The house held its first formal council that night, and as with all formal councils in the Wandering Table, it took place in the kitchen, over food, with nobody wearing the right shoes.

"Item one," said Mister Pettibone.

He stood on the edge of the long table, a small round figure in a waistcoat, with a thimble of tea cradled in his paws and an air of terrible responsibility. A slip of paper lay unrolled beside him, weighted at the corners with a salt cellar, a thimble, a spoon, and one of Brammer's shortbread biscuits, which Fenn kept trying to remove. Pettibone had been writing the agenda since supper. It was nearly as long as he was.

"The status of the guest," he read. "Mister Corvin Ashdell, late of the Wayfarers' Post, presently bound under the law of the Hearth. I propose we determine, once and for all, how a person in his position is to be housed, fed, informed, and generally managed."

"Managed," said Linn, from the stove. "Like a goat."

"Like a sensitive animal. It is a very different thing."

"He can hear you," said Fenn.

He could. Corvin sat at the far end of the table with his back against the wall, as he had at breakfast, a plate of cold chicken and bread untouched in front of him. He had come down to supper because Brammer had stood at the foot of the stairs and said, quite simply, "I made too much," in a voice so anxious that it would have been cruelty to refuse. Now he sat with his hands flat on the wood and his eyes lowered, listening to the house discuss him as if he were not there, with the stillness of a man trying very hard not to be present.

"I have no objection to being discussed," he said, politely.

"There," said Pettibone. "He has no objection. Item one is resolved."

"You haven't resolved anything."

"I have resolved it to my satisfaction."

Oda, in her chair beside the stove, made a sound that might have been a cough and might have been a laugh. Brammer, at the other end of the table, was laboriously slicing a second loaf with the expression of a man who wished very much to be anywhere else. Linn put down her spoon, wiped her hands, and crossed the room to stand at the head of the table. She did not sit. She almost never did.

"Mister Ashdell," she said.

"Corvin."

She paused. "Corvin. I'd like to say something, if I may, and then I'll let Mister Pettibone have his agenda."

"I am most grateful," said Pettibone, with irony.

"This morning I made a mistake. Not a small one." She kept her hands folded, and her voice steady, and did not let the smile come. "I took you in as I would take in anyone, and I did not know what it would cost you. I can't undo it. I'd give a great deal to be able to. But you are here now, and for as long as you are, you are not a prisoner. You're a guest. I would like very much for you to be treated like one."

He looked up.

The light from the oil lamp threw a soft, uneven gold across his face. Without the bandage-white of the morning he looked more ordinary, a tired man of nine-and-twenty with an old scar through one eyebrow and eyes that had not slept in some time. He studied her for what felt like a long while. She made herself hold still under it.

"A guest," he said at last.

"Yes."

"Who is not permitted to leave."

"Who is not able to leave. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"I hope so," said Linn. "Otherwise I don't know what we're doing here."

A pause. Beneath the table, Fenn kicked Brammer's boot, and Brammer, deeply wounded, said "Ow" and was ignored.

"I'll try," said Corvin. It was said stiffly, as though pulled from a deep place. "That's all I can promise. I'll try not to make this worse than it has to be."

"That's all I'd ask."

"Splendid," said Pettibone. "Item two. The household rules."

Fenn sat up very straight. "I'll do this one."

"You will not."

"I've been designated."

"By whom?"

"By myself," said Fenn, with perfect dignity. "As the only person in this house who has read the entire Courier's Handbook, cover to cover. I know the proper protocol for assimilating a visiting dignitary."

"He is not a dignitary."

"He was a Courier. That's practically a dignitary."

Corvin made a small sound into his hand. It was not quite a cough.

"Fine," said Linn, who knew when she was beaten. "Fenn will show him the house. Fenn will not follow him into the washroom, or ask him about the Ridge run before breakfast, or attempt to read his letters."

"I would never," said Fenn, appalled.

"Fenn."

"I might have looked at the satchel."

"Fenn."

"From across the room!"

The boy's ears had gone scarlet. Corvin, who had been sitting very still, made a small, sudden movement, one hand going to the satchel at his feet and then retreating, as though the leather had burned him. Linn saw it. She saw him see her see it. Neither of them said anything.

"The satchel stays with me," he said, evenly. "If that's all right."

"Of course," said Linn.

"It's not valuable. It's only..." He stopped. "A habit."

"Habits are allowed," said Oda unexpectedly. "In this house, one is permitted a certain number of foolish habits. I myself have eleven."

"Twelve," said Pettibone.

"Thirteen, if you count the goat."

"We are not counting the goat."

The rest of the council dissolved, as such councils do, into a general warm bickering about prunes and goat-related litigation, and under cover of the noise Linn found that she had moved to the table's edge and was standing very close to the end of the bench, near enough to see how he held his cup. He held it in both hands, thumbs hooked beneath the rim, the way a man holds a thing he is afraid he will be asked to give back.

She did not know what made her say it.

"There's one more rule."

He looked up.

"It's not on Mister Pettibone's list. It isn't really a rule at all. It's just how the house is." She was aware of her own voice, a little too light, a little too quick. "Everyone who stays here has a place. A chair at the table, and a cup of their own. Brammer's is the big blue one. Fenn's has a chip. Oda's is the one with the roses, and Mister Pettibone has... well."

"A thimble," said Pettibone, with enormous dignity.

"A thimble," Linn agreed. "And I don't like anyone to go without. Even if they're only here a night. Especially then."

She crossed to the dresser, and from the second shelf, behind the good plates, she took a plain brown mug with a slightly crooked handle. It had been in the house longer than she had. It was nothing special. It had belonged, once, to someone whose name she had never been told.

She set it down in front of him.

Corvin looked at it for a long time.

"No," he said.

"It's only a cup."

"I know what it is." His voice was very quiet. He did not push it away, but his hands, which had been lying loose on the table, drew in a little, closing into themselves. "I don't want a cup. I'm not staying."

"I know."

"I can't take it."

"You don't have to take it," said Linn gently. "It'll just be there."

She smiled at him then, not the bright one, but a smaller, steadier thing, and turned away to see to the pot. She heard no reply. She did not expect one. But when she turned back, two minutes later, with the teapot in her hands, the brown mug was still on the table where she had left it. He had not moved it. He had not touched it.

He was looking at it as if it might speak.

She poured the tea into it anyway.

He did not thank her, and she did not wait for him to. He watched the steam rise. And then, when the talk had risen again, and Fenn was doing an impression of the Courier's Oath in a voice that made Brammer laugh so hard he choked, she saw his hand slip out, very slowly, and curl around the crooked handle, and draw the mug an inch closer.

Nothing more than that. An inch.

She let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.

It was the same the next day, and the day after.

He did what was asked of him, and nothing beyond it. He came down for meals. He answered questions when they were put, with a dry, careful courtesy that gave away nothing. He allowed Fenn to show him the house, and Fenn, glowing, took him from cellar to roof with a tour so exhaustive it included the history of every squeaky stair. Corvin followed, and listened, and said "I see," and "Is that so," and once, when Fenn showed him the little door in the rooftop garden where the bees overwintered, a thing that sounded very much like the beginning of a real question. Then he stopped himself, and the door in his face closed again.

He kept the north room as he had found it. The satchel did not leave his shoulder. His coat hung on its hook, not in the wardrobe. His boots stood by the door, laced. Brammer, sweeping the upper hall, reported with great solemnity that the man had not so much as moved the water jug from where Linn had left it.

"He doesn't unpack," said Brammer, in the tone of someone describing a medical condition.

"No," said Linn.

"Is that bad?"

"I don't know." She was stirring something, and watching it. "I think it might be the only thing he thinks he has."

She tried, in those first days, to read him, and found him impossible. He was not unfriendly. That would have been easier. He was exquisitely polite, so polite that every conversation felt like speaking through glass. He thanked her for each meal. He asked whether there was anything he might fetch. He helped carry the milk pails, once, without being asked, and then looked briefly horrified at himself and did not repeat it. And always, in every room, she noticed the same thing: he stood nearest the door. At the table he took the end seat. In the common room he chose the bench by the window, facing the porch, with his shoulders against the wall.

One foot out the door. Always.

It made her want to be kind to him in a way that was almost a physical ache. It also, occasionally, made her want to throw something.

She did neither. She cooked. She smiled. She filled his cup and asked about his shoulder and did not ask about anything else, and the days went by like beads on a string, bright and full and strange.

The night she lit the lantern with him watching was the fourth night.

It was late. The house had gone to bed in layers, Fenn first, protesting; then Oda, announcing that she had been awake all along; then Brammer, who fell asleep at the table and had to be steered upstairs like a ship. Pettibone had retired to his cushion with a very small snore. The Hearth had burned down to its evening red. The windows were black. Out on the hills the wind had a clean, cold edge, the first hint that spring would be a long and changeable one.

Linn took the brass lantern from its hook by the door.

She had done this, by her own count, nearly three thousand times. Her hands knew it without her. Trim the wick. Strike the flint. Cup the flame against the draft until it steadies, and carry it out through the door and across the boards to the iron hook beneath the eaves.

She was reaching for the hook when she realized she was not alone.

He was sitting on the porch bench in the dark. She had not seen him. He had no candle, no lamp, and the shadow of the eave covered him almost completely, so that only the pale blur of his face and the glint of his eyes gave him away. He had a blanket around his shoulders, one of the old gray ones from the chest. His boots were on. The satchel lay beside him on the bench, one hand resting on it, loosely.

"Oh," said Linn. "I didn't know you were out here."

"I couldn't sleep."

"Is it the shoulder?"

"No."

She waited. He did not elaborate. After a moment she turned back to the hook, hung the lantern, and stood a moment with her hand on its handle, letting the warmth of the flame spread through the brass into her palm. Light spilled down the porch in a soft gold pool. It caught the planks, the railing, the edge of his blanket, and one hand, scarred across the knuckles, lying very still on the leather of the bag.

"You do this every night," said Corvin.

"Yes."

"You said so. The first night."

"I did."

"Why?"

It was such a simple word. Fenn had asked her a hundred times, and every guest who stayed more than a week. She had a dozen answers. It's a courtesy. It's a habit. It keeps the foxes off. She had a tone for it, light and teasing, that never failed to turn the question aside.

She opened her mouth to use it.

And found she did not want to.

"Sit down, if you like," he said, quietly. "You don't have to tell me."

She hesitated. Then, to her own surprise, she sat, on the far end of the bench, with the whole length of the leather satchel between them, and folded her hands in her lap.

The night went on around them. A moth found the lantern, tapped against the glass, and circled. Far out on the dark hills something called once, long and low, and fell silent.

"For the guests," she said, finally.

"What guests?"

"The ones who might come back."

She said it simply, looking straight ahead into the dark, in the voice you use for facts that have stopped hurting and become only furniture. "People pass through. Travelers, pilgrims, families going to market. They stay a night or two and they go. Some of them say they'll come again. Most of them don't, and that's all right, that's how it is. But some do. A boy came back after six years, once, with a wife and a baby, because he'd remembered the bread. A woman came back with her sister's ashes to bury under the apple tree." She smiled a little. "And when they come back, it's usually dark. The inn moves. The roads change. And you can't see a house in the dark, not on these hills, not unless it wants to be seen."

"So you leave a light."

"So I leave a light."

"Every night."

"Every night. In case."

She did not say, in case it's tonight. She did not say, in case the one who promised comes up the road with snow on his collar and an apology in his mouth. She did not say anything about the winter she had been nineteen, or the long, dull, endless spring that had come after it, the one she had spent standing at the gate until her feet were numb. She had never said it aloud. She did not intend to start now, on a bench, to a man she had known for four days.

But the silence after her words was strange.

It was not the ordinary silence of two people with nothing to say. It had a quality she could not place. It stretched. It drew out thin and long, until she felt the hairs prickle along her arms, and still it did not break.

She turned her head.

He was staring at the lantern.

His face, in the gold light, was perfectly still. He had stopped breathing, or very nearly. His hand had gone tight on the strap of the satchel, so that the knuckles stood out white as bone, and the other, the free one, had risen, slowly, to the back of his neck, where it rubbed at the muscle there in a small, hard, unconscious circle. His mouth was half-open, as though a word were caught behind it. His eyes were very bright.

She had never seen anyone look at a lantern like that.

"Corvin?" she said.

He flinched. It was the faintest movement, the start of a man waking from a bad dream, and then it was over and his face had smoothed itself like water after a stone. He dropped his hand. He set his shoulders. When he turned to her, there was nothing in his expression at all.

"It's a good lantern," he said.

She stared at him.

"The light," he said. "It's very... It's a good one. Steady. You can see it a long way."

"Yes," said Linn slowly. "That's rather the point."

"Of course." He looked away. "It's a good thing to do."

There was no mockery in it. There was no politeness in it either, only a flat, careful voice, like a man walking across a floor he knows is thin. She sat and looked at his profile, the tight line of his mouth, the muscle moving in his jaw, and a cold little thread of understanding wound itself through her. He was lying. Not about the lantern. About something else, something he was holding behind his teeth with all his strength, and the lie sat in the air between them as plain as the moth tapping at the glass.

She could not think what it was.

She felt, absurdly, a flush of hurt. It was foolish, a stranger's silence, a stranger's secret. She had hundreds of guests with secrets. She had never minded. She had made a kind of art of not asking. But she had told him something, a small true thing, offered across a bench in the dark, and he had looked at it and put it away unopened, and for some reason that was harder to bear than anger.

And under the hurt, stubborn and bright, was something else. Something that felt very much like curiosity.

"You've got a good eye for lanterns," she said at last, lightly, to give him a way out.

"I've seen a few."

"Where?"

"Along the way."

"On the Ridge run?"

"Here and there."

She nodded. She did not press. She sat, and listened to the night, and watched the moth fall away from the glass. When the silence had gone on long enough that it had become a kind of agreement, she rose, brushed down her apron, and said, "Goodnight, then."

"Goodnight, Linn."

It was the first time he had said her name without being asked to. It came out quietly, almost reluctantly, as if it had been waiting some time. She paused on the threshold with her hand on the door and did not look back, because she was afraid of what her face might do.

"The lantern stays lit till morning," she said instead. "If you want to sit out. Nobody will mind."

"Thank you."

"There's a second blanket in the chest."

"I have one."

"I know," said Linn. "I only wanted you to know there was another."

She closed the door behind her, softly.

The common room was dark and warm and smelled of woodsmoke. She stood a moment in the red glow of the banked Hearth, with her back against the door and her heart doing something she did not like. Then she crossed the room on tiptoe, because it was nearly midnight and the house was asleep, and went to the lectern by the window where the Guest Book lay.

It was a very old book. It had been kept by every Keeper of the Wandering Table since before the inn had a name, a great fat volume bound in cracked oxblood leather, its pages soft as cloth, thick with the signatures of the thousands who had passed under this roof. Travelers wrote their own names, or if they could not, the Keeper wrote them. It was a rule, and an old courtesy. Anyone who stayed beyond a single night was entered, so that the house would remember them.

She had not yet entered him. She had told herself it was because she was busy. She had told herself she was waiting until he decided what he was. But the truth, which she examined briefly and then put away, was that she had been putting it off. A name in the book meant a guest who had stayed. It seemed unfair to write it down when he had so clearly not wanted to.

But he had stayed, after all. By law, if nothing else. And a house must keep its records.

She lit the small candle at the lectern's edge, dipped the pen in the pot of ink, and turned to the last written page. The previous entry was a drover and his daughter, three weeks ago, in Oda's spidery hand. She drew a breath, set the nib to the paper beneath it, and began to write.

Her hand stopped.

She was not sure, at first, what she was looking at. The line beneath the drover's name was not empty. There was writing on it already, small, neat, upright writing, in a dark, rich ink that had not yet dried. It glistened in the candlelight, wet and fresh. It had no flourish, no slant, no resemblance to any hand she knew. It might have been written a moment ago.

It read:

*Corvin Ashdell.*

Linn stood very still.

The pen trembled in her fingers, and a bead of ink gathered on the nib and fell, soundlessly, onto the page, a small black star beside the name that she had not written.

Behind her, on its mantel, in the red dark, the squat green bell gave a single, small, satisfied chime.