Day 6 / 100

The first waystation was a long low hall dug into the lee of a hill, roofed in turf and slate, with a chimney that breathed smoke into the fog and a lantern hung over the door on a chain. Wynne had been coming here for eleven years. She knew the third step was loose and the door stuck in damp weather and the keeper's dog had died two winters ago and been replaced by a second dog, which was also called Dog.

She knew all of that, and she still stood a moment on the threshold with her hand on the latch, because there was a particular kind of warmth that came out of a room like this one, and it did not reach her anymore. It reached everyone else. She watched it reach Ione, who stepped in behind her and stopped just inside the door, and let her shoulders come down by half an inch, and did not seem to know she had done it.

"Shut the door," said a voice from the hearth. "You're letting the white in."

The keeper was a narrow, gray, upright woman named Odrey Pell, who had a face like a closed ledger and a way of looking at newcomers as though she were calculating the cost of their burial. She did not rise. She did not greet them. She jerked her chin at two benches by the fire, set a kettle on the hook, and went back to whatever she had been mending, a sack, a net, perhaps her own temper.

"She's taciturn today," Wynne murmured, setting down her pack. "Usually she won't stop talking."

"Does she ever stop talking?"

"No. That's what's worrying."

Ione's mouth moved very slightly at one corner. It was not a smile. It was the place where a smile would have gone if she had allowed one. Wynne noted it, as she noted most things about the Calder girl, and filed it carefully, and did not look at it again.

* * *

Two days of walking had passed between the cave and the light. They had been, on the whole, quiet days. Ione had said "sorry" less and less often when the line went taut, and had stopped saying it altogether sometime on the second afternoon, and Wynne had been unreasonably glad of that. She had also not touched her. Neither of them had spoken of it. They had simply gone on walking at the correct distance, with the correct amount of line between them, as if a contract could be made out of rope and good manners.

It had been very hard work, and Wynne was not good at hard work that looked like nothing.

So when Odrey Pell said, without lifting her eyes from her mending, that there was a pot of dried fish and a bag of oats and a crock of apples in the cellar and that guests were welcome to feed themselves, Wynne said, "I'll cook," before she had thought about it at all.

It was something to do. It was also, if she was honest, something she wanted to do.

She had not cooked for anyone since before the Pall took her wrist. A guide who fed a client was a guide who got close to a client, and close was the one thing she had trained herself out of. But the Calder girl had asked, in the cave, with her stiff face and her steady hands, if she might hold a hand as an experiment. Nobody had asked her anything for two years. She had wanted to give something back, and she had only one thing she knew how to give.

She took the fish down from its hook and soaked it. She chopped an onion. She found a half-wheel of hard cheese, a scrap of bacon, a small bag of barley, and a jar of something sour and green that Odrey Pell identified with a grunt as pickled sea-kale. She set the iron pot over the fire and let it heat and began, as she had once begun every evening of her girlhood in her mother's kitchen, to hum.

It was a fisherman's stew, the kind that tasted of salt and smoke and long evenings. She made it too carefully. She skimmed it twice. She added the apples at the end for sweetness, because dried apples were the only soft thing in the larder, and she let the barley go until it was thick and the fish had fallen into soft pale flakes. She tasted it three times. The first time she could not taste anything at all, which was one of the ways the Pall had of keeping her honest, so she did what she had learned to do, and went by the smell.

Across the room, Ione sat on the bench with her blanket around her shoulders, watching her hands.

* * *

"Eat," Wynne said, and set a bowl in front of her.

Ione looked at the bowl as though it might contain a clause.

"It's not a trick," said Wynne. "It's fish. There is, I admit, an apple in it. Someone has to be responsible for that, and it is me."

Ione picked up the spoon. She ate a mouthful, and then another, steadily and with great concentration, with her head down and her elbow tucked in against her ribs. It was the way a person ate who had learned to eat quickly because there might not be a second helping. She finished the bowl before Wynne had finished serving her own. She set down the spoon.

"That was good," she said.

Wynne waited. A thing like that ought to have a second half. In Wynne's experience, people who said *that was good* in that tone were usually about to say *where did you learn it* or *you must have been a cook* or *you'll make someone a fine wife*. She braced for any of them.

Ione said nothing further. She wiped the spoon on the edge of her sleeve and then, with the air of someone concluding a transaction, reached into her coat and took out her purse.

Wynne had time to think, quite clearly: *oh, no.*

The purse opened. Three silver pieces came out, not flung, but laid on the table one after another, with small, definite, businesslike clicks. They sat in a neat row beside the empty bowl. They were bright in the firelight. They were far too much.

"For the food," said Ione. "And your labor. It's not in the contract, and I won't have you feed me for nothing."

* * *

There is a thing that happens to a smile when it has been placed on a face for a very long time. It stops being a thing the face does and becomes a thing the face is. Wynne's had been in position for nearly two years. It did not fall now. It simply stopped, in mid-curve, like a clock whose pendulum has been caught in someone's hand.

She looked at the three coins.

She knew precisely what they were. They were not an insult. Ione Calder did not insult people; she had no talent for it, and she would not have known how to begin. They were an act of respect, offered in the only currency Ione had ever trusted, and they said, clearly: *I owe you, and I would like to stop owing.* They were the sentence of a woman who could not bear to be given to.

And knowing that, Wynne found, did nothing at all to help.

"That," she said, and heard her own voice come out bright and steady and entirely hers, "is considerably more than the dinner was worth."

"It's what the labor's worth."

"It was an apple and an onion."

"And three hours of your time, and the heat, and the care." Ione's face did not change. "I'll not be in debt for a meal, Wynne."

There it was again: the name, said plainly. It had rolled out the way a stone rolls out of a pocket, and it should have been a gift. It sat on the table beside the coins like a fourth piece of silver.

Wynne laughed. It was the good laugh, the public one, the one that turned heads in the Salt Lamp, and she was proud of it, a little, even as she heard it ring. "Then I'll take it," she said, "and I'll buy you a drink when we get home, and we'll call it even." She picked up the coins one at a time and put them in her pocket, and the weight of them against her thigh was a small, dull, ordinary weight, the weight of a thing that had been said.

Ione nodded, once, relieved. The matter was closed.

Wynne got up and began to clear the bowls.

* * *

Ione sat very still on the bench and watched the woman gather the dishes, and tried to work out why she felt as though she had trodden on something in the dark.

She had done it correctly. She was sure of that. The meal had been made, and it had been good, and she had paid for it. That was how things were done in the world she knew: you took, and you paid, and nothing was owed on either side, and so nobody could ever stand in your doorway at midnight and say *you promised*. She had learned it from her mother, who had learned it from a hard winter and a bad landlord. It had kept the works standing.

But the Harrowgate woman's smile had stopped.

It was a very small thing. She had gone on talking and laughing and gathering the bowls, and nobody else in the room would have noticed. But Ione had spent twenty years watching for the moment a dye stopped taking, and she had seen it stop. She had seen, for half a breath, a face with nothing at all on it. And then the lamp had come back on, brighter than before, and the woman had made a joke about drinks.

She had hurt her.

Ione sat with the knowledge like a stone in her shoe. She did not know how. She did not know what she had done wrong. She only knew, with a cold, certain, ledger-minded clarity, that she had made an error somewhere in the sum, and that the error was a person.

She stood.

"I'll wash," she said.

"You don't need to."

"I'll wash." She took the pot from the hook before Wynne could reach it. It was heavy and hot, and she nearly dropped it, and Wynne caught the other handle without thinking, and for one terrible moment they stood with the pot between them, each with a hand on it, and neither letting go.

Nothing happened. The color did not come. Their hands did not touch; there was iron between them, and the width of a thumb.

"Sit," said Ione.

It came out as an order. It came out as it always did, hard and short and without any softening, and she heard it land.

Wynne's brows rose. She let go of the pot, slowly. "Sit," she repeated, with a very faint, light, bright edge to it. "Of course. Anything you say, Miss Calder. I'm only the guide."

"I didn't mean—"

"No, no. It's quite all right." She sat down on the bench, hands folded, perfectly obedient. Her face was open and friendly and as shut as a door. "I'll just sit here. I've a very good seat."

Ione carried the pot to the washtub in the corner and began to scrub it with a vengeance. She scrubbed the iron until her knuckles ached, and she knew, with the part of her that understood the way things went wrong, that she was making it worse, that the harder she scrubbed the further she was walking from whatever she ought to have said. She did not know what she ought to have said. She had never had to say it.

* * *

It was Odrey Pell, in the end, who broke it.

She had not looked up from her mending the whole evening. When Ione set the clean pot upside down on the board with a sharp clack, she said to the net in her lap, in a flat dry voice that carried perfectly across the room, "Fourteen winters I've kept this hall, and I've never had a client pay a guide for supper."

"It was fair," said Ione.

"I didn't say it wasn't fair." The needle went in and out. "I said I'd never seen it."

There was a long silence. The fire popped. Somewhere in the walls, a wind found a crack and sang a single thin note and stopped.

"Goodnight," said Wynne, and rose, and bowed to the room with an extravagant flourish, one hand over her heart. "I'm told I'm a very good guest. I'll take the bench by the window, Odrey, if it's all the same, I like the draft."

"You like the draft because you can't feel it," said Odrey Pell, to her net.

It was said without cruelty. It was said as a plain fact, between two people who had known each other a long time. Wynne's smile did not move. "That too," she said lightly, and went away down the long room and lay down on the window bench with her back to them all.

Ione stood at the washtub with her hands in the cold water.

She thought: *she can't feel the draft.*

She thought of a palm held to a warm stone, and of fingers spread to a fire that did not warm them, and of a hand pulled out of hers too fast. She stood there until the water went cold, and then colder, and then she dried her hands on her skirt and went to her own bench and lay down and looked at the rafters, and the rafters were gray, and so were her thoughts.

* * *

Wynne did not sleep. She lay on the window bench with her cheek on her arm and the pale glass cold against her forehead, and listened to the others breathe.

The room settled. Odrey Pell banked the fire and went up her ladder. The dog turned in a circle and subsided. Ione's breath, behind her, slowed and deepened and caught, and slowed again, in the way of someone who was a very long way from rest and trying hard to be nearer.

After some time, Wynne rose, quietly, and padded back across the hall to the washtub.

The pot was clean. It was extremely clean. It was scoured down to the pale metal, with a bright worn patch on the bottom where Ione had gone after a stain that was not there. Wynne stood and looked at it, and a strange hot ache rose in her throat, and she did what she always did with an ache, which was to find something to do with her hands.

She took the rest of the bowls, which had been done, and did them again. She wiped the board. She scraped out the last of the stew into the dog's dish. She was not being useful. She was being busy, which was a different thing, and she knew the difference, and she did it anyway.

The water in the tub was still, a flat black disc under the faint ember light, and when she bent over it to rinse the ladle she saw her own face in it.

She saw the line of her jaw, and the dark of her eyes, and the hair coming loose from its plait. And at the edge of the picture, where the water caught the glow, she saw her right ear.

It was clear. Not pale, not pink, not cold-colored. Clear, like the rim of a glass held up to a lamp, so that she could see the firelight through the curl of it and the faint shadow of the cartilage inside, like a leaf pressed in a book.

She looked at it for a very long moment.

Then she lifted a hand and tucked a loose strand of hair carefully behind it, so that it was hidden, and straightened up, and set down the ladle.

"Three silver," she said, softly, to the dark water. "That's a great deal of money for a meal." And she smiled at her own reflection, because it was a habit, and went back to the window bench to lie awake until morning.