The storm came down off the hills that night and did not lift for four days.

It was not like any rain Neva had known on the river. There, rain was a grey curtain, a soft inconvenience, something to be hauled through. Here it came in sideways off the moor with a force like thrown gravel, and it hammered at the slates and moaned in the chimneys and found every gap in the old walls. By the second day the yard was a shallow brown lake. By the third, the valley road had vanished, and the standing stones on the hill were only a rumour in the murk. The Wayhouse, which had been built to shelter wanderers in just such weather, sat in the middle of it all like a great stone ship, its windows lit, its doors barred, riding it out.

There were six days until the dark moon. By the third night of the storm there were three.

Neva had spent those days trying to be useful and failing. She had chopped wood until her palms blistered and mended a harness that did not need mending and carried every bucket in the place to the cellar. She had gone out to the barn to check on the horses and found that Taren had already been, and had left a note chalked on the stall door in his blunt capitals saying *fed, watered, don't fuss.* She had offered to help the cook and been told, kindly, that the kitchen was fine. She had offered to help Isolde repack the supplies and been given a look that said she was a child who had asked to hold the sword.

So she hauled water. It was something to do with her hands.

It was on the third night that the roof gave way.

She was in the east room, lying on her bed in her clothes, listening to the rain hammering the slates a foot above her head, when she heard it: a long low creak, like a ship's timber complaining, and then a soft, wet, terrible sound. Something dripped on her forehead. She opened her eyes. A fat dark stain was spreading across the plaster directly over her, bulging, glistening, and as she watched it a bead of water gathered at its lowest point and fell onto the blanket.

She sat up and moved the bed. It was no use. By the time she had dragged the bed to the far wall, another stain had appeared, and a third, and the heather wreath on the shelf was sodden and drooping. She put every bowl and basin in the room under the worst of the leaks. The bowls filled. She emptied them out of the window. They filled again.

In the end, at the hour when the lamps were low and the whole house had gone quiet, she gave it up. She gathered her blanket and her pillow into her arms and went down the stairs with the shadow trailing after her like a thing ashamed, and she came to the door of the common room and pushed it open.

It was warm. That was the first thing: the great hearth glowed red and gold, and the whole room was lit with it, soft and dancing. A big table stood against one wall, pushed there to make space. Three straw pallets had been laid out on the floor before the fire, with folded blankets at the foot of each.

And on two of them, sitting up, with their heads turned toward her, were Taren and Isolde.

"Roof?" said Taren.

"Roof," said Neva.

"Thought so. Ours went an hour ago." He jerked his chin at a sodden heap of bedding in the corner. "The east wing's gone. The west wing is ruined. This is the only room with a dry ceiling in the whole place, and that's only because the chimney's built into it. Cook has the pantry. We've the hearth."

"I can sleep in the kitchen," said Neva.

"Cook is in the kitchen."

"Then the barn."

"Don't be an idiot," said Isolde.

She had not raised her voice. She said it very quietly, with her braid undone over her shoulder and a blanket drawn round her knees, and Neva heard the tiredness in it. Isolde patted the pallet beside her. It was an oddly formal gesture, a woman offering a chair. "There's a third bed. It's yours. Please."

*Please.* It was the second time she had heard that word from Isolde, and she did not trust it.

She put down her blanket. She laid it on the pallet furthest from the fire, with her back to the wall, and sat down on it with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them. The shadow, as though uncertain of its welcome, stretched itself along the floor and stopped at the very edge of the hearth, a long dark line between the two beds, very nearly touching both.

Nobody said anything.

It was, she thought, the strangest hour of her life. Three adults in a warm room with the storm thundering above, together by necessity and sharing nothing. They had each been given the same hearth and they were each sitting in a separate silence. Taren sat with his back against the table leg and a whetstone in his hand, drawing it slowly down a blade, over and over, with the measured stroke of a man who wants something to do. Isolde sat bolt upright on her pallet and was busy not looking at anything. Neva watched the fire.

There was a supper. It came on a tray from the kitchen, carried by the cook herself: a pot of stew, a loaf, a jug of cider. She set it down with a nod and left. Isolde ladled the stew.

Neva noticed, with a prickle of misplaced attention, the order of it. Isolde filled Taren's bowl first, to the brim, with the biggest piece of meat, and set it by his knee without a word. He took it without looking up. Then her own, a smaller helping. Then she paused, and filled the third, and handed it across to Neva with her face turned away, last of all.

It was nothing. It was the oldest courtesy in the world, the order in which hungry people are served, and Neva knew it should not sting. But it did. She took the bowl and held it between her palms and warmed her fingers on it and could not eat.

They had a rhythm, those two. She saw it now, in the small things. Taren reached for the salt, and Isolde had already moved it into his hand. Isolde stood to fetch a cup and Taren, without looking, moved his boots out of her path. When the fire sank, she banked it and he laid a log on, and their hands did not touch, but the shape of the thing, the choreography, was that of a pair who had cooked and slept and grieved side by side for a very long time. They had gone through five years of that. They had walked through every winter as a team. Neva was a stranger at the table.

She told herself that she did not mind.

The shadow lay between them on the stones, long and quiet, and in the firelight it seemed to ripple, to rise and fall. It stretched its edge toward Taren, and then toward Isolde, and then withdrew, and stretched, and withdrew, as though it did not know where to rest. She understood, watching it, that it was the only thing in the room that belonged to nobody, and belonged to everybody. It was exactly where it should be, in the middle, between the two people the dead woman had loved. And Neva was the one who had been made to carry it there.

She was in the way. She knew it with the dull certainty of a stone in a shoe.

"The bread," said Taren, abruptly.

Neva looked up. He was sitting with the whetstone set aside, holding the loaf in one hand and a long knife in the other. "Do you want any?"

"I'll..." Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. "Yes. Thank you."

He had set the loaf on the board between them. She reached for the knife, thinking he meant her to cut. He reached for it at the same instant. Their fingers met on the handle.

It was nothing. A brush. The tips of his fingers against the backs of hers, calloused and warm, resting for half a second against her knuckles. But Neva felt it all the way up her arm, as if she had put her hand into a stream. Her breath stopped. Across the room, on the wall, the shadow of the dead woman gave a sudden violent shiver, like a candle flame in a draught, and rose.

Taren's eyes came up. They met hers.

She had forgotten how close he was. The firelight made hollows of his face and put a red spark in the brown of his eyes, and she saw the pupils widen. Neither of them moved. She could hear the rain. She could hear her own pulse, loud as a drum, and the soft rush of his breathing, and she knew with perfect certainty that he was feeling it too, that the thing tugging at them was a force in the room like gravity.

*It's her,* she thought. *It's her feeling. It's the shadow. It isn't mine.*

But she could not tell. That was the horror of it. Her own heart was racing and the warmth in her face was her own, and she had no way on earth of knowing where the borrowed fire ended and the real one began.

She snatched her hand back.

"Sorry," she said.

"It's fine."

"I didn't..."

"It's *fine*, Neva."

He cut the bread. He did it with extreme care. He handed her the first slice, and she took it without touching him, and neither of them spoke. She felt the hot blood in her cheeks and prayed that the firelight hid it.

When she looked up again, Isolde was watching her.

She had not moved. She sat with her bowl on her knee, perfectly still, her face a smooth pale oval in the glow. Her grey eyes were fixed on Neva's face with an intensity that was almost frightening. There was no accusation in them. It was something quieter, and more alarming: the look of a woman at a window, watching a stranger walk up the path to the house where she has lived for years. A kind of terrible, patient attention.

Then Isolde turned her head and looked into the fire, and the look was gone, and Neva could not tell whether she had imagined it.

They ate. Nobody spoke. The rain went on.

It was almost midnight, and Taren had lain down and Isolde had put out all but one lamp, when Neva, lying on her back with her eyes open, heard herself say into the dark:

"Tell me how she died."

Silence.

"Not the Wayhouse version," said Neva. "I've had that. I've heard the council's. 'Passed through the stones in the hour of need.' I want to know what happened. Please."

A long pause. She heard the straw creak as someone turned.

"It's not a nice story," said Taren.

"I didn't think it would be."

He sighed. It was a heavy exhalation, and she could hear how tired he was. For a moment she thought he would refuse. Then, quietly, in the dark, he began.

"She sat on the porch every night. You've heard that. Every night for five years, until the winter solstice, when she stopped. I think she stopped because... she couldn't wait any more. She was too tired. The Shadow was starving. She could feel it. It would go out of her at night, and wander, and come back thinner. Some mornings she couldn't stand up. And she wouldn't let anyone else carry it, and she wouldn't let it go, and she wouldn't... she wouldn't have you told."

"Why not?"

"She said you had a right to your life." His voice cracked on it. "She said she'd made a mess of the first twenty years of yours and she wasn't going to ruin the next. She said if you came back, it had to be because you wanted to. Not because she'd called."

Neva pressed the heel of her hand against her mouth.

"She made a lot of rules," Taren said. "Isolde and I... we'd argue. We said it was cruel, to wait alone. She said it wasn't cruelty if the other person was free. She was stubborn as a rock." A sound that was nearly a laugh. "On the last night she woke us up at three. Said she had to walk. She'd got the whole thing worked out, she said. She was going to Heartstead. If she could reach it before the Shadow took her, she could set it down and she wouldn't need a successor. And you'd be free for good."

"She went to find it," Neva whispered. "For me."

"For you. For us. For the thing itself, I don't know." A pause. "She was gone seven hours. We went after her at dawn. We found her at the edge of the Thornwick stones, on the grass." His voice dropped. "She was alive when we reached her. Isolde held her. I went for the cart."

The fire popped.

"Isolde?" said Neva.

For a long time Isolde said nothing. The dark was very soft around her. When she spoke, her voice was so low that Neva had to hold her breath to hear it.

"She said something. At the end. It wasn't for me. I think she thought it was for you." A pause. "She said, 'Don't make her come back for me.'"

Neva made no sound.

"That was all. She said it twice. *Don't make her come back for me. Don't make her.* And then she was quiet." The pause stretched. "I didn't understand it. I thought she meant the Shadow. That it shouldn't be forced on you. Then I heard you were a ferrywoman, and I thought..."

"What?"

"That she meant not to hurt you. That if you came back, it should be for your own sake, and not hers." A very faint rustle: Isolde, drawing her knees to her chest. "I sent Pell anyway. I'm sorry. I couldn't think what else to do. I had her last words in my head, and I sent for you in spite of them. I'm sorry."

Tears were running down Neva's face. She did not make a sound. They rolled sideways into her hair and soaked the straw. She lay there with her eyes open, silent, shaking, and the whole room dissolved into a blur of firelight.

Something touched her hand.

It was a mug of water, pushed across the boards, close against her fingers. She felt it, cool and solid. She turned her head. In the dark, a pale hand was just withdrawing from the rim, and above it, Isolde's face, half turned away, was looking at the wall.

She did not say anything. Neither did Neva. She took the mug and drank. The water was cold. It was the kindest thing anyone had done for her in a week.

The shadow lay between the two beds, long as a road, and neither of them looked at it.

Long after, the fire had sunk to embers and the sound of the storm had thinned to a patter on the slates, Neva heard the slow evening breaths around her settle into sleep. She lay with her arm across her face. She did not sleep.

She was still awake an hour later when the murmur began.

It was very low. She might not have caught it, except that she had been listening, as one listens for a step on a stair. Two voices, close together, from the far side of the hearth. The firelight made no more than a glow of red, and she could make out their shapes, pushed close: a big one, bowed, and a slimmer one, upright. They had moved their pallets together in the dark.

She held her breath. She did not mean to eavesdrop. It was only that she could not help it.

"...she's trying," Isolde was saying, so softly that it was almost not words. "I watched her at supper. She tries so hard."

"She does."

"She doesn't even know what she's carrying."

A silence. A rustle.

"She wears it too well," said Taren.

It was a rough whisper, thick with something that was almost pain. "That's what I can't... I keep looking at her, and for a second it's her, it's Oriel, I see her hands. And then she turns her head and it isn't. And I want to hate it. I want to hate her for it." A shaky breath. "But she's nothing like. She's all edges. She was always all edges. And she wears it so well."

Isolde did not answer. After a while Neva heard the faint chink of a hand coming to rest on a shoulder, and a long exhalation, unsteady.

She lay absolutely still. She was cold from head to foot. Her face burned. Everything in her wanted to pull the blanket over her ears and shut it all out, to be somewhere else, anywhere else, a loft, a ferry, a river that went in one direction and asked her nothing.

She felt a faint pressure at her feet.

The shadow had moved. It lay no longer between the two beds but across her own, up against her legs, and she could feel it as a coolness along her shins. As she watched, it lifted its head, slowly, from the dark of the floor, and turned toward her in the dim light.

It had been listening too.

For a long, quiet moment, in the hush of the sleeping house, the dead woman's shadow and the living woman looked at one another. Neither of them had a face. Neither of them needed one. Then the shadow, with great gentleness, laid itself down along her side, as a dog lies against a frightened child, and stayed there until the dawn.