Day 10 / 100
The morning came up gray and thick, with a cold that went through wool like water through paper.
They had left the Slate Road behind a day ago and come into a country of thorn: low dense scrub, black and twisted, standing in the fog in rows like a crowd of old women with their hands raised. The ground was stony and wet. The cord at Ione's wrist was heavy with beaded damp. Everything she touched came away cold and slightly greasy, and everything she breathed tasted of iron.
She had slept badly. She had dreamed of the laugh on the stones, and then of the ice, and then, which was worse, of a small voice calling from a long way off, a voice she could not name, and she had woken with the rule on her lips, *don't answer*, and her heart going like a hammer.
Wynne had been awake already. She had been sitting at the mouth of their little shelter, with her back to the rock and her knees drawn up, looking out at the dawn. She had looked, Ione thought, rather tired. It was an odd thing to think. The woman was never tired. She was a lamp. But in the thin light, her face had a worn and slightly sunken look, and when she smiled, it came on a second late, like a lamp lit with a damp match.
"Tea?" she said.
"Please," said Ione, and heard the word, and did not know where it had come from.
Wynne's brows lifted. She did not remark on it. She only poured, and passed the cup, and said, in a perfectly ordinary tone, "Careful, it's hot," and Ione took it and held it in both hands and did not drink, for fear that doing so would spoil something.
* * *
It was a little after midmorning that she saw it.
They were crossing a stretch of the thorn where the bushes grew close and tall, threading a path between them in single file, Wynne in front, Ione behind. The fog was thicker here. It lay between the black branches like wet wool, and it muffled everything: the crunch of boots, the creak of the pack straps, even the sound of Wynne humming. Ione was watching the ground. She was counting. She was three hundred and eleven steps into a long and tedious ascent, and she raised her eyes, for no reason, to the left of the path.
Something was caught on a thorn.
It was a very small thing. A scrap of thread, no longer than her little finger, caught on a black spike at the height of her shoulder, and stirring a little in the damp air. It was gray, like everything.
Except that it was not.
Ione stopped. The cord at her wrist drew tight, and she did not notice. She was staring, with her whole body gone still, at a thread of thin loose wool no bigger than a hair.
It was not gray. It was *dark*. It had a depth to it, a blueness, as faint and distant as the memory of a bell. It was the color you see when you close your eyes in a bright room and the light comes through your lids. It was not as it had been on the Slick, not that blaze, not the roaring river of it. It was dim, and shy, and small, and she could not touch Wynne to bring it up. Wynne was ten feet ahead. There was only the cord between them, and the damp air, and the thread on its thorn, and the thread was *blue*.
"Wynne," she said.
Her voice did not sound like her own. It sounded high and strange, as if it had come from a long way down.
Wynne turned. She saw Ione's face, and her own went still.
"What is it?"
"There. On the thorn." She pointed, and her finger shook. "That's indigo. That's *Calder* indigo. I can see it. Without you. I can see it."
She did not wait. She took two steps off the path, stumbling, and put out her hand, and the thorn raked the back of her knuckles in a line of hot scarlet she did not feel. She had the thread between her finger and her thumb. She drew it free of the spike and held it up to the thin light, and it hung there from her fingers, fine and strong and faintly, faintly blue. It was a two-ply yarn, tightly spun, in a twist she knew as she knew her own handwriting: a left-hand twist, a little uneven, spun by a woman who had learned on a drop spindle at the age of six and had never been able to keep the tension steady on the second ply.
"It's hers," she said.
She was not aware of having said it aloud. She was not aware of anything. The whole world had narrowed to a hair of wool. She had a sudden, vertiginous sense of the Pall rushing away to either side of her, leaving her standing on a high and narrow ledge. Her hands were shaking so much that the thread trembled and shimmered.
"Tamsin," she whispered. "It's Tamsin's."
* * *
A long silence passed. When she finally looked up, Wynne was standing exactly where she had stopped, ten feet away, with her hands loose at her sides.
She had gone completely still. It was not the dancer's stillness of the Salt Lamp, the held pose before a flourish. It was an animal stillness, a flat, listening, braced quiet. Her eyes were on the thread. And her face, for the length of one breath, had no smile in it, no brightness, no mask. It was bare, and white, and curiously young, with a look in it that Ione could not read at all.
Then it passed. The smile slid back into place, easy and bright.
"Could be anyone's," said Wynne. "There are dyers all up and down the coast. A bit of wool off a drover's coat. A lot of people have blue."
"Not this blue."
"It's very faint."
"I can see it." Her voice cracked. "Wynne, I can *see* it. I haven't touched you. I haven't touched anyone. How can I see it?"
"I don't know." The reply came too quickly, and she heard it herself, and the smile flickered. "The Pall keeps things. People say. It takes the color out of what it touches, and some of it stays here, in the fog, like a thing in a drawer. Maybe the thread is old, and it's been lying out so long that it's soaked up some of what the Pall took from other things." She spread her hands. "I'm not a scholar, Miss Calder. I only walk."
"You said *Miss Calder*."
"Did I?"
"You haven't, in four days."
Wynne said nothing. She was looking at the thread in Ione's hand. The sound of the fog was very loud.
"Which way did it come from?" said Ione.
She turned slowly on the spot, looking at the thorn, at the direction in which the loose end had been streaming in the air. She saw a faint straight line through the black scrub, running away to the northeast, where the ground rose into a long low ridge. She saw that the thorn there was bent, and broken, as though someone small had once pushed through in a hurry. Her heart gave a great bound.
"There," she said. "That way. We go that way."
"It's not our road."
"I don't care about the road."
"The gate lies north-north-west," said Wynne. "That ridge runs the wrong way. It's the Hollow Moor, Ione. It's a bad place. It's no place to take a client, and it's no place to take someone who's—" She stopped.
"Who's what?"
"Who's got a hundred days and has used ten of them."
"I've the days to spare."
"You don't. Not if you want to reach the gate before it closes."
Ione took a step toward the ridge. The line at her wrist snapped taut, and she looked back and saw Wynne with both hands on the cord and her heels dug into the gravel, standing as if she meant to hold her in place by force.
"Let go."
"No."
"It's my sister's thread."
"It's *a* thread," said Wynne. "It's a thread I'd like to look at when we're not standing in the middle of a thornfield with the fog coming up. Please. Ione. Please."
It was the *please* that stopped her. It was the second time in her life she had heard that woman say the word, and it came out as raw as an open wound.
She stood with her back to the ridge and the thread in her fist and the line between them drawn tight as a bowstring. She did not know what her face was doing. She could feel, behind her eyes, a pressure like a tide about to turn.
"If you can see color without me," said Wynne, more quietly, "then I don't know what it means. And neither do you. And I don't want to follow it blind into the Hollow Moor until we do. That's all I'm asking."
"And if she's there?"
"Then she'll still be there tomorrow."
"You don't know that."
"No," said Wynne. "I don't."
It was the first honest thing she had said all morning. Ione heard that, and could not decide what to do with it.
* * *
In the end they struck a bargain, because Ione was, above all things, a person who bargained. They would go round. They would swing east for a single day, along the lower edge of the ridge, and look from a distance, and see what could be seen. If there was a track, they would follow it. If there was a sign, they would mark it. If not, they would turn north again, and Ione would put the thread away and not mention it for a week.
"Three days," she said.
"One."
"Two."
"One and a half," said Wynne, "and I carry the pack."
"You don't carry my pack."
"Then one."
"Then one and a half, and you don't carry my pack."
"Terrible woman," said Wynne, and her voice shook, but the corner of her mouth was moving. "All right. A day and a half."
They shook on it. That is to say, they did not shake. They looked at each other across ten feet of cord, and nodded, solemnly, like two ambassadors, and each of them turned away.
Ione folded the thread into the page of her notebook and put the notebook inside her coat, against her ribs, where she could feel it. She walked very steadily for a quarter of an hour. Then, quite without warning, the thing she had been holding at arm's length came up the back of her throat, and she put a hand over her mouth, and stopped, and stood quite still among the black thorns, and wept.
She did not make a sound. She had not made a sound in five years. She had cried the way a stone sweats in a cold cellar: without moving, without noise, with the water simply coming. It ran down her face and into her collar, and she let it, and breathed through her nose, and kept her hand over her mouth. It was a mad, ordinary, helpless thing, to weep over a hair of wool. She could not stop.
The line did not go taut. It did not go slack. It lay in the gravel between them in a long loose loop, and she heard the soft crunch of boots as Wynne came back along it. The boots stopped a pace away. They did not come closer.
There was a pause.
Then a faint rustle, and a small thump, and Ione looked sideways through her tears and saw that Wynne had sat down on a flat stone beside the path, perhaps four feet from her, and was looking, with great and apparent interest, at a thorn.
She did not say anything. She did not offer a hand or a handkerchief or a joke. She did not look at Ione at all. She only sat, with her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists, close enough that Ione could hear her breathing, and she stayed there.
It was the most tactful thing anyone had ever done for her. It was also, in some obscure way, the hardest to bear.
Ione wept for a long time. When she had finished she wiped her face on her sleeve, took a breath that shuddered all the way down, and said, without turning, "I'm all right."
"I know," said Wynne.
"You needn't sit there."
"I know that, too."
She did not move. After a moment Ione sat down on the ground, quite suddenly, with her back against the black thorn and her legs out in front of her. They sat there, four feet apart, in the cold, and neither of them said a word.
* * *
They found a hollow to camp in, late, under a lip of rock above the lower slope of the ridge. Wynne laid the fire. Ione sat with the notebook open on her knee and the thread laid across the page, and looked at it until her eyes burned. It had gone gray with the fall of evening. She could still see the memory of its blue, as one sees the shape of a window after the lamp is out.
She slept at last, in the end, from simple exhaustion, curled on her side with her hand curled around the notebook and her face turned to the fire.
It was close to midnight when Wynne rose.
She went softly, in her stockinged feet, to the edge of the firelight and stood looking up the dark slope of the ridge, where the black thorn marched away into the blind white. She stood there a long time. In the dim glow the pale ends of her hair seemed to drift on the air like smoke.
She was holding something. It was a very short length of gray cord, no longer than her hand, with small crooked knots tied in it at close and careful intervals. She turned it over, and over, and over in her fingers. She did not look at Ione. She did not look at the ridge. She looked at the dark that lay between them, and her lips moved.
"Not yet," she said.
It was a whisper, scarcely a breath. It was said to the fog, to the black thorn, to something up there on the ridge that listened. It was said in the voice of someone speaking to a child, or an old friend, or a debt.
"Not yet. Give me a little longer. I'll bring her. I promised. I'll bring her to you."
The fog did not answer. It never did.
Wynne stood for a moment longer. Then she put the cord away inside her coat, and smoothed down her sleeve, and went back to the fire. She sat down, and drew up her knees, and smiled out at the dark, a small, tired, perfectly bright smile with no one to see it. The wind turned. Far out on the ridge, something very faint and very long drawn out might have been, if one were listening, the sound of a name.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Day 10 / 100
The morning came up gray and thick, with a cold that went through wool like water through paper.
They had left the Slate Road behind a day ago and come into a country of thorn: low dense scrub, black and twisted, standing in the fog in rows like a crowd of old women with their hands raised. The ground was stony and wet. The cord at Ione's wrist was heavy with beaded damp. Everything she touched came away cold and slightly greasy, and everything she breathed tasted of iron.
She had slept badly. She had dreamed of the laugh on the stones, and then of the ice, and then, which was worse, of a small voice calling from a long way off, a voice she could not name, and she had woken with the rule on her lips, *don't answer*, and her heart going like a hammer.
Wynne had been awake already. She had been sitting at the mouth of their little shelter, with her back to the rock and her knees drawn up, looking out at the dawn. She had looked, Ione thought, rather tired. It was an odd thing to think. The woman was never tired. She was a lamp. But in the thin light, her face had a worn and slightly sunken look, and when she smiled, it came on a second late, like a lamp lit with a damp match.
"Tea?" she said.
"Please," said Ione, and heard the word, and did not know where it had come from.
Wynne's brows lifted. She did not remark on it. She only poured, and passed the cup, and said, in a perfectly ordinary tone, "Careful, it's hot," and Ione took it and held it in both hands and did not drink, for fear that doing so would spoil something.
* * *
It was a little after midmorning that she saw it.
They were crossing a stretch of the thorn where the bushes grew close and tall, threading a path between them in single file, Wynne in front, Ione behind. The fog was thicker here. It lay between the black branches like wet wool, and it muffled everything: the crunch of boots, the creak of the pack straps, even the sound of Wynne humming. Ione was watching the ground. She was counting. She was three hundred and eleven steps into a long and tedious ascent, and she raised her eyes, for no reason, to the left of the path.
Something was caught on a thorn.
It was a very small thing. A scrap of thread, no longer than her little finger, caught on a black spike at the height of her shoulder, and stirring a little in the damp air. It was gray, like everything.
Except that it was not.
Ione stopped. The cord at her wrist drew tight, and she did not notice. She was staring, with her whole body gone still, at a thread of thin loose wool no bigger than a hair.
It was not gray. It was *dark*. It had a depth to it, a blueness, as faint and distant as the memory of a bell. It was the color you see when you close your eyes in a bright room and the light comes through your lids. It was not as it had been on the Slick, not that blaze, not the roaring river of it. It was dim, and shy, and small, and she could not touch Wynne to bring it up. Wynne was ten feet ahead. There was only the cord between them, and the damp air, and the thread on its thorn, and the thread was *blue*.
"Wynne," she said.
Her voice did not sound like her own. It sounded high and strange, as if it had come from a long way down.
Wynne turned. She saw Ione's face, and her own went still.
"What is it?"
"There. On the thorn." She pointed, and her finger shook. "That's indigo. That's *Calder* indigo. I can see it. Without you. I can see it."
She did not wait. She took two steps off the path, stumbling, and put out her hand, and the thorn raked the back of her knuckles in a line of hot scarlet she did not feel. She had the thread between her finger and her thumb. She drew it free of the spike and held it up to the thin light, and it hung there from her fingers, fine and strong and faintly, faintly blue. It was a two-ply yarn, tightly spun, in a twist she knew as she knew her own handwriting: a left-hand twist, a little uneven, spun by a woman who had learned on a drop spindle at the age of six and had never been able to keep the tension steady on the second ply.
"It's hers," she said.
She was not aware of having said it aloud. She was not aware of anything. The whole world had narrowed to a hair of wool. She had a sudden, vertiginous sense of the Pall rushing away to either side of her, leaving her standing on a high and narrow ledge. Her hands were shaking so much that the thread trembled and shimmered.
"Tamsin," she whispered. "It's Tamsin's."
* * *
A long silence passed. When she finally looked up, Wynne was standing exactly where she had stopped, ten feet away, with her hands loose at her sides.
She had gone completely still. It was not the dancer's stillness of the Salt Lamp, the held pose before a flourish. It was an animal stillness, a flat, listening, braced quiet. Her eyes were on the thread. And her face, for the length of one breath, had no smile in it, no brightness, no mask. It was bare, and white, and curiously young, with a look in it that Ione could not read at all.
Then it passed. The smile slid back into place, easy and bright.
"Could be anyone's," said Wynne. "There are dyers all up and down the coast. A bit of wool off a drover's coat. A lot of people have blue."
"Not this blue."
"It's very faint."
"I can see it." Her voice cracked. "Wynne, I can *see* it. I haven't touched you. I haven't touched anyone. How can I see it?"
"I don't know." The reply came too quickly, and she heard it herself, and the smile flickered. "The Pall keeps things. People say. It takes the color out of what it touches, and some of it stays here, in the fog, like a thing in a drawer. Maybe the thread is old, and it's been lying out so long that it's soaked up some of what the Pall took from other things." She spread her hands. "I'm not a scholar, Miss Calder. I only walk."
"You said *Miss Calder*."
"Did I?"
"You haven't, in four days."
Wynne said nothing. She was looking at the thread in Ione's hand. The sound of the fog was very loud.
"Which way did it come from?" said Ione.
She turned slowly on the spot, looking at the thorn, at the direction in which the loose end had been streaming in the air. She saw a faint straight line through the black scrub, running away to the northeast, where the ground rose into a long low ridge. She saw that the thorn there was bent, and broken, as though someone small had once pushed through in a hurry. Her heart gave a great bound.
"There," she said. "That way. We go that way."
"It's not our road."
"I don't care about the road."
"The gate lies north-north-west," said Wynne. "That ridge runs the wrong way. It's the Hollow Moor, Ione. It's a bad place. It's no place to take a client, and it's no place to take someone who's—" She stopped.
"Who's what?"
"Who's got a hundred days and has used ten of them."
"I've the days to spare."
"You don't. Not if you want to reach the gate before it closes."
Ione took a step toward the ridge. The line at her wrist snapped taut, and she looked back and saw Wynne with both hands on the cord and her heels dug into the gravel, standing as if she meant to hold her in place by force.
"Let go."
"No."
"It's my sister's thread."
"It's *a* thread," said Wynne. "It's a thread I'd like to look at when we're not standing in the middle of a thornfield with the fog coming up. Please. Ione. Please."
It was the *please* that stopped her. It was the second time in her life she had heard that woman say the word, and it came out as raw as an open wound.
She stood with her back to the ridge and the thread in her fist and the line between them drawn tight as a bowstring. She did not know what her face was doing. She could feel, behind her eyes, a pressure like a tide about to turn.
"If you can see color without me," said Wynne, more quietly, "then I don't know what it means. And neither do you. And I don't want to follow it blind into the Hollow Moor until we do. That's all I'm asking."
"And if she's there?"
"Then she'll still be there tomorrow."
"You don't know that."
"No," said Wynne. "I don't."
It was the first honest thing she had said all morning. Ione heard that, and could not decide what to do with it.
* * *
In the end they struck a bargain, because Ione was, above all things, a person who bargained. They would go round. They would swing east for a single day, along the lower edge of the ridge, and look from a distance, and see what could be seen. If there was a track, they would follow it. If there was a sign, they would mark it. If not, they would turn north again, and Ione would put the thread away and not mention it for a week.
"Three days," she said.
"One."
"Two."
"One and a half," said Wynne, "and I carry the pack."
"You don't carry my pack."
"Then one."
"Then one and a half, and you don't carry my pack."
"Terrible woman," said Wynne, and her voice shook, but the corner of her mouth was moving. "All right. A day and a half."
They shook on it. That is to say, they did not shake. They looked at each other across ten feet of cord, and nodded, solemnly, like two ambassadors, and each of them turned away.
Ione folded the thread into the page of her notebook and put the notebook inside her coat, against her ribs, where she could feel it. She walked very steadily for a quarter of an hour. Then, quite without warning, the thing she had been holding at arm's length came up the back of her throat, and she put a hand over her mouth, and stopped, and stood quite still among the black thorns, and wept.
She did not make a sound. She had not made a sound in five years. She had cried the way a stone sweats in a cold cellar: without moving, without noise, with the water simply coming. It ran down her face and into her collar, and she let it, and breathed through her nose, and kept her hand over her mouth. It was a mad, ordinary, helpless thing, to weep over a hair of wool. She could not stop.
The line did not go taut. It did not go slack. It lay in the gravel between them in a long loose loop, and she heard the soft crunch of boots as Wynne came back along it. The boots stopped a pace away. They did not come closer.
There was a pause.
Then a faint rustle, and a small thump, and Ione looked sideways through her tears and saw that Wynne had sat down on a flat stone beside the path, perhaps four feet from her, and was looking, with great and apparent interest, at a thorn.
She did not say anything. She did not offer a hand or a handkerchief or a joke. She did not look at Ione at all. She only sat, with her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists, close enough that Ione could hear her breathing, and she stayed there.
It was the most tactful thing anyone had ever done for her. It was also, in some obscure way, the hardest to bear.
Ione wept for a long time. When she had finished she wiped her face on her sleeve, took a breath that shuddered all the way down, and said, without turning, "I'm all right."
"I know," said Wynne.
"You needn't sit there."
"I know that, too."
She did not move. After a moment Ione sat down on the ground, quite suddenly, with her back against the black thorn and her legs out in front of her. They sat there, four feet apart, in the cold, and neither of them said a word.
* * *
They found a hollow to camp in, late, under a lip of rock above the lower slope of the ridge. Wynne laid the fire. Ione sat with the notebook open on her knee and the thread laid across the page, and looked at it until her eyes burned. It had gone gray with the fall of evening. She could still see the memory of its blue, as one sees the shape of a window after the lamp is out.
She slept at last, in the end, from simple exhaustion, curled on her side with her hand curled around the notebook and her face turned to the fire.
It was close to midnight when Wynne rose.
She went softly, in her stockinged feet, to the edge of the firelight and stood looking up the dark slope of the ridge, where the black thorn marched away into the blind white. She stood there a long time. In the dim glow the pale ends of her hair seemed to drift on the air like smoke.
She was holding something. It was a very short length of gray cord, no longer than her hand, with small crooked knots tied in it at close and careful intervals. She turned it over, and over, and over in her fingers. She did not look at Ione. She did not look at the ridge. She looked at the dark that lay between them, and her lips moved.
"Not yet," she said.
It was a whisper, scarcely a breath. It was said to the fog, to the black thorn, to something up there on the ridge that listened. It was said in the voice of someone speaking to a child, or an old friend, or a debt.
"Not yet. Give me a little longer. I'll bring her. I promised. I'll bring her to you."
The fog did not answer. It never did.
Wynne stood for a moment longer. Then she put the cord away inside her coat, and smoothed down her sleeve, and went back to the fire. She sat down, and drew up her knees, and smiled out at the dark, a small, tired, perfectly bright smile with no one to see it. The wind turned. Far out on the ridge, something very faint and very long drawn out might have been, if one were listening, the sound of a name.
You've reached the end of this chapter