She knew his step before she saw him.

That was the cruelty of it. Neva had lain awake half the night resolved to be calm, to be brisk, to be a woman of twenty-six who had made a decision and would see it through. And then, at the first grey of morning, she heard boots on the stair, heavy, unhurried, with a slight drag on the left foot where he had favoured a twisted ankle one winter and never entirely stopped, and every one of those resolutions went out of her like water through a sieve.

She had not been in the kitchen when he came down. She had meant to be. She had meant to be sitting at the long table with her hands folded and her speech prepared, calm as a judge. Instead she was in the passage outside it, with her back against the wall and her heart going like a rabbit's, listening to a man cross a stone floor.

She remembered the sound of it. That was the worst. She remembered it the way you remember a tune. Taren Voss walked through the Wayhouse every morning of the two winters she had lived under its roof, and every morning at the same hour she had known exactly where he was by the sound: the heavy step on the stair, the pause at the bottom while he looked at the weather through the narrow window, the long stride to the kitchen. She remembered learning to read the Road from him, kneeling in the mud of the south field with her face six inches from the earth while he said, patiently, in that low unhurried voice, *No, look at the grass. See how it lies? Something went through here in the night, and it was frightened.* She remembered the surprise of discovering that he was funny. That under the stern brows and the economy of words there was a dry, deadpan humour that came out sideways, in the pauses, and that she was the only person in the house who always caught it.

She remembered, too, the strap. His hands.

Enough.

She pushed off the wall and walked into the kitchen.

It was a big, warm room with a low beamed ceiling and a hearth deep enough to stable a pony. A kettle hung steaming over the coals. Bread was on the table, and a crock of butter, and a loaf already cut into thick uneven slices, and a man was standing at the far end with his back to her, tipping hot water into a pot. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow. The forearms were lean and corded and she could see the knotted white scar on the left wrist, a pale rope of old tissue she had never learned the story of.

She stopped in the doorway.

He had not heard her. Or he had, and was pretending not to, which with Taren was a distinction without a difference. He put the kettle down. He set the lid on the pot. He stood for a moment with both hands braced on the table's edge and his head bowed, as though listening to something very far away. She saw the muscles of his back move under the linen as he drew a breath.

"You're up early," he said, without turning.

His voice was lower than she remembered. Rougher at the edges. It had gravel in it that had not been there before.

"I couldn't sleep," said Neva.

"No." A short humourless sound. "I don't imagine you could."

He turned around.

She had braced herself. She had spent the hours of the night imagining this moment and fitting herself for it, as one fits a blade to a sheath. She was prepared for anger. For coldness. For the flat controlled courtesy he used on people he did not like. What she was not prepared for was that he would simply stop.

He stood there with the teapot handle in his fist and looked at her, and all the things she had imagined him saying went away.

He had aged. Not much, but unmistakably; at thirty-one he had the face of a man ten years older. The dark hair, cropped short as ever, was threaded at the temples with grey. There were lines at the corners of his mouth and between his brows, as if he had spent a long time frowning at a thing that would not resolve. His eyes were the same: dark, steady, deep-set, with long lashes that had always seemed unfair on a face so unsmiling. But they had a look in them now, a rawness, as though the lids had been rubbed away. He had not been sleeping either.

He did not move. He did not speak. It felt as though minutes passed.

Neva heard a drip from the kettle spout. She heard her own breathing.

He looked at her face. Then his gaze went past her shoulder, to the shadow that stood in the arch behind her, tall and patient in its long coat, and she saw his jaw lock. A muscle jumped under the skin. His thumb came up, as if of its own accord, and pressed hard against the scar on his wrist, once, twice, grinding down, the old tell, the thing he did when something was happening in him that he could not afford to show.

His eyes dropped. They found her left hand, and the copper ring on it.

The silence changed. It went from the stillness of surprise into something with edges.

"Neva," Taren said.

Only that. The two syllables of her name, rough and quiet, dropped into the kitchen like a coin into a well. She felt them in her sternum. She felt them everywhere. She had not heard her name said by that voice in five years and she had not known, until now, how much room it had left in her.

"Taren," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "I... I got your message. Pell's."

"Isolde's message."

"Yes."

"She was very particular about that." His mouth twisted. "She didn't think you'd come for mine."

It hit harder than it ought to have. She lifted her chin. "I came to give an answer. In person. It didn't seem right to do it through a boy on a ferry."

"An answer."

"That I can't take it." She forced the words out one at a time. "I'm not a Pathfinder any more. I haven't been for five years. I've no right to the Shadow, and I don't want it. I'm sorry for what's happened, I truly am, I'd have... I'd have been here, if I'd known..." She stopped, because her voice had started to shake.

Taren set down the teapot.

He did it with great care, the way a man puts down something that he might otherwise throw. He crossed his arms over his chest. When he spoke, he spoke quietly, and every word fell clean and separate, as though cut.

"She waited for you until the Road took her."

The kitchen went very still.

"What?" said Neva.

"You heard me." He did not raise his voice. That was what made it terrible. "Five years, and she would not take another student. She would not name a successor. Do you understand what that means? Every Pathfinder names a successor, it's the first duty. The Shadow has to have somewhere to go when you die. They came to her. Wayhouse councils, the guild, men from three counties, begging. She refused every one. She said she had one. She said it every time, politely, and she sent them away."

Neva's lips parted. No sound came.

"And every year the Shadow got hungrier," said Taren. "Because it had no one to hold it. It's meant to be passed on, Neva. It's not meant to be kept. It feeds on the person who carries it, and she carried it alone. For five years." His eyes did not leave her face. "She sat on that porch every night. She kept the door unlocked. She would not let Isolde bolt it. She would say, *what if she comes in the dark.* Five years. And then, one night this autumn, she stood up from the porch and said she was done waiting, and she went through the stones into the Hollow alone and she did not come back out of it. She came out of it in pieces, if you want to know."

He stopped. His breath had gone unsteady. He looked away, at the window, at the pale morning, and the cords of his neck stood out.

Neva said, hoarsely, "She never asked me to come back."

"No."

"Not once. Not in the letters, not..." She caught herself. She felt the weight of the tin at the bottom of her pack as if it were a stone in her hand. "She never said she wanted me to. I thought she'd made her peace. I thought she was glad."

"She didn't need to ask." Taren turned back. There was fury in his eyes and, under it, something worse. "She left the door unlocked for five years. You think that wasn't asking? You think that wasn't the loudest thing she could say?"

"That's not fair!"

"I never said it was fair."

"She *chose* to wait!" It burst from her, high and cracking. "She chose it, Taren. I didn't ask her to. I walked away because I couldn't bear it, I couldn't bear being her..." She bit it off. Her hands had curled into fists. "I was twenty-one. I wasn't a person to her. I was a replacement. I was the one who was supposed to carry on after. She'd already decided what I was before I'd decided anything. And you wouldn't know that, because she never looked at you like that, you were the one she..."

She stopped.

The word hung in the air between them. *Chose.* Neither of them said it.

Behind her, soundlessly, the shadow moved.

She felt it go past her like cold air. It crossed the kitchen floor, long and unhurried, and it came to a halt in front of Taren, near enough that its edge lay across his boots. She saw him see it. She saw the blood leave his face.

The shadow raised its hand. Slowly, with infinite care, as though approaching a wounded animal, it reached up and laid its palm along the side of his face.

Taren did not breathe.

It was not a touch. Shadows could not touch. And yet a ripple went through him, a shudder from the roots of the hair to the heels, as if something had passed across his skin that his body recognised perfectly. His eyes closed. For one unguarded moment his whole face broke, the arrogance and the anger and the control falling away from it like plaster from a wall, and what she saw underneath was a look of such hunger, such helpless uncomplicated longing, that she felt it as a blow.

Neva's chest filled. Something enormous rose in her, warm and trembling and fierce, a flood of tenderness that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the man in front of her. *There you are,* it said. *There you are, my heart. Look at you. Look at what I did to you.* It surged up through her throat and she could not stop it, could not hold it back. Her eyes burned. Her hand actually lifted, stretched out toward his face.

"Don't."

It was a whisper. It was almost a snarl. Taren's eyes had flown open, and he had caught the shadow's wrist, or had caught at the air where it was, and was holding on with both hands. His chest was heaving.

"Don't do that," he said, hoarse. "Don't you dare. Don't use her hands on me."

Neva snatched her own hand back as though it had been burned. She pressed it against her ribs. The tenderness drained away from her in a long cold backwash and left her shaking.

"I'm not," she said. "I didn't. I'm not doing anything. It does it on its own."

"Then control it."

"I don't know how!"

"Then you've no business with it." His voice cracked on the last word. He let go of the air. His hands dropped, and he stood there with the tendons in his wrists jumping, staring at her as though she were something that had walked out of a grave. "Do you know what it is to see her do that? Do you have any idea? Every time it moves I think... for half a second I think..."

He shut his mouth. He swallowed. Whatever he had been going to say went down with the swallow.

Neva said, very low, "I'm not her."

"I know that."

"I'm not. I never was." Her voice was shaking. "That's the whole reason I left. I'm sorry she's gone, and I'm sorry you're hurt, and I'm sorrier than I can say that she waited. But I am not Oriel Venn. Whatever the Shadow thinks it's doing, whatever it feels, I'm a ferrywoman. I've got a loft and a rope and a friend who feeds me. I'm *me*, and I always have been, and I'm not going to be looked at as a ghost for the rest of my life. So don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're looking for her."

The silence that followed was long.

When Taren spoke again, his voice was quieter, and the heat had gone out of it. "I'm looking at you," he said. "And that's the trouble."

She did not know what to make of that. She stood with her mouth slightly open, and she saw that he did not know either. He had said it as if it had been pulled out of him. A dull red crept up under the weathering of his cheekbones. He turned abruptly, took a mug from the shelf, and filled it from the pot with a hand that was nearly steady.

"Sit down," he said, with his back to her. "Both of you. There's a rule about hot tea at this hour and I'm too tired to break it."

"Taren..."

"Sit down, Neva. Eat something. Then sit and hear the Law like everyone else who ever inherited one of these things. You came all this way to refuse. You can do it properly."

She sat. She had no better idea. She dropped onto the bench at the long table, and the shadow, after a moment, folded itself down into the shape of a woman sitting beside her, its long coat spread along the wall.

He brought the mug. He put it down in front of her. And then, without seeming to think, he reached to the board in the middle of the table and took a slice of the dark bread, and laid it on a plate, and spread it with butter from edge to edge, thick, the way she liked it, and set it before her.

She stared at it.

She had not told anyone how she liked her bread in five years. She had stopped even telling herself. Madda cut it thin and served it dry. And here was this man, the one she had run from, who had hated her this morning with the whole weight of his grief, buttering a slice with hands that clearly did not know what they were doing, and getting it exactly right.

He had not noticed. He was already turning away, reaching for the pot again.

She did not say anything. She picked up the bread, and the butter was cold, and she bit into it, and it was the best thing she had ever tasted in her life. Across the kitchen, Taren stood stiffly with his back to her, filling a second mug, and the set of his shoulders told her that he had seen what he had done and had decided, with the whole force of his will, to pretend that he had not.

She pretended too. It seemed the least she could do.

The fire popped. The kettle ticked as it cooled. Outside, thin and clear in the new light, a wren was singing, and somewhere in the house a door closed and Isolde's step crossed the floor above their heads, and the three of them sat in the kitchen, the dead woman's shadow between them, eating bread and not talking about anything at all.

It was Taren who spoke first. He did not look round.

"There's a thing in her book," he said. "In the ledger. She wrote it the week before she went in." He set down the pot. "You have to hear it before you refuse. I wouldn't ask, otherwise."

Neva swallowed. "What does it say?"

"I'll let her tell you."

He crossed to the door of the passage and stood in it. The light behind him made a dark shape of his shoulders, and in the shape she could read, from the set of him, what it was costing him to stand there and not shout.

"Isolde has the key," he said. "She'll take you up. Finish your tea."

He was gone before she could answer. His step went away down the passage, heavy and slow, with the drag on the left foot. And Neva sat at the long kitchen table with half a slice of buttered bread in her hand and the shadow of a dead woman at her side, and understood, with great and sinking clarity, that the speech she had carried all the way from Harrow Reach was going to stay unspoken, and that she was going to be allowed to walk out of this house only after she had heard what was in the book.

The shadow's hand stirred against the wall. It rested, for a moment, over the place where Taren's chair had been. Then it withdrew into its sleeve.

Upstairs, with a click as of a heavy key turning in an old lock, a door that had been closed for nine days began, quietly, to open.