Day 1 / 100

The list was in Ione's own hand, small and square and ruthless, and she worked down it the way she worked down a ledger: item, price, strike through, next.

Lamp oil, six flasks. Oilcloth, two bolts. Rope, forty fathoms, tarred. Salt cod. Ship's biscuit. Dried apples. Wool socks, four pair. Blankets, two. Flint and steel, and a spare of each. Tallow. A tin of goose grease for cracked hands. And at the bottom, underlined twice in case she lost her nerve about it: dye kit, already packed.

Netters' Green was waking around her in gray. The stalls went up one canvas at a time, the fishwives shouted prices across one another, and the air smelled of woodsmoke and herring and wet dog. In the dim before sunrise everyone looked equally tired. She had forgotten, in five years, how much of a town's mood lived in its colors: the red of a cold cheek, the yellow of a festival ribbon, the green of a fresh-cut cabbage. Now it all arrived as one long, dull sentence, and she read it by shape and gesture alone, the way you read a language you only half remember.

She paid what she was asked. She did not haggle. Haggling meant conversation, and conversation meant someone might ask her where she was going, and she was not ready to hear herself say it in daylight.

Hobb Ansley's provisions stall was the largest on the green, a broad, many-shelved tent with a lantern at every corner. Hobb himself was a broad man with a face that had once, she remembered, been the color of boiled ham, and he was weighing out ship's biscuit with the focus of a man defusing something.

"The Calder girl," he said, without looking up. "Up early."

"Biscuit. Six pounds. And the rope."

"Rope's at the back. Heard you've been up to the Guild." Now he did look up, and his small eyes were kind in a way that made her want to be somewhere else. "Heard you got someone, in the end. Harrowgate, was it?"

"Yes."

"Ah." He sighed, a long bellows of a sigh, and began to tie up the biscuit in paper. "Shame. Brave girl. Best there was, that one. Everyone said so."

Ione held out her coin. "The rope."

"Tell her we'll miss her, will you?" Hobb said, accepting the coin. "Tell her I said she was always good for a joke."

He went to fetch the rope. Ione stood with her hands at her sides and her thumb working at the stain at the edge of her nails, and she could not have said what, exactly, was wrong. It was only that the words sat badly in her ear, like a seam turned the wrong way, a selvedge that would not lie flat however you smoothed it. Brave girl. Best there was. Always good for a joke. She turned them over and found nothing broken in any of them, and still she felt the faint, familiar prickle of a bolt of cloth gone wrong in the vat, an error you could not yet see but could already smell.

She did not correct him. She told herself that it was because there was no point.

* * *

It was not only Hobb. All morning it followed her down the rows, small and ordinary and everywhere. At the chandler's, a woman said, "Harrowgate, was it? Oh, she was a lovely guide." At the lamp seller's, a boy no older than ten said that his da had once been taken through the first marker by Miss Wynne, and she had been so kind and so funny, and he was sorry she was gone. He said it quite cheerfully, wiping his nose on his sleeve, and Ione, who had not yet had a single sip of tea, stared at him until he took a step back.

"Gone where?" she said.

"Oh. I mean." The boy glanced at his mother, who was suddenly very busy with a flask of oil. "I mean she's going. Into the Pall. With you."

It was an answer that fit. It did not satisfy her. She paid for the oil, and the boy's mother would not meet her eye, and when she walked away she felt the weight of the town at her back, kind and sad and polite, speaking of a living woman as though she had already been put in the ground.

It made her angry, and she did not understand why it made her angry. She had known the Guildmistress for years. She had known Hobb since she was small enough to ride on his counter. It was not as though any of them was cruel. If anything, they were being tender. But the tenderness had an edge on it like the sharp lip of a cut jar, and Ione, who had run her hand along enough of those edges to know them blind, found herself wishing very badly to put something down on top of it.

* * *

Wynne Harrowgate arrived at the green as the sun came up, and the town changed around her like water around a stone.

Ione saw it from across the row. The woman came down Tanner's Stair with her pack on one shoulder and her coat open and her plait coming loose, and she was already talking: to the fishwife on the corner, whose knee she asked after by name; to a girl carrying eggs, whom she told a joke so terrible that the girl nearly dropped them; to a man with a barrow, whom she asked whether his mother had mended. She knew everyone. She remembered everything about everyone, the knee and the cough and the second cousin in the south. She waved at a dog. It was as though she were walking the length of a long, familiar corridor, touching each door lightly as she passed, so that no one would feel overlooked.

Ione watched, and she thought: she's saying goodbye.

The thought came out of nowhere and was gone before she could look at it. By then an old woman had stepped out of a stall and caught Wynne by the sleeve.

She was a tiny, stooped thing in a shawl the color of nothing at all, with a face crumpled like a dried apple. She was holding a ribbon, a narrow braid of pale thread, undyed, and she pressed it into Wynne's hand and folded Wynne's fingers shut over it with both of her own.

"For the road, love," the old woman said. Her voice carried, thin and cracked. "For the one who's going. Mother Tibb's blessing, as I gave your mam's."

Wynne bowed, deeply, with a flourish, one hand to her heart. "Mother Tibb, you spoil me."

"Someone should."

"I'll wear it to the death." She said it lightly. The old woman made a small sound, not quite a laugh, and patted her cheek, and the sound followed Wynne for a moment as she tied the ribbon to the strap of her pack in a quick, neat bow. Her sleeve slid back as she worked. She dragged it down again before the sun could reach her skin.

Ione saw her look at the ribbon a heartbeat too long, with her smile still on and nothing behind it, the way a person looks at a thing she has seen before and had hoped not to see again.

* * *

On the night the Pall came early, Ione had been working.

It had been the autumn she was twenty-three, three weeks before the first frost, and the dye works had been warm and loud and smelling of ripe indigo. There had been a rush order, a bolt of the deep Calder blue for the harbormaster's daughter's wedding lining, due across town by dusk. It had been late. Ione had been behind on the second dip. Tamsin had been standing at the other end of the long table with her sleeves wet to the shoulder and her hair coming out of its braid, saying the thing she had been saying for a month.

"We can't keep this up. Not with only the blue. There's madder-red work going begging at the Tollivers' yard, plain, quick, steady money. We take the red and we keep the lease, and we do the blue on the side, for people who can pay."

"We do the blue," Ione had said. "Calder blue or nothing."

"Ione."

"It's the only thing we are."

"We're also a roof," Tamsin had said. "We're also two people who'd like to eat."

It was an old argument and they had worn it smooth. Ione could no longer remember which of them had started it that night. She remembered only that she had been tired and the second dip had gone cloudy and her sister's voice had been exactly the voice their mother used to use, patient and reasonable and utterly impossible to win against. She had snapped. She remembered it as she remembered the smell of the vat: with no distance at all.

"Then take the order yourself," she had said, "and stop telling me what Mother would have wanted."

Tamsin had looked at her for a long moment. She had been twenty-one. She had had a stripe of indigo along her jaw, where she had wiped her face with her wrist. Then she had said, "Fine," in a small, level voice, wrapped the finished bolt in oilcloth, and pulled up her hood.

Ione had gone back to the vat. She had not said wait. She had not said anything. She had heard the door and thought, good, and she had gone on working, and the next thing she knew the harbor bell was ringing the Pall warning, three hours before any warning had ever been given, and when she went to the window the whole of Vethmoor was white.

The bolt had been found, three winters later, on the shingle. It was the first of the cloths.

Tamsin had not been found at all.

* * *

Ione came back to herself with her hand pressed flat against the edge of Hobb Ansley's counter, hard enough that the grain had printed itself into her palm. The rope was waiting in a neat tarred coil beside her elbow. Hobb had finished the biscuit. He was looking over her shoulder with the particular sympathy of a man who has spotted the subject of his own gossip coming up the lane.

"There she is," he said, in a lowered voice. "Poor Harrowgate. Poor lass. Brave to the last, you know. She was always so cheerful, it breaks my heart."

The second "was" went through Ione like a splinter.

She had not meant to speak. She had meant to take the rope, count out the coin, and walk away. But her mouth had gone ahead of her, cold and precise, in the voice she used on a supplier who had tried to sell her rotted woad.

"Wynne is guiding me."

Hobb blinked. "Of course, of course, I only meant—"

"Wynne is guiding me," Ione said again, "and she is a very good guide, and she will be back in a hundred days, and you can tell her yourself." She picked up the rope and put the coin on the counter with a click. "Present tense, Mr. Ansley."

The words hung there, absurd, a little shrill. Hobb's mouth opened and closed. Across the aisle, the fishwife with the bad knee had stopped talking. Ione's face went hot, and she cursed herself, because it was none of her business, because it was a harmless slip of the tongue, because she had hired the woman for her skill and not her sad story. But the words had come out and she would not take them back, and there was a strange loose lightness under her ribs, as if she had finally set something heavy down.

Then she turned, and Wynne was standing six feet behind her with her pack on her shoulder.

* * *

She had heard. Of course she had heard. Ione saw it in the very small stillness of the woman's face, the grin held in place a half-beat too long, like a pane of glass that has taken a stone and not yet decided to crack.

Then Wynne stepped forward and said, brightly, "Is that what I'm doing? Here I thought I was being kidnapped."

"Wynne," said Hobb, flushing to the roots of his hair.

"Hobb. You look well. How's that knee of yours?"

"It's the other one," said Hobb, helplessly.

"The other one, then. Give it my love." She took the rope from Ione's arms, slung it over her own shoulder as though it weighed nothing, and glanced at the list sticking out of Ione's coat pocket. "Six flasks of lamp oil. That's forty days, Miss Calder. We're going for a hundred."

"Sixty days in reserve."

"Stubborn."

"Prepared."

"I'd call it both." Wynne started up the row, and Ione fell into step beside her because there was nowhere else to be. The sun had cleared the roofs and was putting a thin, pale light on the stalls, and in it Ione could see the edges of the woman's hair, lighter than they had been last night, lighter than anything had a right to be. She looked away. "That was quite firm," Wynne said after a little. "Back there."

"It was accurate."

"Was it?"

The question was light. The walk was not. Ione kept her eyes on the cobbles, on the bright rope bobbing at Wynne's shoulder, on anything but the profile beside her. "You are guiding me," she said. "It's in the contract."

"So it is." Wynne was quiet for the space of three steps. Then she said, in a different voice, lower and with no trick in it, "Nobody's done that before. Corrected him." And before Ione could answer she added, quick and sparkling, "Don't do it again, you'll make me vain."

"I'll make no promises."

"No promises. Not even small ones." Wynne slanted her a look, bright and sidelong and, for a flicker, entirely sincere. "I think I'm going to like working for you, Miss Calder."

"I'm not working for you."

"No," Wynne agreed. "Other way round. I keep forgetting."

Ione did not answer. She had the odd feeling of having been handed something very small and very breakable and not knowing which pocket to put it in. She put her thumb to the stain beside her nail, and rubbed.

* * *

The sea gate stood at the bottom of the harbor, where the old wall met the shingle: two weathered posts and a rusted iron arch, the road running through it down to the strand. Past it the beach ran out a hundred yards and then simply stopped, cut off as cleanly as a loaf by a knife, where the Pall began.

There were three markers between the gate and the fog. The first was an iron post as tall as a man, wrapped to the shoulder in rags and ribbons, offerings, memorials, some old, some new, all gray. The second was a cairn of white stones. The third was a stake, black with age and bound with a coil of rope that someone had tied there and no one had ever dared to untie. Beyond the third the sand went on, but it looked different, flatter, as though it had been combed.

Wynne stopped at the first marker. The tide was out. The wind had dropped. Where the beach met the fog there was no sound at all, no gulls, no surf, nothing, only a pale, enormous quiet that pressed on the ears.

"Rules," Wynne said, and unlooped the guide cord from her pack. "Today you only need one. When we're past the second marker, you walk where I walk. Not near it. Where." She held up the cord, a long, supple coil of dyed rope, and looked at it rather than at Ione. "I'll tie you on once we're through. For now, you can still go back."

"I'm not going back."

"I know." Her mouth quirked. "It's the ritual. You'll let me have the ritual." She took a step toward the fog, turned, and walked backward for a few paces, hands in her pockets, grinning at Ione across the widening gap. In the flat white light she looked like a figure cut out of paper, bright at the middle and fraying at the edges. "Last chance to say 'turn back,' Miss Calder."

Ione looked at her. She looked past her, at the wall of fog, flat and patient and absolutely without color, and thought of a bolt of blue lying on the shingle, and of a hood pulled up, and of a small level voice saying fine. She thought of a hundred days. She thought of a woman who had heard the word was applied to herself and had made a joke about it.

Her thumb stopped.

"No," she said.

She walked past the first marker, and past the second, and stopped at the foot of the third, level with the woman who had waited for her there. Wynne's grin had gone gentle at the edges. She did not say a single word. She only inclined her head, the barest nod, the nod of one professional to another, and turned, and Ione followed her out over the hard, combed sand toward the place where the world went white.