The Harrow ran brown and slow at dawn, and the ferry at Harrow Reach ran with it, or against it, depending on how hard a person was willing to lean on the rope. Neva Calloway leaned hard. Hand over hand she hauled the guide-line, wet hemp sliding through gloves gone stiff with cold, while the flat-bottomed boat ground its way across forty yards of river with a cart, two bad-tempered goats, and a salt merchant who had paid extra not to be talked to.

She was good at not talking. Five years had made an art of it.

Pull, step, pull, step. The rope was honest work, and the best thing about honest work was that it left no room in the head. She did not think about the river, or the weather, or the fact that the morning mist had the same pearl colour it used to have over a stone house far to the north. She thought about her hands. Her left thumb turned the copper ring on her third finger, round and round, a worn band the colour of old pennies, too plain to be worth stealing. She had stopped noticing when she did it. Madda had noticed years ago and had the decency never to mention it.

"Landing," Madda called from the stern, where she leaned on the long sweep like a woman holding up the sky. "Mind the goats."

The goats did not need minding. The goats were the only ones aboard with any opinions, and they had already expressed all of them. Neva brought the boat in against the pilings, dropped the ramp, took the merchant's coin without looking at his face, and watched cart and goats and man wobble up the muddy bank into the day. Then she coiled the rope, sat down on the gunwale, and let her hands shake the cold out of themselves.

This was the whole of her life now, and she had built it on purpose: a ferry, a cot in the loft above Madda's net-house, a river that went in one direction and asked nothing of anyone. Nobody on the Reach called her Pathfinder. Nobody called her Oriel Venn's girl. Most days nobody called her anything but Neva, and she had grown fond of how small the word was. It fit in a pocket. It did not weigh anything at all.

She heard the horse before she saw it.

Hooves on the hard road above the landing, a fast and ragged rhythm, the sound of an animal pushed far past its patience. Neva's thumb stopped on the ring.

The rider came down the bank in a spray of mud: a lean young man in the grey wool and slate-blue sash of a Wayhouse courier, hat gone, hair plastered to his forehead, his horse lathered white to the knees. He had ridden through the night, and probably the night before that. Anyone could see it. And tied around his left arm, just below the shoulder, was a band of black cloth.

Neva knew what the black meant before he opened his mouth. Every child on every road knew it. A black band was carried one way, by one kind of messenger, for one kind of news.

She stood up so fast the boat rocked under her.

"Neva Calloway?" He had to stop and drag in a breath to say it. "I'm Pell, from Thornwick Wayhouse. I was told you'd be on the ferry at Harrow Reach, and if not the ferry then the loft above the net-house, and if not there..." He swallowed. "I'm sorry. I was told to say it plainly. Oriel Venn is dead."

The river kept moving. That was the strange thing. The gulls kept screaming over the fish-heads on the pilings, and Madda's sweep kept dripping, and up on the bank the goats kept up their complaint. The world did not so much as hesitate.

"Nine days ago," Pell said. "She went through the Thornwick stones and into the Road, and she came out again, but not..." He stopped, started over. "I wasn't there. That's all I was told. I have the notice. It's the old form, with the seal." He fumbled inside his coat and came out with a small packet bound in black thread, and held it out to her over the gap of water between the boat and the bank.

Neva did not take it.

"She was thirty-eight," she said. It was a stupid thing to say. A number. But it was the number that came.

"Yes."

"She was never ill."

"No." Pell wet his lips. "Mistress Calloway, there's more, and I don't know how to say it well. Her Shadow has no keeper. By the old law a Pathfinder's Shadow chooses who comes next, and it hasn't settled on anyone. It slipped out of the Wayhouse on the second night. No one has seen it since."

He said it the way a person reports a fire in a neighbouring valley, something enormous that has not yet reached him and that he cannot stop looking at.

Neva looked at the packet in his hand, at the black thread, at the way his fingers shook. Her own hands had gone quiet. She could not feel them.

"Tell them no," she said.

Pell blinked. "Mistress..."

"Tell them I'm sorry for the loss, and that I mean it, and that I'm not a Pathfinder. I haven't been one for five years. I couldn't find my way to the end of the Reach road on a dark moon, let alone through the Hollow." She heard how steady her voice was and was faintly horrified by it. "Whatever the law says about Shadows choosing, it has picked the wrong door."

"It hasn't picked any door," Pell said miserably. "That's the trouble."

"Then let it choose someone who still walks the Road."

"Mistress Marek sent me."

The name landed like a stone dropped into a still well. Neva did not move. She felt the ripples go out through her anyway, ring after ring, all the way to the edges.

"Isolde," she said, and her own voice sounded strange to her, rusty, like a gate that had not been opened in years. In five years she had not said that name aloud once.

"She didn't give an order. She asked." Pell looked at her with the earnest misery of a young man handed a task too large for him. "I've served at Thornwick six years and I have never heard her ask anyone for anything. Not me, not the cook, not the Wayhouse council. She gives instructions and they're followed. But she stood in the yard and put this in my hand and said, 'Tell her I'm asking.' Those words. Nothing else."

Neva looked at the river. It was very brown, and very ordinary, and it was carrying a single dead leaf past the hull in no particular hurry.

"Tell her no," she said again, more quietly. "I'm sorry."

Pell nodded the way people nod when they have expected to be refused and still hoped. Madda, without a word, put the sweep down and came forward and took the black-bound packet out of his hand herself. She fed him bread and cold bacon standing up at the water's edge, and gave his horse a bucket and a rub-down, and at midday he rode back up the road with Neva's answer. He did not look back. Neva watched him until the road bent behind the willows and there was nothing left to watch.

The notice stayed on the piling where Madda had tied it. When Neva looked again, an hour later, it was gone, and Madda's apron pocket had a square corner in it, and neither of them said anything about that either.

The afternoon went by like any other afternoon. Neva worked the rope. She carried a woman and six crates of hens across, and a pair of tinkers, and a boy delivering a coffin-lid to the next village, which she did not find funny, though Madda made a sound in her throat that suggested she might have. Pull, step, pull, step. The sun slid low and red. The mist came up off the water in the evening and made everything soft.

It was only when the ferry was tied up for the night, and the loft had closed around her with its smell of tar and dried fish and old rope, that Neva allowed herself to sit down on the edge of the cot and stop.

Her pack was under the cot, where it had been for five years. She had never really unpacked it. She had never really admitted that was what she was doing. She pulled it out, undid the buckles, and dug past a spare shirt and a whetstone and a bundle of waxed twine until her fingers found the flat tin at the bottom.

She set it on her knee. For a while she only held it.

Then she opened it, and there they were.

Five letters. Five folded sheets sealed with plain brown wax, one for every autumn since she had left. They had come by the post-road with no return mark, but she had known the hand on the first one from across the room: a long, slanting script that always looked like it was leaning into a wind. Oriel's hand. Oriel had never in her life written anything short, and so each letter was thick, and each seal was whole.

She had never broken one.

The corner of the first letter was soft as cloth from handling. That was the shameful part, if she let herself look at it. Five years of picking them up and putting them down again. Five years of thinking, this winter, and then telling herself, next winter. What was in them? Anger? Forgiveness, which would be worse? Instructions? News of the house? She did not know. She had arranged her whole life so that she would not have to know, and the arrangement had held, and now it was nine days too late for any answer she might have wanted.

She thought about the night she had left.

It had been raining then too. She had been twenty-one, and Oriel had been out on the Road, three nights into a long walk, and the house had been quiet in the particular way that a house is quiet when the person who holds it together is gone. She had stood in the back kitchen with her pack half buckled and her hands not working properly, and Taren had come in from the yard.

He had not asked her where she was going. He had looked at her face, and then at the pack, and then he had crossed the kitchen and put his big, scarred hands on the strap she could not manage, and pulled it through, and tightened it, and tested it with two sharp tugs, the way he tested every knot he ever tied. That was all. He had not said stay. He had not said go. He had stood there with his head bent, so near she could see the line of his jaw working, and a pulse in his throat, and his thumb pressed hard against the white scar on his wrist. Then he stepped back, and his face closed like a door.

And on the stair above them, in the dark, Isolde.

Neva had not heard her come. She never did. Isolde had stood on the third step with her arms folded and her braid over one shoulder, watching, her mouth pressed flat as though she were holding something behind her teeth with all her strength. She had not spoken. She had looked at Neva the way a person looks at a sentence that has stopped halfway, and Neva had gone out into the rain rather than finish it.

That was the last time she had seen either of them.

The ring was warm.

She noticed it slowly, the way one notices that a room has gone quiet. The copper on her finger was no longer the temperature of the cold loft or of the cold tin. It was the temperature of skin. It was warm the way a hand is warm when it has been holding yours for a long time.

Neva went very still.

Beneath her, past the floorboards and the net-house and the mud and the silt, the river was moving. She had listened to that river every night for five years and thought she knew every sound it made. But there was something else under it now, something she had not heard since she was twenty-one and had told herself she had imagined it and then, eventually, believed it. One long low note, as deep as the lowest string of an instrument, drawn out under her feet and under the earth, a note that was not a sound at all but a direction. It said: north. It said: this way. It said what the Road had always said to her, in her bones, in the soles of her feet, in the years Oriel had taught her to listen.

She had thought it was gone. She had thought it had been taken out of her the night she walked away, like a tooth.

It was only sleeping.

"No," Neva whispered, to no one.

The note held. Warm copper pressed against her finger, and the unopened letters lay in the tin like a row of small closed mouths, and her chest hurt.

That was the part she was not prepared for. Not the Road, not the ring. The ache. It rose under her breastbone, wide and sudden, like grief, but it was not shaped like grief for a woman she had left behind. It was shaped like hands: Taren's knuckles on that strap, the rough warmth of them, the way he had not looked up. It was shaped like a silent stair and a mouth pressed shut. She missed them. She missed those two, with an unfairness that took her breath, as if she had been walking for five years with a stone in her shoe and only now had someone told her it was there.

She did not want to examine why it was them. Not Oriel, whose death she ought to be crying for. Those two. It did not feel entirely like her own wanting. It felt too big, and too sure, and too old.

She closed the tin. She put it back in the pack. She did not sleep.

In the morning she was up before the river fog had lifted. She packed slowly, with the care of a woman packing for a short trip, which was how she told herself it was. Spare shirt. Whetstone. Twine. The tin, which she wrapped in the shirt so that it did not rattle. When she came down the ladder Madda was already sitting on the bottom step with two mugs of something hot and an expression that said she had been sitting there for a while.

"Going somewhere?" Madda said.

"Thornwick." Neva took a mug. It gave her something to look at. "A few days. I'm going to say no to their faces, properly, since I couldn't manage it any better the first time. Tell them to find someone else for the Shadow. Then I'll come back."

"To say no."

"To say no."

"In person. Two days up the post-road, two days back, to say a word you said yesterday on my ferry to a boy with mud to his ears."

"It's not the same," said Neva. "It's different when you say it where they can see you."

Madda drank her tea. She was a broad woman with a face like weathered oak and eyes the same grey as the river, and she had a way of looking at a person that made the lie inside a sentence stand up and wave. She looked at Neva for a long time.

"You've been waiting five years for a reason to go back," she said at last. "Don't you dare call it a chore."

Neva opened her mouth. Nothing came out of it.

She thought of arguing. She had a dozen arguments, and every one of them was true: that she had left for good reasons, that the Road had never wanted her, that she was a ferrywoman now and content. But under every argument ran that low warm note, and under the note ran the ache, and Madda had heard her walk the loft at night for five years, and had not said a word. There was nothing in her that could make the argument stand up straight.

"I'll be back by the week's end," Neva said, which was not an answer.

"I know you will," Madda said, in a tone that suggested she knew nothing of the sort.

She would not let anyone else take Neva across. She stood at the sweep herself, at dusk, with the sky going the colour of bruised peaches and the Harrow lying wide and quiet and nearly black, and she brought the boat over to the far landing with one long, steady pull. The ramp went down. The far bank smelled of wet clay and willow leaves.

"Eat something on the road," said Madda. "Walk in the middle of it, not on the edges. And Neva."

"Yes?"

"The loft'll still be there."

It was the kindest thing anyone had said to her in a very long time, and she could not trust herself to answer it. She nodded once, adjusted her pack, and stepped off the boat.

The road ran up from the landing between two rows of willows, pale in the dusk. She climbed it with her head down and her hands in her sleeves, and the river fell away behind her, and the only sounds were her boots on the gravel and the small wind in the leaves. She did not look back. That was a rule she had kept for five years: do not look back.

She had gone perhaps thirty paces when she heard it.

Someone was humming.

It was very faint, and very close, just behind her left shoulder. Three notes. A low one, a lower one, and then one that rose, unfinished, like a question. Three notes that every walk had begun with, every morning of the four years she had followed a long coat out the front door of Thornwick Wayhouse, the way a woman clears her throat before she speaks.

She knew those notes better than her own name.

Neva stopped walking. Her breath had stopped somewhere in her chest and would not move. Slowly, very slowly, she turned around.

The road was empty. The willows hung still. The landing was a small dark shape far below, with one lantern lit on the boat, and Madda a smaller shape beside it, not yet turned away. There was no one else in the dusk.

But the sun was low at her back, and it had thrown her shadow out long across the gravel, down the slope, toward the water, and it was too long. A person's shadow at that hour should have reached perhaps twenty feet. This one went on and on. It ran down the road, over the grass, and out across the black surface of the Harrow, where the river did not break it and did not carry it, where it lay quite still on the water like a path.

And it was a little taller than she was.

Neva stood in the road with the copper ring warm on her finger, and the long shadow lay quiet in the gloaming, and somewhere very near, in no voice at all, the three notes began again.