Hawthorn Gap was the loveliest stop on the spring road, and Linn had always thought so.

It was a narrow green pass between two wooded shoulders of hill, where the old hedgerows had run wild and grown into whole white walls of blossom, so thick in May that the air itself tasted faintly of honey and almonds. Umber came down into it slowly, as he always did, easing his great feet into the soft turf, and settled at the bottom of the hollow with a long, contented sigh. He liked it here. The clover grew deep. The wind could not find him. By the time the house had stopped rocking, the light was spilling over the eastern ridge in long slanting ribbons, and the kitchen windows were full of drifting petals, white and pale pink, turning slowly in the sun.

Linn stood at the open window with a cup of tea in her hands and her eyes half shut and let herself have a minute.

It had been a good week, on the whole. Not an easy one. Corvin Ashdell was a difficult man to have in a house, and no one, not even Mister Pettibone, had pretended otherwise. But the days had found a shape. She had stopped starting at the sound of his step on the stairs. He had stopped leaving his coat by the door. He still ate at the end of the bench with his back against the wall, and he still said thank you in that careful, level voice, as though each thank you were a coin counted out and set down. But there was a brown mug at his place now, washed every evening, and returned every morning to the same spot. Neither of them had said a word about it.

She took a sip. The tea was strong and sweet. The bread was rising in the bowl by the stove, and the pastry dough was cooling on the slab, and Brammer, behind her at the long table, was humming a tuneless song to himself as he worked a great round of dough with his enormous floury hands. It was the kind of morning that came, perhaps, twice in a season. She was going to enjoy it, and nothing was going to...

"AAAAAAH!"

She did not spill the tea. That was the thing she would remember afterward, with some pride. She turned around with the cup still perfectly level and every muscle in her body instantly braced for the worst, and found Brammer Gulloway, forty-five years old and seven feet tall, standing on top of the kitchen table in his stockinged feet with his arms wrapped around his own chest and his eyes squeezed shut.

"Brammer!"

"It's there," said Brammer, in a high, strangled whisper. "It's there. Don't look. Don't look at it."

"Don't look at what?"

"I said don't look!"

Linn looked.

It was on the ceiling beam directly above the table, hanging in the middle of the long dark rafter with its legs spread wide like a pair of hands about to pounce. It was a cellar-duchess, which was a thing that lived in the old stone houses of the Hollowlands and was, as a rule, no bigger than a plum. This one was the size of a saucer. It was a deep, glossy, velvety brown, with a pale gold stripe along its back, and its legs were as thick as pencils, and it was entirely, magnificently still.

It was, she had to admit, a handsome spider.

"Oh," said Linn.

"Is it moving?"

"No."

"Is it looking at me?"

"I don't think it has that kind of eyes."

"That is not a comfort," said Brammer, with feeling.

The household arrived in a series of thumps. Fenn came first, sliding in his socks across the flagstones, hair on end, a pair of brass spectacles shoved crooked on his nose. He took in the table, the giant, and the beam in a single sweeping glance, and said, "Oh, it's a *good* one," with enormous satisfaction, and ran out again. Oda came next, drifting in from the common room on the arm of her chair, which Brammer had pushed for her that morning and which she had apparently decided to ride the rest of the way. She was wearing her nightcap. She examined the ceiling for a long, serene moment.

"That's Mrs. Pennywhistle," she said. "She's been in the larder since Michaelmas. Leave her be."

"Gran, it is *enormous*."

"She's very well mannered."

"She's going to eat us in our beds," said Brammer, in a voice of doom.

"She eats flies, dear."

"She is *not* going to stay in my kitchen!"

"I'm sorry," said Mister Pettibone, from his shelf above the stove. He had climbed onto the lid of the teapot, which was warm, and stood there with a thimble of tea held aloft like a general's baton. "Whose kitchen?"

"Mine!"

"I was under the impression it was Linn's."

"It's *everyone's*, but she's in *my*..."

"Brammer." Pettibone had set down his thimble and raised one paw. "I am commandeering this operation. All hands to your stations. Fenn, we shall require a net. The Keeper will take the left flank. Mister Gulloway will remain exactly where he is and attempt not to scream."

"I'm not screaming!"

"You are visibly vibrating, which amounts to the same thing."

Fenn came back at a gallop with a butterfly net twice his height and a look of pure joy. Linn, who had meant to protest, found that a laugh was rising in her chest and had to turn her face to the window. Brammer groaned. The spider, for its part, did not so much as twitch a leg.

"Flank it," said Pettibone gravely. "Slowly. Let it know we mean no harm. Fenn, hold your net at a respectful angle."

"It's a net, not a sword," said Fenn.

"All nets are swords, if one has the right attitude."

"I do not think it was your attitude that made the mop chase you into the teapot," said Linn.

"That is a low blow."

"It's the truth."

There was a soft step in the doorway. A calm, dry voice spoke from behind her shoulder.

"Is this the new house rule? Everyone on the furniture?"

She turned.

Corvin stood in the doorway to the common room with one shoulder against the frame, looking at the scene with an expression of grave, courteous bafflement. He was in his shirtsleeves, his hair damp from washing and sticking up on one side, the leather satchel slung across his chest, as always. There was a small cut healing on his chin where he had shaved too quickly. He had, Linn realized with a jolt, a sleep-creased line across his cheek, from the pillow. It was such a human, such an ordinary thing that her breath went a little odd.

He looked at Brammer, standing rigid on the table. He looked at Fenn, with his net. He looked at the old woman in her chair, at the hedgehog on the teapot, at the ceiling, at the spider. A long, long beat of silence passed.

"Has it signed the Guest Book?" said Corvin.

Fenn made a sound like a kettle going off.

"I don't think so," he managed. "I don't think she's, hhh, she's been here since Michaelmas..."

"Then technically she's a trespasser."

"Procedurally," said Mister Pettibone, with great dignity, "she has not been entered. I regret to say that we have, in this matter, a lacuna."

Fenn had collapsed against the wall, wheezing. Oda's shoulders were shaking beneath her shawl. Brammer said, "This isn't funny," in a small, wounded voice, and that was what did it.

Linn laughed.

She had not meant to. She had been holding it in with all her strength, with the cup against her mouth and her teeth set, and then someone said *lacuna* and Brammer said *this isn't funny* and it simply burst out of her. It was not the bright, polite, ringing laugh she used for guests. It was not any laugh she had used in years. It came up from somewhere much lower down, all at once, wild and breathless and slightly undignified, a great helpless bark of a thing that bent her double against the windowsill. She had to put the tea down. She put her hand over her mouth, and it did not help, and a snort leaked out between her fingers, and she was gone again.

When she finally straightened, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, she found that the kitchen had gone quiet.

Everyone was looking at her. Fenn, with his mouth open. Brammer, from the table, with an expression of dawning wonder. Oda, who had stopped shaking and was gazing at her with an odd, warm, inward look, as if at a lamp that had been lit in a window.

And Corvin.

Corvin was standing exactly as he had stood, one shoulder against the frame. But he had gone still in a different way. His face was quite blank, and quite open, the way a face goes when something has surprised it so much that it has forgotten to arrange itself. He was looking at her as if he had heard a sound he had been listening for, for a very long time, in a very large house, and had given up expecting.

It lasted a heartbeat. Then his eyes dropped, and his hand came up to rub the back of his neck, and the moment was over.

"Sorry," said Linn, hoarsely. "I'm sorry, it's only..." She pressed her palms to her cheeks. They were burning. "It's been a long week."

"Don't," said Corvin.

"What?"

"Apologize." His voice had gone a little rough. He cleared his throat. "It's a good sound."

Nobody said anything. Pettibone, with great tact, raised his thimble to his face and became absorbed in it.

"Right," said Corvin, brusquely, after a moment. He came into the kitchen. "I'll deal with the spider."

"You'll what?" said Brammer.

"I'll deal with it."

"You are not going to *kill* her," said Oda, sharply.

"Of course not."

He crossed to the dresser without hurry, looked at the shelves, and took down the first cup his hand fell on. It was a brown mug with a slightly crooked handle. He did not appear to notice which one it was. Linn noticed. She felt her heart give a small, absurd skip, and said nothing.

Then he reached into the flap of his satchel and took out a single stiff cream-colored card, blank on both sides and edged in faded blue, one of the Post's old dispatch slips. He held it up to the light, checked it for creases, and then, with the unhurried precision of a man doing something he had done a thousand times before, he climbed onto the end of the table, in his stockinged feet, beside the trembling bulk of Brammer.

"Excuse me," he said.

"By all means," said Brammer, faintly, and shuffled aside.

Corvin reached up. He did not hurry. The spider, on its beam, shifted one long leg, assessing him. He brought the mug up slowly, over the creature, in a smooth, steady, level arc, and set the rim gently against the wood. The spider did not run. He slid the card across the beam beneath the mug's lip, with a tiny rasp of paper on timber, and the creature, finding itself in a shadowed, enclosed space, did what any sensible spider would do and stepped quietly onto the card.

He lowered both, mug and card, together, and held them against his chest.

The kitchen exhaled.

"That was," said Fenn, in a hushed voice, "the best thing I have ever seen."

"It's a spider," said Corvin.

"It was *extraordinary*."

"It was a cup."

He stepped down. He walked through the kitchen, and the household parted for him like water, and the whole way across the flagstones Linn could not stop watching his hands. They were big and scarred, and they held the cup as though it were something alive and fragile. When he reached the back door he put his shoulder to it, pushed it wide, and went out into the garden. The rest of them followed in a tumble, crowding onto the step.

The morning was gold and green and dazzling. Petals drifted over the herb beds. Corvin crouched by the wall of hawthorn, with its thick lace of blossom reaching over his head, and tilted the cup with great care. The spider hesitated on the edge of the card. Then it put one leg out into the leaves, and the next, and went over the side into the flowering branches in a slow, stately, entirely unhurried descent, and was gone.

"Farewell, Mrs. Pennywhistle," said Oda, with feeling.

"Can we keep her?" said Fenn.

"NO," said Brammer.

"She was so beautiful."

"She was eight-legged and *looking at me*."

He had come out onto the step behind the others, still in his stockinged feet, still flushed to the roots of his hair. He stopped beside Corvin. For a moment the great, shy, gentle man seemed to be searching for something to say. Then he simply bent, and picked Corvin up by both elbows, and gave him a hug that lifted him clean off the ground.

"You're a hero," said Brammer, thickly. "I'll make you anything. A cake. A whole pie. Three pies."

"Put me down," said Corvin, in the voice of a man being hugged by a sofa.

"A pie with your name on it."

"One pie is fine."

"I'll make a *pie*," said Brammer, setting him down, tearful.

"Albrecht always did love pie," said Oda, to nobody, and went in to put the kettle on.

The rest of them drifted off in a loose, noisy tide. Fenn went to look for the spider, with his net, over Pettibone's strenuous objections. Brammer went to lie down. Pettibone, after a long and somewhat theatrical survey of the garden, announced that the operation had been, in his professional opinion, a success, and went back to his shelf to write it up.

And Linn found that she was standing at the kitchen window, alone, with her hands on the sill and her heart beating oddly fast.

She was not sure how long she had been there. It was quiet. The sun had climbed higher, and the whole green hollow was full of moving light. She could see the hawthorn, and the little patch of beaten earth where he had crouched, and the hens, Tolliver's runaways, scratching in the bean rows.

"She's going well," said a voice at her shoulder.

He had come in, quietly, without her hearing. He stood beside her at the window, a little to her left, looking out at the blossom. He had put the cup down somewhere. There were a few white petals caught in his dark hair.

"Is she?" said Linn.

"She's made it to the second branch. She's got somewhere to be."

"They all do."

"Do they?"

"Everyone does," said Linn. "That's what I've always thought. Even spiders. Even people who say they haven't."

He looked at her sideways, then, quickly, and then away. There was a faint, wry crook at the corner of his mouth.

"That's a very kind way of putting it," he said.

"It's a very kind spider."

And that was all it took. She did not know whose breath went first. It was only a small, absurd, wobbling sound, no more than a puff of air through the nose, but she heard it, and he heard her hear it, and the next instant they were both laughing. Not the great helpless storm of before, only a low, shared, guilty laughter, shaking their shoulders, with their faces turned carefully toward the glass so that neither of them would have to look at the other. It went on a moment longer than it should have. It trailed off into a kind of quiet.

The window was not wide. The sill was low. Somewhere in the course of it, without either of them quite deciding, they had drifted together, until her shoulder was against his arm. It was only the lightest pressure, through two layers of linen. But it was warm, and solid, and he smelled of soap and woodsmoke and faintly of crushed hawthorn leaves, and she could feel, quite distinctly, the steady rise and fall of his breathing.

Neither of them moved.

Outside, the petals fell. A hen clucked, far off. The long gold light slanted across the sill and over the backs of their two hands, lying a few inches apart on the weathered wood. Linn stared at them. She had the oddest sense that the whole house had gone quiet around her, that every beam and board was holding its breath.

She took a step back.

He took one too, at the very same moment. It was perfectly synchronized, like a dance, and for an instant they stood facing one another in the middle of the empty kitchen, each of them half a pace away from where they had been, with the sunlight between them.

"Well," said Linn. Her voice was strangely light. "I should see to the bread."

"Yes," said Corvin. "Of course."

She went to the bowl by the stove, and put her hands into the dough, and found that she was trembling very slightly, and that her eyes were stinging for no reason at all. She had not laughed like that in years. Not since before the winter she was nineteen. Not since a certain lane in the dusk, and a certain voice, and a promise made at a gate. She had forgotten that it was possible. She had forgotten that it could happen, easily, in the middle of an ordinary morning, over a spider and a cup.

She wondered how long it had been.

She did not dare to count.

Behind her, at the window, there was no sound. She did not turn. But she glanced back, once, through the steam rising from the bowl, and saw that he was still standing where she had left him, in the light, with his head bent and his back to the room. He was looking down at his own right hand, turning it slowly over in the air, palm up and palm down, as though he did not quite know what it was, or what it had just been about to do.