Oriel's study was the smallest room in the house and the only one that had ever been locked.

Neva had been inside it perhaps a dozen times in all the years she lived at Thornwick, and each time she had felt like a trespasser. It was a narrow, high-ceilinged room at the head of the east stair, with one window facing the standing stones. The walls were lined from floor to rafters with shelves, and the shelves were crammed with ledgers, rolled charts of nothing she could read, jars of river-clay and sea-sand and ground bone, little bundles of knotted cord, each tagged and labelled in that long slanting hand. A desk stood under the window with a green-shaded lamp. A cracked leather chair. A cold hearth.

It smelled of her. Of ink and cedar smoke and the faint dry bitterness of the herb she chewed on long walks. That was what stopped Neva on the threshold, with the shadow at her heel. The smell had not faded in nine days. It had been shut in, and kept.

Isolde was already standing at the desk. She had put on a clean black shirt and bound her hair back with a strip of leather, and she held a thick book bound in grey cloth, its spine cracked with use. She did not look up when they entered. Taren took the place by the window, arms folded, shoulder to the frame, as far from Neva as the room allowed.

"Close the door," said Isolde.

Neva did, and the sound of it, soft and final, made the room feel very small.

"This is the Pathfinder's Law," Isolde said. She laid the book on the desk and opened it at a place marked with a strip of faded ribbon. "It is the oldest of the guild's laws, and the only one that was never written down by a person. It was copied from the stones. Every Pathfinder reads it on the day she takes up the walk. Oriel read it to you when you were fifteen, though I doubt you remember. I'm reading it again because it matters, and because I'd rather you heard it from someone who is not trying to persuade you."

"I remember," said Neva.

"Then you'll recall that it's short."

She began to read.

Her voice had been level in the yard and it was level here, but now it had a different quality, a recited steadiness, as though each word had been set on the page like a stone in a wall. Neva found that it was unbearable. It was too even. It was the voice of a person holding herself together by the exact application of method, and every syllable had its price.

*The Road is not a place. It is a memory the earth keeps of every way that has been walked. It forgets what is not remembered and it remembers only what is carried. Therefore the carrier is chosen, and not the other way. The Shadow is the Road's memory made flesh. It goes before, and the walker follows. It takes its keeper in the hour of her passing. It is not given and it is not taken. It does not consult her will.*

"Not consult," Neva murmured.

"Listen." Isolde did not pause.

*What the Shadow chooses it holds. It may not be refused, for refusal is only delay, and delay is hunger. A Shadow without a keeper is a hunger without a mouth. It will seek the nearest voice that calls it, and it will wear that voice thin. If no keeper will bear it, it will not die. It will spread.*

The room was very quiet.

"There's a clause," said Isolde. "At the bottom." She turned the page with great care. "*There is a place where a Shadow may be set down. It lies at the far end of the Road, and no one has yet walked there and returned, for those who have gone found the Road would not end and the Shadow would not wait. The place is called Heartstead.*"

Neva's head came up.

"Heartstead," she said. "That's a story. It's a story you tell children."

"It's in the Law."

"Everyone knows the Road doesn't end. Oriel said it herself. She walked it for twenty years and never found an end."

"She never found Heartstead," said Taren, from the window. His voice was flat. "She looked. She spent eight winters of her life looking. She was convinced it was real, and that the reason nobody got to it was that nobody had known how to walk. She thought it needed..." He stopped.

"Needed what?"

He shook his head. "Never finished the sentence."

Isolde turned the book around on the desk and pushed it toward Neva. A line of text was underlined in red, in the long slanting hand, with a note beside it in the margin. Neva bent over and read.

*If Heartstead is reached, the Shadow may be laid down with the consent of its bearer, and the bearer shall keep whatever of herself she carried in.*

And in the margin, smaller, almost illegible, as though the ink had been gone over several times:

*Not before the third dark moon. After that it will not let go.*

A coldness spread outward from the base of Neva's skull.

"What does that mean?" she whispered. "The third dark moon."

"It means we have a deadline," said Isolde.

She said it so evenly that for a moment Neva did not take in the sense of it. Isolde put her finger on the line. "A Shadow in transition has three dark moons from the death of its keeper. In that time it is... loose. It seeks. It tries the new bearer, and the bearer may still be herself. The Road opens only on the first. After the third, the bearer's own self and the Shadow grow into each other, and there is no separating them. A person cannot be two people for long." She drew a breath. "What remains is not you. What remains is Oriel, walking. In your body. With her memory, and without your name."

Neva could not speak.

"She knew," Taren said, quietly. "She knew she was dying. She'd already worked out the number. She wrote it the week before."

"That's not possible." Neva's mouth was dry. "You said it hasn't settled. Pell said it hadn't chosen anyone."

"It's chosen you," said Isolde. "Pell was wrong. Or Pell didn't want to say it to your face."

"It has been in this room with us for nine days," said Taren, with deadly flatness. "It didn't leave the house until the second night. It went to the river and it sat on the water and it waited for you to look back."

*Do not look back.* The old rule. Neva felt it crack, a hairline fracture, running right through her.

"I never asked for it."

"No one asks."

"I'm not her!" The words were out before she could stop them, louder than the room could bear. "Don't you see? I'm the wrong person! There must be someone else, someone who still..." She swung round, appealing. "Surely there are others. Pathfinders. There must be. Let another one take it. Give it to a keeper who wants it."

"It doesn't transfer," Taren said. "It only chooses."

"Then it's chosen badly."

"She turned them all down, Neva." Isolde's voice had gone very quiet. "Every one who came. Seven, in the last year alone. She said none of them would be able to carry what she carried. She said there was one."

"That's not my fault."

"No," said Isolde. "It isn't. Nobody said it was."

"You're saying it with your face!"

Isolde's mouth thinned. "My face is not saying anything."

"That's exactly what it's saying. It's saying I'm responsible. That I left and she died, as if..." Neva's voice shook. "As if I was the only person in the house who could have stopped her. You were here! Both of you! You could have bolted that door, you could have gone with her, you..." She cut off, appalled by herself.

Silence. A bar of cold light lay across the desk. In the stillness Neva heard the wind pick at the shutters.

Isolde's face had not changed, but the hand resting on the book had gone white to the wrist.

"Yes," she said. "I know."

It was the way she said it. It had no heat or defence in it. It was merely a woman agreeing with a charge she had already passed on herself, a hundred times, in the dark.

Neva felt the floor go out from under her, a small cold drop. "That isn't what I..." she began.

But she could not finish it, because the room had gone strange.

It started as a draught. A cool current moved across her face and stirred the pages of the open ledger. Then the lamp on the desk, unlit, rocked on its base. The light seemed to grow thinner, the room longer, and the shadow that had been standing silently beside the door detached itself from the wall.

It moved across the floorboards like a thing walking. It went between Neva and the door and stopped there, long and still and absolutely solid, blocking the way. She could not have said how she knew it was blocking. It simply was.

"Move," Neva said. Her voice shook. "Let me out. I'll... I need to... I'm going to be sick."

The shadow did not move.

"I mean it. Move!"

It turned its head. She felt the weight of its attention. And then, slowly, without hurry, it walked past her to the cracked leather chair behind the desk and seated itself, as if the chair were its own. It leaned back. It laid its hands along the arms. It looked out, across the room, at the three of them, with a posture so entirely and dreadfully familiar that all the breath went out of her.

It was how Oriel sat when she was tired. When she had come in from the Road and the day was over and there was no one left to be strong for. Shoulders dropped. Head tipped back. The whole long body going soft, like a candle that has burned to the socket.

A sound came out of Isolde. It was a small sound. It might have been a name.

Neva's legs gave.

She had no warning. The strength simply went out of her knees, and the floor tilted, and she felt herself falling sideways with the whole room whirling at her. She flung out a hand. It closed on something warm and hard.

A strong hand closed round her elbow and held her up.

"I've got you."

Taren's voice, rough and close. He had crossed the room in two strides. His fingers were wrapped around her arm just above the joint, and she could feel the heat of his palm through the thin wool, and the controlled shake in the muscles of his hand. He did not let go. For one confused breath she felt that he would not. She stood there with her weight against his grip, her cheek close to the open collar of his shirt, and the smell of him, woodsmoke and cold air and soap, rose through her like a flood.

She heard his breath catch. She felt it.

It was only a moment. His hand was warm and steady and entirely unthinking, the grip of a man who has caught a stumbling child, and then she saw his face change as he realised what he held.

They both jerked back at once.

He let go as though her arm were hot iron. She stepped away so sharply that her shoulder struck the shelf, and a jar of river-clay rocked on its edge. Neither of them looked at the other. Taren thrust his hands into his armpits. Neva pressed her palm against the burning place on her elbow and stared at the floor.

"Sorry," she said.

"Don't," said Taren, hoarsely. "It's nothing."

It was not nothing. It sat in the air between them like a struck bell, and Isolde, watching from the desk, had gone quite still. Something moved behind her eyes. Neva saw it and did not understand it. It might have been grief or fury or the look of a woman who has just seen the thing she most feared come true in front of her and has been given no right to speak.

The shadow in the chair had not moved. Its hands lay quiet on the arms. It seemed, if anything, to be waiting.

Neva wiped her hand across her mouth. She felt, abruptly and totally, that she had been put in a corner. Everything in the room, the book, the Law, the soft dead voice of the Wayhouse, was closing in around her. She had come here to say no. She had said it a hundred times in her head. And now the wall was at her back and she understood that there was no way to say it that would not be a kind of murder.

"If I walk away," she said. Her voice was not steady. "If I get on the road and go back to the river. How long?"

"Until the third dark moon." Isolde's tone was clinical. "Eleven weeks, perhaps. You would feel it growing. You would lose sleep, and then time. And then you."

"And Oriel?"

"Would walk about in your shape," said Taren. "With her memory. And none of yours."

"Would she know?"

"I don't think so." A pause. "I think that's the worst of it."

Neva shut her eyes. She thought of the loft above the net-house. The cold river. The rope. The long grey years that she had made, stone by stone, to hold herself in a place where nobody could ask her for anything. It had been a good wall. It had kept the world out. She had thought it would keep out this too.

She thought, absurdly, of her bread, buttered right to the edge.

"Then I'll go," she said.

"Go where?" said Isolde.

"To Heartstead. To set it down." She opened her eyes. "If that's the only way, that's the way. But I want it understood. I'm going to put this thing down and then I'm going home. I'm not going to be a Pathfinder. I'm not going to be her replacement. I won't be asked to. Not by you, not by anyone, ever again." She looked at each of them in turn, at Taren's bent head and Isolde's white face. "And no one calls me hers. Not 'Oriel's girl,' not 'the successor,' not 'the one she was waiting for.' I'm Neva Calloway. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly," said Isolde.

"Taren?"

His mouth moved. After a moment he said, grudging, "Clear."

"Then that's my condition. I'll walk. I'll lay it down. But I do it as myself."

She waited for objection. None came.

Instead Isolde straightened her shoulders, very slightly, as though a weight had been taken off them. She looked at Neva with an expression that might have been the first real thing Neva had seen on her face since she walked into the yard. It was not warm. But it was not blank.

"Then I go with you," she said.

Neva blinked. "What?"

"I swore an oath to guard the Pathfinder's walk. Oriel's walk." Isolde's hand had gone to the hilt of her sword, but gently, a gesture of habit rather than threat. "The Shadow is still hers, even if the walk is not. I have not been released. If the Shadow goes on the Road, so do I."

"And I," said Taren.

Everyone turned.

He said it very flatly, with his shoulder against the wall and his eyes on the window. "She'd haunt me if I stayed. You'd get four days in before you stepped wrong and walked off a cliff. I know the Road. I've read it for twelve years." He tugged at his cuff. "And someone has to make sure that thing doesn't do to you what it did to her."

It was the closest he had come to saying that he cared whether she lived.

Neva looked from one to the other. A great stillness had settled over the study. Outside, the wind dropped, and the long shadow of the standing stones lay across the hillside, black on grey.

"Why?" she said. She meant it to be gentle. It came out sharp. "Why would you, either of you? I've been nothing but trouble since I walked in."

"I'm going for Oriel," said Isolde, simply.

"I'm going because she'll rattle chains in my bedroom if I don't," said Taren.

They both looked at her.

"And I," said Neva, slowly, "am going because I need to. For me."

It was true. It was almost entirely true. It was the plainest sentence she had spoken in two days, and she heard in the silence after it that nobody believed it, least of all her. Beneath the words lay something she could not touch, a long low note, warm as copper, humming through the floor.

The shadow in the chair turned its head toward her.

It had no eyes. It was not looking. And yet something in the angle of its brow, in the way the dark outline of its mouth seemed, for a moment, to soften, said as clearly as speech: *Liar. But I forgive you.*

She did not want to be forgiven. She looked away.

"Right," said Taren, pushing himself off the wall. His voice was rough and practical, the voice of a man who has found something to do with his hands. "Then we'll need supplies. I'll check the cart, and the ropes. We want two weeks' food and the winter packs." He paused at the door. "The Road opens in six days. That's your clock. Make your peace with the roof over your head while you've still got one."

He went out. They listened to his step go down the stairs.

Isolde was closing the ledger. She put it back in its place on the desk, and straightened the pen beside it with a precise small movement, and Neva noticed that her fingers were not quite steady. She turned to go. At the threshold she hesitated.

"You were right," she said, without looking round.

"About what?"

"That I could have bolted the door. I should have." A very small, very dry breath of humour, the first Neva had heard from her. "She would have kicked it down. But I should have tried."

She went out, and Neva was left alone in the narrow room with the cold lamp and the lined shelves and the shadow in the chair.

It had not moved. It sat, as it had sat, with its hands on the arms and its head tipped back. She went to the desk and laid her hand on the cover of the ledger. The grey cloth was soft with years of handling. She stood there and she did not know what to do.

And from the doorway, low, almost casual, a voice said, "Why are you still wearing the ring?"

Taren had come back. He stood in the corridor with the light behind him and his arms folded, not unkind, merely watching. His eyes were on her left hand.

"You can't need it," he said. "You haven't walked in five years. You don't read the ground and you don't keep a Shadow. There's no reason in the world for you to wear that."

"I..."

"Pathfinders don't wear them. Not in the Wayhouse. It's an old custom. They're given at the very start, and taken off on the first day of the real walk." He paused. "She gave you one on your fifteenth birthday. It's still on your hand. Eleven years. Why?"

Neva opened her mouth. She looked down. The copper band lay against her skin like a closed eye, warm as a living thing, and a sudden, unfamiliar fear rose in her, as she realised that she had no idea. She had never once asked herself the question. She had thrown the ring across a yard and crawled through thistles to find it. She had put it on again before she had known she was doing it.

"I don't know," she said.

Taren looked at her. For a long moment he said nothing. Then he nodded, very slowly, and the look on his face was not one she could read.

"No," he said. "I don't suppose you do."

And he went away down the corridor, leaving her alone with the ledger, the shadow, and the copper ring burning quietly on her finger like a word she had forgotten how to say.