Day 8 / 100

Ione woke at four, as she had woken every day of her adult life, and lay in the dark composing the day.

It was a pleasant exercise, and one she was very good at. First the packs, checked and re-checked. Then a cold breakfast, eaten standing, to save the fuel. Then out of the hall by half past the hour and onto the trail, with six full hours of walking before the light turned, and a good ten miles under their boots before noon. She laid the hours out in her head like bolts of cloth on a long table, each one measured and cut and exactly the right size for the work. Beyond the waystation, according to Wynne's oilcloth map, the way ran flat for a long stretch, a plain of hard-packed shingle that the Guild called the Slate Road. A day and a half at a good pace. She could do it in a day.

The hall was dark and cold. She dressed by touch, rolled her blanket, hauled on her boots, and was at the door with her pack on her shoulders before the first gray smear of morning had so much as touched the window.

"Where are you going?"

The voice came from the bench by the window, muffled and thick with sleep. Ione did not turn.

"The road."

"It's the middle of the night."

"It's four."

"I know. That's what I said." There was a rustle. A pale shape sat up in the dark, with its hair standing up in a bright and absurd crest, and one hand wiping at its eyes. "Ione. Miss Calder. Dear heart. Nobody walks the Slate Road at four."

"I do."

"You don't, though, do you, because you'd be dead by seven." Wynne yawned enormously. "Go back to bed. The fog's asleep. You can't walk a sleeping fog, it wakes up cross."

"That's not a thing."

"It's the only thing."

They looked at each other across the dark room, Ione in the doorway with her pack on, Wynne on the bench with her blanket around her like a chrysalis. It was the first thing resembling an argument they had had since the stew. It was, Ione realized with some surprise, a good deal less awful than the silence.

* * *

They left at nine.

It was a compromise, and Ione did not like it. She had stood in the doorway for twenty minutes, arguing the point in clipped, reasonable sentences, and Wynne had countered every one with an absurd and serene refusal, until at last Odrey Pell had said, without looking up from her porridge, "If you don't both shut up, I'll charge you for the noise," and Ione had sat down on the bench to wait, rigid with disapproval, with her pack on her lap.

They ate a hot breakfast. It was porridge, thick and gray and tasteless to her tongue, and Wynne ate it with enormous enjoyment, tapping her spoon against the bowl, telling Odrey Pell the long and mostly untrue story of a goat she had once met in the Tollivers' yard. Ione watched the light creep up the window. She watched it go from black to charcoal to dull pearl, and did the arithmetic, and the result was five hours lost.

"Five hours," she said, at the door.

"Four and a half."

"You are unbelievably slow."

"I'm *correct*," said Wynne, with deep contentment. "It's different."

The Slate Road ran out ahead of them, a broad, flat, gleaming plain under the thin fog, with a hundred thousand scraps of gray stone laid edge to edge like the scales of some enormous fish. They stepped out on to it, and it rang faintly under their boots. Ione set a good brisk pace. She had it all worked out. At this rate they would make the Hollow Stones by dusk, and the next waystation by the following noon.

"You're going very fast," said Wynne, behind her, in the pleasant tone of a person remarking on the weather.

"I'm going at a walking pace."

"You're going at a pace I'd call a march. A brisk and angry march. It's very impressive. I'm only saying, I'd slow down."

"We're losing the day."

"We're not losing the day. We're just not spending it in a hurry." The cord at Ione's wrist went gently slack, as though Wynne had stopped walking. "Look at the fog."

"I am looking at the fog."

"No. Look at it."

Ione turned, with exasperation, and looked. She saw a smooth gray wall of mist, standing still. She saw nothing else. She said so.

"Hm," said Wynne. "Look at the top edge. There, where it meets the lighter gray. It's leaning. Do you see the lean? It leans east in the morning, and it leans west in the afternoon, and when it changes sides it moves. Not the way a wind moves. The way a sleeper turns over." She stood on the stones with her hands in her pockets and her hair in a wild crest, looking up at the white with the tender, wary attention of a woman looking at an animal she knew well. "It's about to turn over. I'd rather we weren't in the middle of the road when it does."

"You're making that up."

"Mostly," Wynne admitted. "But not that part."

Ione looked at the wall of white, and at the woman, and at the long gleaming plain stretching out to nothing in front of her. A small, dry, irritable voice in her said that the wall had not moved in two hours and that she had a plan.

She took another five steps.

* * *

The fog turned over.

It was not at all like a wind. There was no gust, no rush, no warning. There was simply a sound, a low, vast, soft exhalation, as of an enormous sleeper turning in a very large bed. And then the whole bank of mist, which had stood quiet and upright for two days, tilted, slumped, and began to roll across the plain.

It came sideways, from the east, fast, in a low smooth tide as high as Ione's waist and as wide as the horizon. It was perfectly silent. Where it passed, the slate gleamed for a moment and then went dull, as if breathed on. And inside it, for a single heartbeat before it reached her, Ione saw something that made her stomach go cold: the edges of the stones were *moving*. Slowly, soundlessly, they slid, they shifted, they closed up over the seams between them, so that the whole surface of the plain ran together into one smooth unbroken sheet, like skin healing over a cut.

"Stop," said Wynne.

It was not loud. It was not a request.

Ione stopped. She stood with one foot in the air and her whole body held in suspension, and felt the cord at her wrist go taut, and then tauter, as Wynne, ten feet behind her, took two long strides and caught the line in both hands and *hauled*.

Ione staggered backward. She came up hard against the woman's chest, and the two of them went down together onto the cold stones, and the fog rolled over them in a wave, soft and white and cold as milk.

"Don't move," said Wynne, in her ear. "Don't look up. Hold your breath and count to forty."

She counted. She counted into the white, and in the white she could not see her own hand, and the weight of the woman beside her was the only fixed thing in a world gone liquid. She heard the faint sliding hiss of the slate closing over the gaps in the road. She heard Wynne breathing, even and slow, and the breaths were counted, too: she was counting under her breath, steadily, calmly, as if it were an ordinary thing to do.

At forty the fog thinned. At fifty it lifted. At sixty it was gone, rolled away west across the plain like a great white animal going home, and the Slate Road lay shining in front of them.

But not as it had been.

Where they had been about to walk, the plain had closed. There was no seam, no join, no gap between the stones. It was a single slick surface, smooth as a pane of glass, and past it, a hundred paces on, the road simply ended in a long, flat, glittering drop, a sheet of black water spread wide and still beneath a skin of thin gray ice.

"Oh," said Ione.

"Mm," said Wynne.

They lay on the stones with their breath going up in clouds, side by side. Ione became aware that she was still pressed to the woman's arm, the whole length of her shoulder against Wynne's, and that nothing was happening, no color, no flood. Just the plain rough wool of a coat, and a faint smell of woodsmoke and cold air, and a warmth that was not quite warmth, a sort of quiet, a presence.

She sat up at once. She did it quickly, and busily, and brushed her skirt.

"If we'd been on the middle of the road," she said.

"Mm."

"If I'd got there at dusk, as I intended."

"Mm-hm."

"Stop saying *mm*."

"I'm not saying anything," said Wynne, who had gone very pink with the effort of not saying anything. She was lying flat on her back with her arms spread, looking at the sky, her whole face quivering with suppressed light. "I'm being silent. I'm being a rock. I'm being a very, very large and modest rock."

"You are insufferable."

"I am a rock."

Ione stood up. She dusted herself off, in tight furious motions. She did not look at the ice. She did not look at the place where she would have stood. Her heart was beating very hard, and she was angry, and she could not work out whom she was angry at.

Wynne rolled over onto her stomach and propped her chin in her hands. "The thing is," she said, "I wasn't going to say anything. It's only that I've waited eleven years for someone to turn up who got up at four. I'd always wondered what it would be like. And it's *terrible*. Do you know, I haven't felt so threatened since the goat."

"There was no goat."

"There was a goat."

"I've heard that story three times in a day. The goat changes color."

"That's what makes it a good story." She sat up, plait in disorder, face alight. "It's a very honest goat. It's only the colors that vary."

* * *

It was the *colors* that did it.

Ione could not have said afterward whether it was the word or the idiocy of the sentence or merely the day's accumulation of nerves, but something rose up in her, hot and fierce and quite beyond her control, and she opened her mouth to say something cutting, and what came out was a snort.

A small, undignified, startled snort. It escaped before she could stop it. She clapped a hand over her mouth, and her shoulders jerked, and she felt the laugh come up out of her chest like a bubble out of mud, rising, rising, and she could not catch it.

And Wynne, at the same moment, with her mouth half open on the next absurdity, made a small whooping sound and fell over backward on the stones.

They laughed. They laughed in the same breath, with no cue and no warning and no art in it at all. Ione bent double with her hands on her knees, helpless, with tears starting in her eyes. Wynne rolled onto her side and pressed her face into her sleeve and shook. It went on for much longer than anything so foolish deserved. Each time one of them recovered, the other made some small sound, and they were off again.

At last it wound down, in hiccups and gasps. Ione straightened, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, and found that she was breathing hard and her ribs ached and her face hurt in a way she did not at first recognize.

It was her mouth. She had been smiling. She had been smiling so wide and so long that the muscles had begun to cramp.

She stopped, at once. She put her hand against her cheek and felt the edge of it fade, and she looked up, and Wynne was looking at her.

Wynne was lying on her side on the stones with her cheek on her arm, flushed and tousled and shining. And the look on her face was not the bright quick performance, the show-grin, the one that turned heads. It was a different thing entirely: it was wide-eyed and unguarded and a little startled, like a person who has opened a door in a house she knew well and found a room she had never seen.

It lasted a heartbeat. It was beautiful, and Ione did not know what to do with it.

She looked at the plain. She looked at the ice. She looked at the line of the horizon, with a concentration she might have given to a difficult measurement, and her thumb went to the stain on the edge of her nails and began to rub, back and forth, hard.

"Right," she said, to the ice. "Well."

* * *

They rested on the stones for a quarter of an hour, because it seemed foolish not to, and because neither of them quite trusted her legs. Wynne dug a heel of bread out of her pack and broke it in two and held out the larger half without a word. Ione took it. She did not pay for it. She was aware of not paying for it, as she might have been aware of not breathing.

It was a small thing. It was the smallest thing. She chewed the bread, which tasted of nothing, and watched the light change on the glass of the new-made ice, and said, at last, in a voice she did not entirely recognize, "Your pace."

Wynne turned her head.

"We'll go at your pace," said Ione, to the ice. "For the Slate Road. I'm told you know the fog."

"Is that," said Wynne, after a pause, very carefully, "an apology?"

"It's a change in the schedule."

"Mm." It was said very softly. When Ione glanced aside, Wynne was looking at the bread in her hand with a small, crooked, private smile that was not for anyone, and not quite hers either. "I'll take it," said Wynne. "As a change in the schedule."

They got up. They tied the cord, checked the knots. They took the long way round the new ice, and Wynne chose each step with that easy musical care, and Ione matched her, and the pace was slow, much slower than Ione would have chosen, and for the first time in five years she did not mind.

Half a mile on, without warning, Wynne snorted, and Ione, without turning, said, "The goat was green," and the line went slack between them as both of them fought and lost.

It was only afterward, much later, when the road was quiet and the light had gone amber and Wynne was humming again in front of her with the plait swinging at her back, that Ione understood what had been strange about it. It had not been the laugh. It had been that for the length of it, for ten minutes, for twenty, she had forgotten to count. She had forgotten the days. She had forgotten, for the whole of a long gray afternoon, to be a woman who had lost something.

She put her thumb to the stain. She did not rub it. She only held it there, as one holds a hand over a flame to see if it is still warm.

*Tamsin is,* she told herself, firmly, and walked on.