Umber left Hawthorn Gap on the third evening after the spider, climbing out of the hollow the way he always did, one slow foot at a time, as though the hill were a staircase he did not wish to wake.

The blossom had begun to fall in earnest. It lay along the ridgeway in white and pale pink drifts, and the wind lifted it and sent it spinning past the porch rail, so that the whole evening seemed to be breathing out petals. Linn stood at the rail with a dish towel over her shoulder and watched the light go thin and golden over the western hills. Somewhere below, a lark was making a long, unhurried argument with the dusk. She thought it was the kind of evening that deserved a lantern a little early, and she was reaching for the hook by the door when she felt the house slow beneath her feet.

It was not a stop, not yet. It was the long, gentle easing that Umber did when something at the edge of his attention had caught him. Linn knew it as well as she knew her own pulse. She lowered her hand from the lantern and went to the rail again, and leaned out, and looked down the long green slope to the road.

There was a cart on it.

It stood crooked at the side of the lane, one wheel in the ditch, with a gray donkey hanging its head between the shafts in the posture of an animal that had given up on the day. A man was crouched at the donkey's off hind foot. A woman stood at the cart's tail with a child on her hip, and was looking up at the inn, slowly passing above her on the shoulder of the hill, with an expression Linn had seen a hundred times. It was the look of a person who has been walking too long and has just seen a lit window.

She had not even lit the lantern yet. They had seen the house anyway.

"Guests," said Linn, to nobody, and felt her whole body change.

It was a thing she could not have explained to anyone. One moment she was a tired woman with a dish towel on her shoulder. The next she was something older and simpler, a pair of hands, a warm kitchen, a table that already had a place laid. She was down the porch steps before the thought finished. Behind her she heard Umber settle, a long, soft sigh, and felt the whole inn lower itself into the grass like a hen onto a nest.

"Brammer!" she called. "Four more places, and the big pot! Fenn, the lamps on the porch! Oda, the good blanket!"

"Which one is the good blanket?" said Oda, from the depths of the common room.

"The one without the goat on it!"

"Ah," said Oda. "That narrows it."

Their names were Tam and Elsbeth Wickersham, and they made cheese.

They made it, Elsbeth explained, in a stone dairy two valleys east, from the milk of eleven goats and one very bad-tempered cow, and they were taking it to the Larkspur market in a cart so heavy that the donkey, whose name was Biscuit, had lately developed opinions. A stone had lodged in his hoof two miles back. They had been unable to shift it. They had, Tam said, with the embarrassed gravity of a large, kind man who was not used to asking, been about to sleep in the ditch.

"You will do nothing of the kind," said Linn.

She said it warmly, and she meant it, and she had already taken the child's small cold hand without noticing she was doing it. The little girl, who was six and had a plait the color of new rope, looked up at her with enormous, solemn, tired eyes, and said nothing at all.

"This is Posy," said Elsbeth. "She doesn't talk to strangers."

"Good," said Linn. "Neither do I. We'll be very comfortable."

The corner of Posy's mouth moved. It was not a smile. It was the place where a smile might eventually live.

Within ten minutes, the Wandering Table had performed its miracle. Linn had seen it so many times that she no longer thought of it as one, but she supposed it must look like one from the outside. Brammer hauled the long table out onto the porch and set it with lamps and bread and a great steaming pot of barley stew. Fenn unharnessed the cart with grave and thorough attention, narrating every buckle to the donkey. Pettibone, perched on the end of the table with a thimble of tea, announced the house rules to the bewildered Wickershams in a voice of great ceremony, and Posy, who had been about to hide behind her father's leg, stopped and stared at him with her mouth open.

"He talks," she whispered.

"I do," said Pettibone, with dignity. "When there is tea. It is a very exclusive arrangement."

"Can I see?"

"You may observe from a respectful distance."

Posy took one small step closer. It was, Linn thought, a respectful distance exactly.

It was Corvin who dealt with the donkey.

He had come around the side of the house at the commotion, with his sleeves rolled and a smear of oil on his wrist, and had stood for a moment watching Tam wrestle with Biscuit's hoof. Then he had walked straight over without a word and crouched, and run one hand down the donkey's leg with a slow, practiced pressure. Biscuit, who had been about to kick Tam into the next valley, sighed through his nose and went slack.

"You've been pulling at it," said Corvin. "He doesn't like being pulled. Hold his head."

"You've done this before?" said Tam.

"A lot of the Post's mules," said Corvin. "They're all the same. They think you're their enemy until you prove otherwise."

He took a hoof pick from the pocket of his coat, which Linn had not known he carried, and it was out in a moment, a small flat gray stone, no bigger than a thumbnail, that dropped into the dust with a click. Biscuit lifted the hoof, set it down, lifted it again, and then bent his long gray neck and leaned the whole heavy weight of his head against Corvin's shoulder with a sigh of undignified gratitude.

Corvin stood very still.

He looked, Linn thought, like a man who has been handed a cup of something hot without being warned. Then, slowly, almost stiffly, he lifted one hand and set it on the donkey's neck.

She turned away to attend to the stew. It was none of her business. She told herself so, several times, with great firmness.

They ate on the porch as the dark came down.

It was a soft, warm, bright evening, with a wind full of hawthorn and a sky going from gold to violet. The lamps threw pools of light along the table, and the long grass below the rail went silver. Fenn, as the youngest of the household, had been given the honor of pouring the cider. Brammer carved. Elsbeth, who had started the meal as a stiff, careful guest, was by the second helping laughing aloud at one of Oda's stories, which was about a bishop and a pig and had, Linn suspected, not one true word in it.

She noticed Oda's chair about halfway through the meal.

It was a small thing. Brammer had set the old woman's chair, as he always did, at the head of the long table's northern end, where the porch gave onto the best of the view: the long, dim fall of the land toward the northern hills, the last red streak of sunset above them. It was her usual place. It had been her place, Linn thought, for as long as there had been a table on this porch. And Oda had sat in it exactly long enough to be polite, and then said, "Draughts," and risen, and carried her teacup and her knitting bag all the way down the length of the porch to the opposite end, the south end, where the table faced a blank wall of climbing roses, and she had sat down there with her back to the north and her shoulders very straight.

"The view's better on the other side, Gran," said Fenn, who noticed everything and understood very little.

"I've seen it," said Oda.

"But it's the best part."

"It's a very ordinary hill."

"It's not ordinary, it's the north," said Fenn. "You always say the north has the best sunsets. You always..." He frowned. "You don't sit there, though. Do you? Not ever. I just realized. I've never seen you sit on that side."

There was a very small pause.

"Draughts," said Oda again, serenely, and passed the bread.

Linn looked at her for a moment. The old woman's face was perfectly placid. Her needles had not so much as faltered. But one hand, the left, resting on the arm of her chair, had curled very slightly inward, the way a hand does against cold.

She thought nothing of it. She had a table to tend.

Posy had been sitting beside her mother for the first half of the meal, with her back against her mother's arm and her eyes on her plate. She had eaten very little. She had looked at everyone in turn, and said nothing, and by the time the pie came round Linn had begun to think that the child would last the whole evening without a word. It was only when Fenn, with great ceremony, set a bowl of cream beside Corvin's plate that the girl stirred.

She slid off the bench. She walked the length of the table in her stockinged feet, past Brammer, who grinned at her, past Pettibone, who gave her a small, courteous nod, and stopped in front of the man at the end who had not once, all evening, looked at her directly.

"Hello," said Posy.

Corvin looked up. He took in the plait, the solemn face, the cream on her chin. Then, with a care that made something in Linn's chest go odd, he set down his spoon and turned fully on the bench to face her, so that their eyes were level.

"Good evening," he said. "I'm Corvin. I don't know anything about cheese."

Posy considered this.

"That's all right," she said. "Most people don't."

"I believe it."

"Can I sit here?"

"If you like."

She climbed onto the bench beside him. She sat very upright, with her feet not quite touching the ground, and arranged her skirt with immense concentration. Then, after a moment, she said, "You're sad."

The whole end of the table went quiet.

Elsbeth half rose. "Posy..."

"It's all right," said Corvin. He did not look away from the child. His voice was perfectly even. "Why do you say so?"

"You sit funny. Like you're waiting to be told to go."

"Do I?"

"Yes. My da does it when we go to the big house for the rent."

"Posy," said Tam, hoarsely.

"I think," said Corvin gravely, "that you may be right."

Posy nodded, satisfied, and took a bite of pie. A moment later she pointed at the leather satchel at his feet, and asked, with her mouth full, what was in it.

"Letters," said Corvin.

"Whose?"

He was quiet for a moment. Linn found, to her annoyance, that she had stopped breathing in order to hear.

"Somebody's," he said.

"Do you know whose?"

"I do."

"Why haven't you given them?"

The lamp-flame trembled in the wind. Corvin looked down at his hands.

"I haven't found the right moment," he said.

"That's silly," said Posy. "You just give it. You say, here, this is for you." She demonstrated, holding out her crust of pie to him with both hands. "See?"

He took the crust. He looked at it, and at her, and something happened to his face that was not a smile and not anything else that Linn had a name for. It was as though a very small door had opened, somewhere a long way inside him, and a draught from a warmer room had come through.

"Thank you," he said. "I'll remember."

"Good," said Posy, and leaned against his arm, with a sigh, and shut her eyes.

Linn looked away.

She found she needed to look at the stew. She found she needed, quite urgently, to adjust the lamp. She had watched him for three weeks, as a person watches a cat that has come in from the rain and will not be touched, and she had thought she was beginning to understand what sort of man he was. Careful. Cold. A man who counted the exits and kept his bag packed. She had not expected this. She had not expected him to turn on a bench and give a child the whole of his attention as though she were a magistrate. She had not expected the way he held very still so that the little girl might sleep against his sleeve.

It made her want, absurdly, to put her hand against his arm, and ask who had taught him to be so gentle, and why he had never been allowed to use it.

She did not. She stood up and went to fetch the kettle.

It happened as she was coming back.

The porch gave a lurch.

It was a slow, heavy, rolling kind of lurch, as though the whole inn had been lifted an inch and set down again, and every cup on the table chimed. A bowl slid. Fenn grabbed the cider jug. Elsbeth clutched her daughter, and Tam half rose with his hand on the rail. And Linn, who had been standing with the kettle in her hand, felt the floor tilt beneath her, forward and to the left, and knew in the pit of her stomach what it was.

Umber was standing up.

He had been lying quiet in the grass for the better part of an hour, as he always did when the household had guests. He did not rise at night. He had never, in all her life, risen in the middle of a meal. But he was rising now, great shoulder by great shoulder, and the whole porch tipped with him like a ship in a swell. Then she felt him step. One foot, slowly, into the soft turf. A second. A third, steadier.

He was walking north.

"Oh," said Linn. "Oh, no. Not that way."

"What's happening?" said Elsbeth.

"It's nothing. It's nothing, he's only stretching..." She set down the kettle. Her hands were shaking. The porch swayed, and swayed, and then with a great shuddering groan, Umber stopped.

It was not the gentle stop of a creature settling. It was the stop of a creature that has run into a wall. The whole house jolted. A cup fell off the table and broke. Somewhere inside, a shelf went down with a clatter. Posy woke with a cry and Corvin's arm closed around her without a word, and Linn felt the low trembling begin, deep in the timbers, a shiver that ran through the whole of the house like a fever.

"I'm sorry," she said, to the table, to anyone. "I'm sorry, I'll just..." She did not wait to finish. She went down the porch steps on the side of the house, past the roses, and along the narrow rope ladder that hung down the front of the inn to the old creature's mossy shoulder. It was a place she had gone since she was small, a ledge where the great hide rose in a green hummock under the lowest beam. Nobody else used it. Nobody else had been asked.

She put both hands flat against Umber's side.

His hide was warm. It was thick and dry and rough as old bark, studded with pale flowers and clumps of silver lichen, and beneath it she could feel the vast slow drumming of his heart, much too fast. He was staring north. She could not see his eyes from here, but she felt where they were turned, felt the whole great weight of his attention bent toward the dark line of hills on the horizon.

"Easy," said Linn. "Easy, old man. Easy, my lovely. Not that way."

The words came out in a voice she did not use for anyone else. It was low, and cracked at the edges, and had no brightness in it at all. It was the voice of a child talking in the dark to the only creature she had ever been sure would not leave. She laid her cheek against his flank. She closed her eyes.

"We're not going that way," she said. "We never go that way. It's all right. We're going to Larkspur. You like Larkspur. They've got the apples."

He shuddered. A long, low note rolled up through the beams of the inn, a note too deep for a voice, and she felt it in her ribs and in her teeth. He did not move his feet. He did not turn back. He only stood there, shaking, with his great head bent toward the north, and Linn stood with him, and the smile that she had worn for so many years, the one she put on at the door and took off at the stove, quietly slid from her face.

"I know," she whispered. "I know. I'm tired too."

It was the first time she had said it aloud in a very long time. It came out as softly as a breath, and it was gone at once into the dark. She stood with her forehead against the mossy hide, in the cold clean smell of lichen and rain, and let her shoulders drop, just an inch, just for a moment, because nobody could see.

A stair creaked.

She straightened instantly. The smile came back like a shutter slammed down. She turned, bright and quick and ready, and found him standing on the lowest rung of the ladder, with one hand on the rope and the lamplight behind him.

Corvin.

He had followed her out. She had no idea how long he had been standing there. He had Posy's small shawl in one hand, the one the child had dropped, and his face in the dim light was very still. He was not looking at Umber. He was looking at her, and there was nothing in his expression that she could name, no pity, no curiosity, only a steady, level attention, as though he had been handed a page that was written in a language he had once known well.

"He does this sometimes," said Linn, brightly. "It's nothing. He gets a notion. Always the north, for some reason. I've never found out why."

Corvin said nothing.

He was no longer looking at her. He had turned his head, slowly, toward the black line of hills to the north, and in the thin light she saw his face go pale. It was a small thing, a drawing-in around the mouth, a tightening at the jaw, and it was gone almost before she could be sure. But she saw it. She stood with her hand on the great warm flank of the creature who had raised her, and she saw a man look north with the face of someone who has just heard his own name spoken in an empty house.

"The tea's going cold," he said at last.

His voice was quite ordinary.

"Oh," said Linn. "Of course. I'll come in."

"I brought you this."

He held out his hand. It was not Posy's shawl after all. It was her own gray cardigan, the one with the darned elbows, which she had left over the back of her chair at supper and had not noticed was gone. He put it into her hands without a word. It was warm from the lamp.

"You're shivering," he said.

"It's the wind."

"Of course it is."

He did not say anything else. He did not say that he had seen her face before she put the smile on. He did not say that he had heard what she had whispered into the dark. He only waited, with one hand on the rope, until she had put on the cardigan, and then turned and climbed back up the ladder, ahead of her, slowly, so that she would not have to hurry.

Umber's trembling eased. By the time the dishes were cleared, he had folded himself down into the grass again, and the whole house was rocking quietly, like a cradle with a sleeping child in it.

They left in the morning, in a clear, cold, silver light.

Tam had put the donkey back between the shafts, and the cart creaked and settled, and the Wickershams stood on the lane below the inn, in a loose, shy knot, saying the awkward things people say when they have been given more than they know how to repay. Elsbeth pressed three wheels of cheese into Linn's arms, wrapped in cloth, and would not hear a word of refusal. Tam shook Corvin's hand for a long time without saying anything, which Corvin bore with the stiffness of a man being weighed. The donkey leaned on Fenn, and Fenn, overwhelmed, told it that it was a good citizen.

Posy stood a little apart.

She had her hands behind her back. She had been quiet all morning, in a way that had nothing to do with shyness, and now she walked up to Linn with her chin raised and her small face set with the grim resolve of a person about to do something very large.

"This is for you," she said.

She held out her closed fist. Linn knelt, so that their eyes were level, and put out her hand, and the child dropped something into her palm.

It was a whistle. It was no longer than her thumb, whittled from pale, sweet-smelling wood, in the shape of a plump little sparrow with its wings folded, each feather cut with a tiny careful line. There was a hole in its beak. It was worn smooth from handling, and a little dark where small fingers had held it, and she knew at once that it was the most precious thing the child owned.

"Posy," said Elsbeth, softly. "You don't have to..."

"I want to." Posy did not look at her mother. She looked at Linn. "My da made it. It's got a good voice. If you blow it, a bird comes. Maybe not today. But a bird."

"I can't take this," said Linn. "It's yours."

"That's why." The little girl scowled with great determination. "You've got the light. You've got all the people. But you've got nobody that left you something."

Linn went entirely still.

"I looked," said Posy. "There's nothing. Not in the whole house. It's very clean."

There was a silence on the lane. Behind her, Linn heard Elsbeth draw a quick breath, and Fenn, for once, say nothing at all.

"You've got to keep it," said Posy. "Promise. On the fire."

"On the Hearth," said Linn, in a voice that came out quite steady. "I promise."

"For always."

"For as long as I live."

"That's good," said Posy, and, apparently having concluded the business to her satisfaction, turned and marched back to the cart and let her father lift her up.

The cart rolled away down the lane. Posy twisted round on the cart seat and waved, and waved, and kept waving until the road bent behind the hawthorn. Linn stood at the foot of the hill with a sparrow whistle in one hand and a wheel of cheese in the other, and she did not wipe her eyes until the last sound of the wheels had died.

The kitchen shelf by the window was crowded with small things.

She had never thought of it as a collection. It had simply grown. A blue-glass bead from a pilgrim. A tin soldier from a drover's boy. A dried sprig of lavender, tied with red thread. A tiny cracked cup. A handful of other things, all of them small, all of them left behind, all of them stuck into the narrow space between the spice jars and the window as though the house had grown them like moss. She set the whistle among them, at the front, where the morning light could reach it, and stood back and looked.

It looked well there. It looked as if it had always been there.

"You keep everything the guests leave?"

She did not startle. She had known, somehow, that he was in the doorway. He stood with one shoulder against the frame, in the clean new light, a mug in one hand, and his face turned to the shelf. The brown mug, she noted. His fingers curled through the crooked handle as though he had held it all his life.

"Most of it," said Linn.

"Why?"

She thought about it. She turned the little sparrow a quarter turn on its shelf, so that its beak faced the door.

"Because they're not things," she said. "Not really. People don't leave a thing behind because they forgot it. They leave it because they want to be remembered, and they don't know how to say so." She smiled, a little crookedly, and for once she did not know whether it was the bright one or not. "So most of what's on that shelf is what they want me to remember."

He looked at the shelf for a long time. He looked at the sparrow, and the bead, and the cracked cup, and the tin soldier with its painted red coat. When he spoke, his voice was low.

"And what do you want to be remembered by?"

She opened her mouth. She found that she had no answer. The question lay in the quiet kitchen between them, like a stone dropped into a very deep well, and neither of them heard it land.

"The bread's going to burn," said Linn, and fled.

Behind her, in the doorway, Corvin Ashdell stood looking at the shelf a little longer. Then, very quietly, with one scarred finger, he touched the tail of the little wooden bird, as if he were testing whether it was real.