the slow, contented rumble that ran through the floorboards, and by the way the house swayed a little with every breath, like a hammock in a lazy wind. He loved Larkspur. He loved the apples and the noise, and the children who came to stand beneath him with their heads tipped back, and the old women who gave him carrots when they thought no one was looking.

She leaned out of her window and breathed in the morning, and for a moment she was simply happy.

"The Ribbon," said Fenn, at breakfast, with the gravity of a general unfurling a map, "has been placed."

"The what?" said Brammer, through a mouthful of porridge.

"The Ribbon. I measured it myself. Mister Pettibone supervised." He drew a small, grubby square of paper from his pocket and unfolded it on the table, and Linn saw that it was a careful, wobbling diagram of the meadow, with a large dotted curve drawn across it in red ink. "It's the edge of the bell's hearing. I walked out with Mister Ashdell yesterday evening, and we went as far as he could stand, and I tied a red rag to a stake. Then I did it again on the other side, in case it's lopsided. It isn't. It's a very good circle."

"How far is it?" asked Linn.

"Three hundred and forty paces. Mine, not his. His are longer, so it's about three hundred and ten of his." Fenn beamed. "I counted both."

At the far end of the table, Corvin lowered his cup and regarded the diagram with the expression of a man who has just discovered that his prison has been surveyed, mapped and named.

"You've put a title on it," he said.

"It's the Ribbon of Doom."

"I see."

"I can change it. I thought it was descriptive."

"It's very descriptive," said Corvin gravely, and picked his tea back up. But Linn saw the corner of his mouth, and knew that he was not displeased.

It was Mister Pettibone, naturally, who ruled on the matter of the market.

"The guest," he declared, from the top of the sugar tin, "will not be left unattended within sight of the Ribbon. It is not that I doubt his good faith. It is that the bell is a stubborn instrument, and a man who is distracted by a pie might walk straight into it without noticing. I will not have a fall on my conscience. He will be accompanied."

"By whom?" said Linn, with a sinking feeling.

"By the Keeper. She is going to the market in any case. She has the basket."

"I can go on my own," said Corvin. "I'm not likely to..."

"There is a goat," said Pettibone, with finality, "at the cheese stall."

There was a silence in which no one looked at anyone.

"It's a very large goat," said Oda, serenely, from her chair.

They went down the hill at nine, with a basket between them.

It was Corvin who carried it, in the end. She had meant to take it herself, as she always did, but he had put out his hand on the porch steps, with his eyes on the meadow and his face perfectly blank, and said, "I'm not allowed anywhere else, so I may as well be useful," and she had found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she had given it to him without argument. He swung it onto his good arm like a thing he had done all his life. His other hand was in his pocket. The satchel, as ever, hung across his chest.

The market took them in at once.

It was a different world, down in the meadow, a world of noise and color and bodies. The crowd closed round them like water. Somebody shouted the price of turnips. A small boy with a hoop shot between their legs. A woman with a tray of ribbons stepped back without looking and trod on Linn's foot, and Linn, flinching, found herself pressed into Corvin's side. His arm came out to steady her. He drew it back instantly, as if he had touched a stove.

"Sorry," he said.

"It's fine."

"It's very crowded."

"It's market day."

"Yes," said Corvin. "I'd gathered."

They walked on, a little closer than before.

It could not be avoided. The path between the stalls was narrow, and the red Ribbon hung only a short way beyond the herb-sellers, where it fluttered above a stake at the end of the lane. When the press grew thick he had to move in toward the center to avoid it, and so she found herself walking with her shoulder a hand's breadth from his arm, and her skirt brushing his coat, and the basket swinging between them on its handle like a pendulum counting out a very slow, very awkward time. She bought thyme. She bought a string of onions, and a bag of dried peas, and three pounds of butter from a woman with forearms like hams. She did not look up at him. She was aware of him all the same, a long dark shape at her side, saying very little, and seeing everything.

It was the woman at the vegetable stall who said it.

She was a round, bright-faced person with a kerchief on her head and a pair of scales in her hand, and she weighed Linn's carrots with the unhurried rhythm of long practice, nodding at Corvin as he stood waiting with the basket. "Your man's got the right idea," she said comfortably. "Mine never carries a thing. You'd think the basket was made of lead. Where d'you find him, love?"

Linn froze with a coin in her fingers.

"He's not..." she said.

"We're not..." said Corvin, at the very same moment.

"He's a guest," said Linn.

"I'm a guest," said Corvin.

"Only a guest. He's staying with us."

"For a while. Temporarily."

"Purely as a matter of the law."

"There is a legal aspect."

The woman looked from one of them to the other. Her eyebrows had risen slowly toward her kerchief. She set down the scales.

"Well," she said, "I only said he carried it nicely."

Linn had gone scarlet to the roots of her hair. She put the coin on the counter with a click, took her carrots, said, "Thank you, good morning," in a voice that did not sound like her own, and was out of the stall and four paces down the lane before she realized that Corvin was still standing there, with the basket, looking after her, with exactly the same expression on his face.

He caught up. They walked on for some distance in a silence so rigid that a passing child glanced up at them in alarm.

"That was fast," said Corvin, at last.

"What was?"

"The denial."

"I don't know what you mean."

"You said it before she'd finished the sentence."

"So did you."

"I know," said Corvin. "I was there."

She made a small noise through her nose that was not quite a laugh and turned her face away, and found, with a lurch, that she was grinning at a stall of tin whistles. She pressed her lips together. He cleared his throat. They walked on.

The Wickershams had a stall near the middle of the meadow, under a blue awning, and Posy saw them from forty yards off. She came at a run, through the crowd, with her plait flying and her arms thrown wide, and Linn braced herself to be hugged. But the child went past her as if she were a lamp-post and flung both arms round Corvin's leg, and held on.

"You came," said Posy, into his knee.

"I live here," said Corvin, faintly. "I mean. I'm nearby."

"I told Da you'd come. He said you wouldn't."

"I'm told I'm not allowed to be anywhere else."

"Good," said Posy, with satisfaction, and let go, and turned to Linn with her small chin up. "Did you keep the bird?"

"It's on the best shelf," said Linn. "In the front. Where the sun comes in."

"Have you blown it?"

"Not yet."

"You should. You'll know when." She nodded, apparently regarding the matter as closed, and trotted back to her mother, who was watching from under the awning with a look so full of delighted mischief that Linn had to turn away and inspect a barrel of pickled walnuts for some time.

It was beyond the cheeses, at the very end of the lane, that they found the bread.

It came to them first as a smell. It was a warm, sweet, strange, toasted smell, with something of caramel in it, and something of rye, and a wild green undertone like the edge of a wood in the first week of spring. Linn followed it without thinking. At the last stall before the Ribbon, tucked in beside a stack of empty hen-crates, sat a very old woman on a three-legged stool, with a tray across her knees and a shawl the color of old brick.

She was small, even for an old woman. Her face was brown and creased like a walnut, and her white hair was braided into a single long rope that fell across one shoulder, and her hands, folded on the tray, were so knotted with age that they looked like roots. The tray was covered with a cloth. Beside it, on a rickety board, lay a handful of round dark loaves with a cross cut in the top of each.

"Taste," said the old woman.

She said it without preamble. She tore a morsel from the end of a loaf, held it out between two fingers, and waited. Linn took it, because it would have been unthinkable not to.

It was warm. It was dense and soft and faintly sticky, and the crust cracked between her teeth like thin ice, and then the flavor came, honey and burnt sugar and something deep, dark and almost smoky, with a bright green edge of mint or sorrel at the very end. It was unlike any bread she had ever tasted. She stood in the middle of the market, with her eyes half closed, and for a moment she was somewhere very cold and very clean, with the sound of running water in her ears.

"What is that?" she said.

"Thaw-bread," said the old woman.

"I've never heard of it."

"You wouldn't have. It's high country bread. Passes and shepherds' huts. Nobody makes it down in the valleys, there's no call. It's only baked the one day." The black eyes, bright as a bird's, rested on Linn's face. "The first day the snow breaks. You bake it that morning, before the sun's on the stones, and you carry it to the first person you see coming down off the mountain. It doesn't matter who. Shepherd, tinker, thief. You put it in their hands and you say, *the winter's done.* And they eat it, and it's true."

Beside her, Linn heard Corvin draw in a quick, short breath.

She glanced round. He was standing quite still, with the basket forgotten in his hand. His face had gone very odd, not pale exactly, but fixed, like a man listening to a sound a long way off. He had not taken any bread. He was looking at the loaf on the board as if it might speak.

"It's a lovely custom," said Linn. She turned back to the old woman, a little hurriedly. "I'm Linn. I keep the Wandering Table. We're just up there, on the hill."

"I know the Table," said the old woman. "Mab Cranwick. My cart's got a wheel gone soft, and I was hoping for a corner of someone's barn."

"You'll have a bed," said Linn, at once. "A proper one, with a quilt. And supper. And anything else you like. Come now, and I'll send Brammer for the cart."

"I don't take charity."

"It isn't," said Linn. "I'd just like to be paid in bread."

The old woman gave a sudden, cracked, delighted cackle, like a crow finding a spoon. "Oh, you're a clever one," she said. "Very well. A loaf for a bed. It's a fair trade."

Mab Cranwick sat at the long table that night as if she had been born at it.

She had refused every offer of a cushion. She had refused the good chair, and the best cup, and had taken instead a small plain stool at Oda's elbow, and a mug of ale, and had been telling stories for an hour. There was one about a shepherd who had married a heron. There was another about the winter that the whole of High Wethers had been snowed in for three months and survived on pickled eggs and spite. Fenn, who had never heard of a heron's husband, had stopped eating altogether. Brammer was weeping with laughter into his napkin. Even Pettibone, on the table's edge, had put aside his dignity and was leaning toward the old woman with his thimble forgotten in both paws.

Linn had served the soup, and the bread, and the cheese Elsbeth had pressed on her at the stall, and for once she had sat down to eat it. She hardly noticed that she had done so. She sat with her chin in her hand and her feet tucked under the bench, between Fenn and the wall, listening to the old voice roll on, and a little way down the table Corvin sat with his brown mug in his hands and his eyes lowered, saying nothing, and listening too.

It was a good night. It was the sort of night that gathered itself in a house and stayed there for years.

"And the pass," said Mab Cranwick, wiping her eyes at the end of the heron, "that's where I learned it. The bread. My gran had it from her gran, and she had it off the shepherds in the Candlemere hut, back when they used to bake for the first walker through."

Umber moved.

It was not a stumble, not a lurch. It was a shudder, a long, slow, rippling tremor that began somewhere under the floor and ran through every board in the house, from cellar to roof. The lamp-flames leaned over and straightened. The spoons chimed in the bowls. A single drop of ale shivered over the rim of Mab's mug and ran down the side.

Nobody spoke.

"Oh," said the old woman, and looked up at the ceiling. "Is he cold?"

"He's..." said Linn.

"It's the north wind," said Oda.

Her voice was cheerful and clear, and came a little too fast. She had been silent for some time, knitting, her needles clicking over the gray scarf, and now she set it in her lap and turned to Brammer with a beaming, vacant smile. "Brammer, dear. I'd like some more tea. And Mister Pettibone wants a hot cup, I'm sure he does. Would you be so kind?"

"Of course," said Brammer, startled, and heaved himself up.

"Candlemere is a very long way off," Oda said to Mab, in the sweet, flustered, rambling voice that Linn had known all her life. "It's all rock up there, you know. And I never could abide the cold. Have you ever tried a poultice, dear? Of comfrey, I mean. It's marvelous for the knees. I knew a man once who swore by it. Had a goat."

"I've heard of the goat," said Mab, after a moment, in an odd, careful tone.

"Everyone has. Fenn, pass the bread."

The talk picked itself up again, a little unevenly. Fenn passed the bread. Brammer clattered with the kettle. Mab Cranwick, who was nobody's fool, looked once at Oda's face and once at the ceiling and began, in a loud, genial voice, a story about a pig.

Linn did not hear it.

She was looking at her grandmother's hand.

It lay on the arm of the rocking chair, on the old faded wool. It was a small, thin, brown hand, with prominent knuckles and a silver ring, and it was clenched. It was not clenched as a hand clenches in anger. It was clenched tight and shut, in the dead, white-knuckled grip of someone holding on to the rail of a ship. As she watched, it opened, one finger at a time, with a visible effort, and lay flat. Then it closed again.

Oda did not look at her. She was looking at Mab, with a kind smile, and nodding along to the pig.

And all along the table, in the warm yellow light, something quietly shifted. It was the smallest thing. It was a quality of attention. Linn had the sudden, absurd impression that everyone in the room had heard what the old woman said, and that every one of them had decided, with great tenderness, not to have.

Her eyes went round the table. They came to rest on Corvin.

He had not moved. He sat with the brown mug between his hands and his gaze on the table, and he was holding it so hard that the tendons stood out along the backs of his fingers. The skin about his mouth was gray. He looked, she thought, like a man who has been struck from behind and has not yet decided to fall.

Mab left the next morning, with a full basket and a new wheel, and a hundred small blessings called after her cart from the porch.

But before she went, she took Linn's hand in both her own.

"I've something for you," she said. "I don't give it to just anyone."

She pressed a folded paper into Linn's palm. It was a single sheet, soft with age, covered with a small dense hand of faded brown ink. The letters wandered a little at the edges, as if the writer's fingers had trembled. At the top, in larger script, were three words.

*Thaw-Bread. For Giving.*

"My gran's hand," said Mab. "She wrote it out the year I was wed. I've no daughter to leave it to. I've a feeling you'll know what to do with it." The dark eyes searched Linn's face. "Bake it the first morning the snow breaks. Not before. And give it to the first one who comes down."

"I can't take your grandmother's..."

"You can. You've the look of someone who knows how to give a thing away." She patted Linn's cheek with a cracked, dry, kindly hand. "Now learn how to keep one."

Then she climbed up onto her cart, clucked to the horse, and was gone along the hedge.

It was in the evening, while the house was winding down, that Corvin found her at the shelf.

She had unfolded the recipe and read it twice, and set it very carefully beside the little wooden sparrow, at the front, where the last of the light came through the window. It lay there against the glass, small and pale, with the sparrow standing guard over it. She was straightening a corner when she heard him in the doorway.

"Linn."

"Mm?"

"The pass she mentioned. Candlemere." His voice was very even. It was the voice he used for facts. "Is it on your route?"

"Not any longer."

She said it lightly, still adjusting the paper. "It used to be, I think. Gran says the Table went round by the high road every winter, in her younger days, for the shepherds' trade. But Umber doesn't go that way now. It's years since he did."

"How many?"

"Eight, nearly." She frowned a little, turning the sparrow a quarter turn. "I only remember because I was young. He just stopped one season. Wouldn't turn north past the Greywethers, however you coaxed him. Gran says he's getting old and has opinions." She smiled. "I don't know why. I used to wonder. But you can't ask him, can you?"

She waited for an answer. None came.

She turned, and found him standing in the doorway with one hand on the frame. It was the left, and it was gripping the wood. His knuckles were bloodless. He was looking at the floor. For an instant she thought he was going to say something, that his lips had parted around some enormous word, and that it was about to come. She felt it in the air, like the smell before a thunderstorm.

Then his jaw tightened, and the moment passed.

"Eight," he said, very softly, to himself.

"Corvin?"

"It's nothing. I was only wondering." He let go of the doorframe and flexed his hand, as if it had cramped. "It's a long time, for a creature to hold a grudge."

"He isn't holding a grudge. He's frightened."

The words had come out before she could think. She heard them, and stopped. They hung in the air of the little kitchen like a cloth caught on a nail, and she saw him look up at last, quickly, sharply, with his gray eyes very wide.

"Of what?" he said.

"I don't know." She spread her hands. "I've never known. I only know it when I put my hand on him. It isn't anger. It's older than that."

He said nothing. He looked at her for a long time, with a look she could not name, a look that seemed to hold something enormous and unspeakable pressed very small. Then he said, "Goodnight, Linn," and went away down the hall.

She stood by the shelf for a while after he had gone.

She set the last of the dishes in the rack. She banked the stove. She went out to the porch to light the lantern, with her thoughts moving slowly in her head, like fish in a pond. The sky was clear and green and full of the first stars. The wind had turned. It was cold and thin and smelled of far, faint snow.

She hung the lantern on its hook. She turned.

He was at the end of the porch, at the rail, with his back to her. She had not heard him come. He stood in his shirtsleeves, with his arms folded on the wood, looking north. He was looking at the long dark line of the hills where they met the sky, where the Greywethers rose, black and jagged and very far, with a single pale star hanging above their shoulder.

He did not hear her. He did not move. He stood as still as a man at a graveside, with the wind lifting the hair at the back of his neck, and she saw that he was shaking.

She went inside without a sound. She did not know why she felt she must. But she shut the door as gently as she could, and left him there, alone with the cold and the stars, and the light she had hung so that someone might find the way.