Neva woke because her shadow stood up.

She did not see it happen. She felt it, the way you feel a draft before you know a door has opened: a change in the air against her back, a lightness where a weight had been. She lay on a plank bed in the common room of the Alder Fork waystation, under a blanket that smelled of other people's wool, and she kept her eyes shut and told herself that she was still dreaming.

The room was quiet. A fire ticked in the grate. Somewhere beyond the shutters a cart rolled by and a rooster made a halfhearted announcement.

Then, on the wall beside her bed, in the grey wash of early light, the shape of a tall woman straightened her shoulders.

Neva opened her eyes.

The waystation was a low, smoke-darkened place, the kind built every day's walk along the post-road for drovers and tinkers and anyone too poor for an inn. Six beds, all but hers empty. A hearth. A table with a bowl of turnips on it. And across the whole whitewashed wall, thrown there by no lamp and no window, a shadow that did not belong to anything in the room.

It was cast by a long coat. She could see the hem of it, the way it swung when the figure moved. It had a high collar and a heavy belt, and its hair, if a shadow could be said to have hair, was tied back in a knot that Neva could have drawn from memory. She had watched that knot come undone at the end of a hard day more times than she could count.

She had not looked at her own shadow on the road last night after the three notes. She had walked until the dark came, and she had lain down in the first bed she could find, and she had pulled the blanket over her head like a child, because the alternative was to think.

The shadow turned its head. It looked at her. It had no eyes and she felt the look land all the same.

Then it walked, flat against the plaster, around the corner of the fireplace and down the wall to the door. It stopped there and waited.

"No," said Neva, and her voice cracked in the middle. She sat up. She pulled her knees to her chest. "No, I told them no. I told the boy. I'm going to say it again, in person, and then you can go and find someone who wants you."

The shadow did not answer. It was not the kind of thing that answered. It stood against the doorframe with its weight on one hip, in the posture of a person who has been told many times that she is in the way and has decided to be patient about it, and Neva's stomach turned over, because she knew that posture. She knew it the way she knew her own handwriting.

Oriel had stood like that at the door of the schoolroom the first autumn, when Neva was fifteen and furious and had thrown a slate across the room. Oriel had said nothing. She had leaned on the frame with one hip cocked and waited, and the waiting had been worse than any scolding, because it had been so entirely without contempt.

Neva got out of bed. She was in her boots and trousers still, her cloak on the floor. She put them on with hands that were working too carefully. The waystation keeper had gone out to the yard. There was no one to see her, and she was grateful for that, because she suspected she looked like someone arguing with a wall.

She tried the obvious things first.

She stepped on it. It was easy; the shadow lay across the floorboards by the door and she brought her boot down square on the head. It did not matter. The shadow simply came up through her foot and stood on the other side of it. She tried the dark corner behind the woodpile and stood there with her back against the logs and her heart going. The shadow did not need the light to exist. She could feel it standing at her shoulder in the dark, patient as a well.

"Please," she said, finally, to the empty room, and hated the sound of it.

And the shadow lifted its hand.

It was a small gesture, and she knew it with her whole body. The right hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled, the wrist turned a little as if inviting someone to step across a stream. Come on, then. It was what Oriel had done at the edge of every difficult piece of ground, from the day Neva had first been brought to Thornwick, a thin girl with wet hair and a burn on her arm and no idea what the old woman wanted of her. Come on, then. I've got you.

She had been taught to take that hand. She had been taught it before she had been taught to read.

Neva did not mean to do it. Later, thinking back, she would insist on that. She meant to wave it off, to say something sharp. But her arm was already moving, and her fingers were already reaching, and her palm closed on nothing at all.

It was not nothing.

The room went white at the edges. For a breath she was standing in the waystation, and then she was standing in a stone yard in the rain, small and cold, and a tall woman with a face she had half forgotten was crouched in front of her and saying, patiently, in a low dry voice, *Not with your eyes, girl. Close them. The ground is talking. Stop shouting over it.*

Fifteen. She was fifteen again, and her hands were shaking, and she shut her eyes and felt, for the first time in her life, the Road's long note come up through the soles of her feet like warmth through a stone. She heard herself gasp. She felt Oriel's hands on her shoulders, steady and dry and sure, and underneath the warmth of them, something Neva had never been told and had never known to look for: a fierce, quiet, unbelieving joy. *There you are,* Oriel thought, and it was not Neva's thought. It was a thought arriving in her from outside, from the long way off. *There you are. I wondered if you'd come.*

She was kneeling on the waystation floor.

She had no memory of falling. Her palm was flat against the boards and her whole arm was trembling, and tears were running off her chin and she had not decided to cry. The shadow stood over her with its hand extended, perfectly still.

"That's not fair," Neva said. Her voice came out thin. "That isn't fair. You can't just..."

The ring was hot on her finger.

The memory came again, and she did not take it so much as fall into it.

It was a summer evening, golden, and she was looking across a courtyard at a man. Not Neva looking: someone taller, with a different set of aches in her knees and a different weight on her shoulders. Someone who walked with a slight forward lean, and had a way of folding her arms against the cold even in the heat. The man was twenty-four or twenty-five, sleeves rolled, dark hair damp with sweat, bent over a split fence rail with a mallet in one hand. He laughed at something. His whole face changed when he did. A tightness went out of it. A kind of light came in.

And she felt it. Not Neva, not exactly: a feeling that was in her like a hand in a glove, much too big for her to hold. A great steady sweetness that rose in the centre of her chest, warm as bread, and was so deep and so unhurried that it made her want to sit down. *Look at him,* the feeling said, in no words. *Look at how he is when he thinks no one is watching. I could look at this for forty years.*

Her heart was beating hard. It was beating the way a heart does when it has been in love for years and has not lost the habit of astonishment.

"Taren," Neva said aloud.

The vision shattered. The waystation reassembled itself around her, the cold fire, the turnips, the grey light. She was on her hands and knees and the thing in her chest, the sweet enormous thing, was draining out slowly and leaving a raw patch behind.

It was not hers. She knew that, very precisely. She had never once looked at Taren Voss across a courtyard and felt that. What she had felt, the winters she spent under the same roof, was irritation and awe and a prickling self-consciousness whenever he was in the room, and a bone-deep wish that he would stop looking at her as though he expected her to disappoint him. Not this. Never this.

And still. Her heart had not stopped racing, and the warm place under her ribs was still faintly warm.

She got up. It took two tries.

"You," she said to the shadow, and found she had nothing to put after it.

It had not moved. But when she looked closely she saw that its head was turned a little to one side, as though it were listening, and it occurred to her, with a lurch, that it might be waiting to see if she was all right.

She took the hand again.

She knew she should not. She did it anyway, out of something that was part curiosity and part the old habit of obedience and part a thing she could not name and did not like. The room shivered and went away.

It was night. A cold clear night, with stars out hard and bright, and she stood under the porch of a stone house she knew, with a lantern at her feet. Thornwick Wayhouse. The door was open behind her, and the light fell yellow across the flags, and someone was standing in the yard, tightening the girth of a mare. A slim woman in black. Pale braid down her back, silver in the lantern light. She had her face turned away and the line of her shoulders was held tight, the way it was held when she had something to say and had decided not to say it.

The feeling this time was different. Smaller, and sharper, and much more careful. It did not rise. It ached. It was the feeling of a person standing in front of a window in the cold with her hand flat on the glass. A longing so private it had never had a name. A tenderness so deep it had learned to hide itself in small things, a second blanket, a warmed stone, the kind of attention that watches someone's face to see whether they have eaten.

*She never asks,* the feeling thought. *She would walk off a cliff before she asked. And I never say. Gods, we're a pair.*

The woman in the yard looked round.

It was Isolde, and she was very young. Twenty-two perhaps, still with a face that had not yet decided how much to give away. Her eyes found the porch and the lantern and the tall figure standing there, and they widened slightly, and then she lowered them.

Oriel took a step forward. Neva felt her do it: the weight of her boots on the stone, the exact distance she was crossing. She wanted to say something. She wanted to say *come here*, or *stay*, or the other thing, the three-word thing, and the words came up and stuck in her like a bone. So she said what she always said, instead. The thing she said at the head of every walk, in a voice kept deliberately low and light and dry.

*Walk it like you mean to come back.*

Isolde stood very still. Then she gave a small, tight nod, and put her foot in the stirrup, and rode out of the yard under the stars without looking behind her. And Oriel stood on the porch with the lantern at her feet and watched her go until the dark took her. The ache under her ribs was so large that for a long moment it was all there was.

Neva came back to herself in a sob.

She was bent over with both hands over her mouth. She did not know whose grief it was. It was inside her and it was enormous and it was sorrowing over something that had happened years before, to someone else, in a country she did not own. She cried until her ribs hurt. She cried the way a person cries who has been handed a stranger's letter and found her own name in it.

When she could breathe again, she stood in the middle of the waystation and said, slowly and clearly, to nobody: "I am not going to be a conduit for this."

The shadow regarded her.

"I'm not. I won't be a window for her to look out of at them. They've lost her. They don't need her walking around inside me, wearing my face, reminding them." She dragged a sleeve across her eyes. "I'm going to Thornwick, and I'm going to tell them, and then I am going to find someone who knows how to get you out."

She was aware, as she said it, that she was talking to a shadow on a wall.

The ring burned. Without thinking, she wrenched it off her finger.

It came away hard, against the knuckle, and she felt something tear very slightly in the air, as a seam tears. For one clean moment there was nothing. She stood with the copper band in her fist, and the sorrow lifted away from her like cloud off a hill, and the shadow flattened against the wall, and everything in her was merely her own: a tired, scared, twenty-six-year-old ferrywoman in a poor man's waystation with a headache.

Then she saw the shadow's face change. Not the face, since it had none. But the whole stance changed. The shoulders dropped. The hand that had been held out to her slowly lowered, and the head bowed, as if something in it had been struck.

It stood there. It did not follow her. It did not do anything. It simply stopped.

Neva felt, absurdly, as though she had slapped someone.

"Don't," she said. "Don't do that. That isn't fair either."

She marched to the door, wrenched it open, and flung the ring as hard as she could into the yard.

It went in a small bright arc. She heard it hit the stones beyond the midden, and she heard it skitter, and then there was only a rooster, and the creak of the pump, and the keeper's boy looking at her from the well with his mouth open.

She stood there breathing. The morning air was cold on her wet face. Behind her, in the waystation, the shadow had not followed, and for a few seconds this felt like victory.

Then she realised her finger was cold.

Not just the finger. Her whole left hand. Her arm, up to the shoulder. She looked at it. It looked the same as ever, pale and chapped and scarred across the knuckles. But it felt wrong, like a limb that has been slept on. The ring-mark was white on her skin where the copper had been. She had worn that band for eleven years. She had not taken it off to wash, or sleep, or bathe. She had never asked herself why.

She turned. The shadow was on the floor now, small and low, folded close in the corner by the hearth like a dog that has been shouted at.

And it was shaking. She could see the edge of it tremble.

"Oh, for pity's sake," said Neva.

She walked down the yard. The boy at the well scuttled out of her way. She went past the midden and the woodpile and into the thistles by the wall, and she got down on her knees in the wet and she looked.

It took her a quarter of an hour. She went through the thistles stalk by stalk. She tore her palms. She found a lost button, a dead mouse, the cap of somebody's bottle. And then, in the angle of the wall, where the stones met the earth, a small dull gleam.

She picked it up. It was warm.

She sat back on her heels with the ring in her hand and the cold seeping up through her knees, and she thought: I could throw it in the river. I could sell it. I could bury it. She thought of every possible thing a person might do with a ring, and she turned each one over, and she put it back on her finger, and the warmth rushed up her arm like a held breath being let go.

She hated that. She hated how relieved she was.

"This isn't surrender," she said, into the cold. "I want that understood. I'm only wearing it until Thornwick."

Nobody argued. Back in the waystation, the shadow had risen. It was standing in the doorway again, and when she came up the steps it fell in beside her, its edge touching hers, as quietly as if it had never gone away.

The keeper's boy gave her a heel of bread and a cup of milk and did not meet her eyes. She ate on the road.

It was a hard, bright morning, with frost on the verges and the sun a pale coin low in the east. She set off north, as she had been going, with her pack on her back and her breath smoking. For a while she walked and tried not to think. Her shadow walked beside her, as shadows do, flung long across the frozen ruts toward the west.

Except it was not on her left. It had been on her left all morning, where the sun threw it. And now, as she watched, it slid ahead of her on the road, and then ahead again, until it was walking a full pace in front of her with its long coat swinging, and the sun, impossibly, was coming from behind it.

It did not look back. It knew where it was going.

She stopped. It stopped. It turned, in the way that a shadow can turn without moving, and she could feel it wait.

Then it raised its hand again, palm out this time, and pointed.

North. Up the long white road that ran toward the hills and the grey stone house at the end of it, where two people she had left in the rain were still waiting, and had waited, so Pell said, for five years. The shadow knew the way. It knew every bend and ford and gate. It had known it for twenty years, and it was pointing down the road at the people its owner had loved, and it was asking Neva, very gently, to carry it home.

Neva pulled her cloak tight around her shoulders, and, because she could not think what else to do, she followed.