It rained on the second evening, the thin cold rain of the hill country that does not fall so much as hang in the air and wait to be walked through. By the time Neva came over the last ridge she was wet to the skin and her fingers had gone white around the strap of her pack, and the long dark shape of the shadow walked a pace ahead of her, unbothered by weather.

Thornwick Wayhouse stood where it had always stood, at the end of the valley road, with the hills crowding close behind it and the great grey standing stones just visible on the slope above, like a row of patient old men with their backs to the wind. It was a long, low building of fieldstone and slate, with a deep porch and a smoking chimney at each end. There was a lantern lit over the door. Under the lantern, nailed to the oak, hung a band of black cloth, dark with rain, with its two ends moving slightly in the wind.

She stopped at the gate.

It was smaller than she remembered. That was the first thing, and it was such a stupid thing to notice that she almost laughed. For five years it had been enormous in her mind, a great stone mouth with a light in it. Now it was a house. It had a loose shutter on the upper floor, and a barrow tipped against the wall, and somebody had mended the porch step with a plank that did not quite match. A house that had been lived in, and was still being lived in, and was going on being a house with a dead woman's name on the black cloth over its door.

Her shadow had stretched across the yard ahead of her and lay along the flagstones, its head touching the doorstep. It did not go in. It waited for her. She was not sure whether this was courtesy or an ability to sense, as she did, exactly how much she wanted to turn around.

"I know," she said to it, low. "I'm going."

The gate latch was cold and wet under her palm. She lifted it. It swung inward without a sound, because someone had oiled the hinges.

She was halfway across the yard when the door opened.

It opened before she had so much as lifted a hand. The light poured out across the flags, yellow and warm, and in the doorway, with the glow behind her, stood a woman in black.

Neva's feet stopped on their own.

Isolde Marek had not changed, and she had changed completely. The braid was the same, long and pale and tight, laid over her left shoulder, silver where the lantern caught it. The line of her shoulders was the same. The sword at her hip was the same, plain and well-kept, in a scabbard worn dark at the throat. But the face had thinned. Something had gone out of it, or been put away. There were shadows under her eyes like thumbprints, and a hardness at the corner of her mouth that had not been there at twenty-two. She was twenty-nine and she looked like someone who had been standing guard for a very long time.

She did not look at Neva.

She looked over Neva's head. Her gaze went past the wet hair and the drenched cloak and went directly to the flagstones, to the long tall shape lying across them with its head at the step. Her eyes stayed on it. Nothing moved in her face at all.

The seconds went by. A drop of rain ran off the lantern and landed on the stone between them. The shadow lifted a hand, a very small movement, palm turned slightly up, as if in greeting.

Isolde's fingers closed on the hilt of her sword.

It was a small thing. The knuckles whitened and that was all. She did not draw. But Neva, who had spent the better part of a decade learning to read that woman's silences, felt it go through her like a nail.

And then something else went through her, quite apart from fear.

It came up from nowhere, from the pit of her chest. It was warm, and soft, and so tender it made her eyes sting. It was the way you feel when you see a person you love standing in a doorway in the cold after a very long day. It said, quite clearly, in a voice that was not Neva's: *You didn't sleep. You never sleep. Come in, come in, love, you'll catch your death.*

Neva pressed her hand flat to her sternum. It's the walking, she told herself. It's the damp and the two days on the road with no real meal. She was tired. She was tired and strange things happened to tired people. It was nothing.

Isolde's gaze lifted at last. It rose from the shadow and came across the yard, unhurried, and arrived at Neva's face. Grey eyes, light as ice on a pond. They went over her with care, like a physician's. They stopped for half a second on the copper band at her left hand, and moved on.

"The Shadow came on ahead of you," Isolde said. "Pell reported it on the road two days ago. I'd hoped it was a mistake."

Her voice was level and a little hoarse, as though she had not used it for some time. She said it as a statement of fact.

"It followed me from the river," said Neva. "I didn't ask it to."

"No." Isolde's mouth tightened. "I don't suppose you did."

Neva waited. She had rehearsed this on two days of road, over and over, till the words wore smooth: *I'm sorry, I came to say I can't do it.* But the speech would not come, and something small and fierce in her wanted, absurdly, to be asked in.

"You'll be wanting a fire," said Isolde. "Come inside, successor."

*Successor.*

It was not unkind. It was not anything. It was a title, set down between them like a closed door. She had not said Neva. She had not said *Neva Calloway*, or *you*, or even *Mistress*, which would at least have been a thing a person could answer. Successor was a role, a vessel, the place where someone else was meant to go.

Neva crossed the yard. She stepped up onto the porch and stood dripping on the boards, and Isolde stood aside from the doorway to let her pass, precisely wide enough that they would not touch.

"I'll take your cloak," Isolde said.

"I can hang it myself."

"It's soaked. It will ruin the pegs."

Neva unclasped it and held it out. Isolde did not take it. She looked at it, and at Neva's outstretched hand, and then she turned away to the hearth, and after a moment Neva, flushing, hung it on the peg by the door herself.

The common room was warm. It smelled of wood smoke and bread and the faint lamp-oil tang she had not smelled in five years and had not known she remembered. A fire roared in the great hearth, and in front of it stood two chairs, one on either side, with a small table between them and a chess-board laid out and left mid-game. Along the wall hung a rack of walking-staves, oiled and straight. A pair of long oiled boots stood beside the fire to dry, mud still caking the soles.

Neva looked at the boots.

They were Oriel's. She knew them the way she knew her own face. The left heel was worn down on the outer edge from years of favouring a bad ankle. The leather over the right toe had been mended three times with the same dark thread. Beside them, hung on the chair-back like something put down for a moment, was a long dark coat with a high collar.

She had not expected the coat.

She stood very still. Behind her, the shadow came in through the door and went across the floor, and she could feel it as a pressure at her shoulder, close and quiet. It moved past her. It went to the chair where the coat hung, and it stretched out a hand and laid the fingers lightly on the frame of the doorway on its way, a brush of the knuckles on the wood, the way a person touches a door they have gone through ten thousand times.

Oriel had done that. Every morning, every night, every time she went out and came back in. A touch on the frame. *Hello, house.* Neva had thought it was superstition. She had been fifteen and had found it embarrassing.

She heard a very small sound behind her, like a breath drawn in and held.

She turned.

Isolde was standing against the closed door with her back to the wood. Her face had gone perfectly blank, as if wiped, and her hand had come up and was pressed flat against her own collarbone, as if she were checking that something was still there. She was looking at the shadow's hand on the doorframe. The tendons stood out in her neck.

It lasted a single breath. Then the hand dropped and the blankness came down again like a visor, and Isolde said, quite calmly, "Sit down. I'll bring you something to eat."

"I didn't come to stay," Neva said.

The words came out louder than she meant. She had been holding them in all the way up the valley, and they burst out of her. "I want to be clear about that. I came because I... because I owed you a face-to-face answer. I'm not going to be what you need. I'm not a Pathfinder. I stopped. And this thing..." She waved a hand at the shadow, helplessly. "I didn't ask for it. I won't pretend to be her. I'm not here to take her place."

Isolde's expression did not alter.

"Then you've come for nothing," she said.

It was said without heat, and it was worse than if she had shouted. Neva felt it settle into her like a stone dropped into water.

"That isn't..."

"I'll bring soup." Isolde moved away from the door. She went past Neva with her eyes fixed on a point just to the left of her shoulder, careful not to brush her sleeve. At the kitchen archway she paused and said, in a quieter voice, as though it were an afterthought, "Eat. Then you'll see him. He's out at the stones until dark, and he's not in a good temper, and I would rather you had something in you first."

She went through the archway.

Neva stood in the middle of the room, dripping, with her hands hanging uselessly at her sides. The shadow had gone to the hearth. It lay long and still across the stones, its head just touching the foot of the empty chair, and she thought, with a sudden painful clarity: it knows this room. It has been in it every day for twenty years. And it's waiting for someone to sit down.

She did not sit in that chair. She sat on the settle by the wall, as far from it as she could get, with her wet boots stretched out toward the fire, and she did not look at the coat.

The soup came, and a heel of dark bread, and a mug of something that smelled of honey and cloves. Isolde set them on the table without a word and went back to the kitchen. Neva ate. It was good soup. It tasted of leeks and barley and the particular kind of salt that the Thornwick cook put in everything, and she had to stop twice and breathe through her nose.

After a while she became aware that she was being watched.

Not by Isolde. By the kitchen arch, where the light fell in a long bar across the flags, and where a figure stood just out of sight with her arms folded. Neva could see only the toe of a boot and the dark edge of a sleeve. She waited. She stared at her soup. After a long moment the boot withdrew, and the sound of a pot lid came from the next room, a little too loud.

Neva put down her spoon.

Something was happening in her chest again. A pull, faint but steady, like a thread tied to a rib. It ran across the room and through the wall, and it ended in the kitchen, in the person standing at the stove. She tried not to feel it. She tried to concentrate on the warmth of the mug in her hands. But the pull was patient. It said: *go to her. Go and see if she's all right. Put a hand on her back.*

She gripped the settle with both hands until the feeling passed.

"It is not mine," she said, under her breath. "It is not mine."

"What isn't?"

Neva jerked around. Isolde was standing three paces off with a lamp in her hand. She had come in without a sound, as she always had. The light made hollows of her cheeks.

"Nothing. I was thinking aloud."

Isolde's gaze slid to the shadow on the hearthstones and back again. Whatever she was thinking, she buried it. "I've lit the fire in the east room," she said. "Your old room. You may as well sleep there. I won't force you to take a bed, but the road is long, and the nights are cold."

"My old room?"

"No one else has used it."

She turned and walked out. After a moment, Neva, with a feeling of having been handed a loaded crossbow, took the lamp from the table and followed her up the stairs.

It was the third step that did it. The third step from the top, where, five years ago, in a different rain, a woman had stood with her arms folded and her mouth pressed closed. Neva put her foot on it and felt the board give its small familiar creak, and she stopped, and had to put a hand on the wall.

Isolde had gone on ahead. At the top of the stair she turned, and looked down, and saw Neva standing there with her hand on the plaster. For a moment something unguarded crossed her face. Then it was gone.

"The room is at the end," she said, and went into the dark.

The east room was exactly as she had left it.

That was what undid her, in the end. Not the coat, not the boots. This. She stood in the doorway with the lamp shaking in her hand and she looked at the narrow bed, made up with a clean blanket, and the small oak chest at its foot, and the shelf above it with the dried wreath of heather she had hung there at sixteen and never taken down. The window was clean. The floor had been swept. Someone had put a jug of water on the sill and a folded towel beside it, and had been doing so, she realised, every day. A room kept ready for someone who might arrive at any hour.

Five years.

She went in and sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress took her weight with a small sigh. She put the lamp on the chest and sat with her hands between her knees and looked at the heather, and she found that it was impossible to be angry. She had counted on being angry. Anger would have been so much cleaner. She had spent five years polishing her reasons, her grievances, the bright little list of the ways she had been used and measured and kept; she had held onto it like a coin. And she looked at the swept floor and the jug of water, and the coin turned to ash in her hand, and left her with nothing but guilt, which was heavier and much more difficult to carry.

Behind her the shadow had come in. It stood at the foot of the bed, very still, and when she looked up she saw it looking at the heather too.

"Did you know?" she whispered. "That she kept this?"

It did not answer. But its head tilted, slightly, and the outline of its shoulders eased, and she had the strangest sense that if it could have wept, it would have.

She did not sleep. She lay on the made bed with her boots still on and watched the ceiling. The house made its night noises around her: a settling of beams, the far-off thud of a door, the wind in the chimney. She heard Isolde's footsteps pass the door twice, slowly, and stop. She heard them go away again. The shadow lay quiet along the floor. The ring was warm on her finger.

It was well past dark when she heard the yard gate.

Boots on stone. A heavy man's tread, slow and tired, that she would have known in her sleep. They crossed the flags below her window and paused at the porch, and a low voice said something to someone she could not see, and another, quieter voice answered. The words were lost in the rain.

Then the front door opened, and a man's voice, deep and rough, and unmistakably hoarse with something that was neither anger nor weariness but both, came up through the floorboards and filled the entire house.

"She's come, then?"

Neva's whole body went rigid.

"In the east room," said Isolde. "She arrived at dusk."

"Is she alone?"

A pause. "Not entirely."

There was a long, terrible silence, and in the silence, against the wall of the east room, Neva watched the shadow of the dead woman, which had been lying so quietly on the floor, rise to its full height, and stiffen, and turn, with all the slow attention of a thing that has heard a name called in the dark, toward the stairs.