On the fifth morning the storm broke.

It did not fade. It simply stopped, between one breath and the next, as though a hand had been lifted from a drum. Neva woke to a silence so complete that she thought for a moment she had gone deaf. Then she heard a drip, and another, and the thin sweet whistle of a wren on the roof-ridge, and she sat up on her pallet in the grey light and saw that the shutters were glowing gold at their edges.

She pushed them open. The valley lay washed and shining under a sky of pale new blue. Every blade of grass was hung with water. The standing stones on the slope above the house were stark and clear, black against the green, each one casting a long wet shadow down the hill, and over the top of the ridge a thin white moon, nearly gone, was dissolving in the morning.

Tomorrow it would be dark. Tomorrow night the Road would open.

She stood at the window a long time with her forehead against the cold glass. Behind her the common room was empty. Two pallets had been rolled and stacked; the third, hers, was still tangled. The shadow lay along the floor, perfectly quiet, its head turned toward the light.

"Don't look at me like that," she told it. "I haven't decided anything."

It did not argue.

By midmorning the whole Wayhouse was out of doors, dragging sodden bedding into the sun. The cook had a line strung between two posts and a bonfire of ruined plaster steaming in the yard. Taren was up on the barn roof with a bucket of tar and a long ladder, swearing quietly and steadily at a slate. Neva was sent, with an air of unspoken kindness, to the stable-yard, where a heap of tack lay waiting to be sorted.

It was there that she found Isolde.

She was at the far end of the long bench under the eaves, the sun on her bare forearms and a mountain of straps, buckles, and rope at her side. A coil of waxed line lay across her knee. Beside her, laid out in neat rows on a clean sack, was a collection of gear that made Neva's stomach turn: a pair of long knives, a whetstone, a roll of lint, a lantern, four lengths of fine cord knotted in the old Pathfinder's pattern. The things you took onto the Road.

Isolde did not look up. "Dry gear's in the left basket," she said. "Wet's in the right. Check the stitching on everything. If it's frayed, put it aside."

"Right."

Neva sat. She pulled the left basket toward her. For a while they worked in a silence that was, for the first time, almost companionable. The sun was warm on her shoulders. The leather smelled of grease and old rain. She turned a girth strap over in her fingers, looking for the weak place, and she found it, and set it on the pile, and reached for the next.

She was aware, as she worked, of Isolde's hands.

She had never really watched them before. They were slender and brown, with a long, narrow, competent grace, and they handled a buckle as if each was a living thing. A white scar ran across the back of the left one, from the knuckle of the first finger to the base of the thumb. Her nails were cut short. She wore no ring.

"You're staring," said Isolde.

Neva flushed. "I wasn't."

"You were." Isolde pulled a frayed strap from the heap and examined it. She did not seem angry. "Everyone does, the first time. It was a bow-string. I was twelve."

"It looks painful."

"It was."

That was all. But it was, Neva thought, a longer exchange than they had had in five years, and she sat with it quietly, as one does with a gift one is afraid to look at.

They worked on. The sun climbed. In the yard beyond, a man's voice shouted, and a dog barked, and a horse whickered in a stall. At the far end of the bench Isolde rose and went to the wall where the saddles hung on their pegs and began to lift one down.

It was a big saddle, a Road saddle, heavy with its double girths and saddlebags, and she took it in both arms and swung it up. It was no more than she did every day. But the wet leather was slick, and her boot found a patch of mud, and as she turned there was a short crack, like a green twig breaking. The saddle slewed sideways. Isolde swore, a clipped, soundless word, and went down on one knee with the whole weight of it pinned against her left wrist.

Neva was on her feet before she knew she had moved.

"Don't," Isolde said. "It's nothing."

"Let me see."

"It's a wrench, I said it's..."

But Neva had already taken the saddle's weight and swung it onto the bench. She knelt in the mud. She caught Isolde's left hand in both of hers, and turned it over, and saw the wrist already beginning to swell, a hot dull red.

"It's sprained," she said. "You can't carry anything on that. Hold still."

She did not stop to think. She reached for the roll of lint on the sack, and the clean strips beside it, and she took the wrist in the heel of her palm and began to wind the bandage round, firm and flat, over and under and across, with a rhythm her hands seemed to know. It was an easy, unconsidered competence. She had not bound a wrist in her life.

She felt the shadow move.

It was behind her. It had been lying along the wall, and now it rose and drew in against her back, and the movement of her hands changed. They slowed. They gentled. They turned, in some way she had not chosen, so that her thumb lay along the inside of the wrist and pressed down, and the bandage went on in a pattern of long, soft, overlapping loops. It was not how she would have done it. It was how it had always been done, in this yard, on this bench, by someone with an infinite patience and a great many years of practice.

Isolde had stopped breathing.

Neva felt it before she heard it. The hand she held went rigid. Under her fingers the pulse in Isolde's wrist began to race, wild and light, like a bird against a window, and there was a kind of electric tension along the whole length of the arm.

And through Neva's own hands, up through her wrists and her elbows and into her chest, came a rush of something so gentle it was almost unbearable.

It was not pity. It was not even affection. It was the particular tenderness of a person tending someone she has watched for years from a little way off, someone who has never asked for anything and who has been bleeding quietly all the while. *There,* the feeling said. *There, there. You never say it hurts. You never say. Let me.* It filled her throat. It brimmed behind her eyes. It was so large and so heartbreakingly kind that for a moment Neva could not tell where it ended. And in that moment she saw, behind the sunlit yard, another yard, a summer one, and a younger Isolde, sitting on the same bench with a cut hand and a scowl, and a tall woman kneeling to bind it, and the quiet wonder of the first time those fingers had closed around hers and not been pulled away.

She let go.

She dropped the bandage as if it had burned her. She snatched her hands back against her chest. She was breathing hard, and her fingers were trembling, and the tenderness was draining out of her in a long cold flood.

For a moment the two of them knelt in the mud and stared at each other.

Isolde's face had gone a dreadful white. Her lips were parted. In her eyes, for a single unguarded moment, Neva saw something raw: a flare of wild, hopeless, helpless hope, as though somebody had opened a door onto a room she had long since stopped believing in. It lasted no longer than a heartbeat. Then Neva saw her understand. She saw the hope shatter, and the realisation come up behind it, black and cold, and the whole face close.

"I'm sorry," said Neva. "I didn't mean..."

"Don't."

"It wasn't me. It was the Shadow, it moved my hands, I swear it..."

"I know it was the Shadow." Isolde's voice was perfectly flat. She was on her feet. She had snatched up her wrist and was holding it close against her side, and her mouth had set in a thin hard line. "I know exactly what it was."

"I would never have..."

"Don't use her hands on me."

It was said very quietly. It struck like a slap.

Neva stayed on her knees in the mud. She could feel the heat in her cheeks. "I didn't do it on purpose."

"No." Isolde's eyes were very bright and very dry. "That's what makes it worse."

"How is that worse?"

"Because if you'd meant it, I could hate you." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she caught it, and straightened. "I could say, she is a thief. She has come into my house and taken a thing that doesn't belong to her. But you didn't. You didn't even know. You just put your hands on me and it was her. It was exactly her. The way she held my wrist. I'd know it anywhere. And you looked at me, and you were *crying*, and I..."

She broke off. Her jaw worked. A muscle in her cheek flickered.

"Do you know what it's like," she said, very low, "to be handled by someone you've loved for seven years, and for them to not be there?"

Neva said nothing. She could not.

"I don't ask you to understand." Isolde took a long breath. "I only ask that you don't do it again. Please."

There was a step on the cobbles behind them, and a big shadow fell across the yard.

"What's going on?"

Taren stood at the stable arch with a bucket of tar in one hand and a hammer in the other. His eyes went from one woman to the other, quick and sharp. He took in Isolde's white face and the bandage at her feet, and Neva kneeling in the mud, and the long shape of the shadow rising behind her like a coat on a hook. His face tightened.

"It did it again," he said. It was not a question.

"It healed her wrist," said Neva. Her voice shook. "It took my hands. I didn't ask it to."

"It's grieving," said Taren, grimly. "It doesn't know how not to."

"It isn't grieving. It's feeling." Neva got to her feet. Mud streaked her knees; she did not brush at it. She could hear her own voice rising and could not stop it. "That's what I can't stand. It isn't just memory. It's what she felt, and it's all inside me, and I can't tell. When I look at him..." She flung a hand toward Taren, then dropped it, appalled. "When I look at either of you. I can't tell which parts are me."

Silence.

"How do I know?" she said. Her voice cracked in the middle of the word. She spoke it aloud, at last, the question that had sat in her chest since the road. "How do I know what I feel is mine? How do I tell the difference?"

Neither of them moved. A hen pecked at the cobbles. A long way off, behind the barn, the cook was beating a carpet.

"You don't," said Taren.

He said it very gently. He put the hammer down on the mounting block.

"Not yet. It's... it doesn't tell you. It's not marked. It all feels the same from the inside." He rubbed his face with a tarry hand. "I loved her for twelve years. I know how her love feels. It's like standing in a warm room. It doesn't announce itself. You only realise you're in it when it's gone." He lowered his hand. "I can't tell you what's yours, Neva. I wish I could. You'll have to find out as you go."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you don't," said Isolde.

They both looked at her.

She had straightened, one hand cradling the other against her ribs, and she was looking at Neva with an expression that was hard and tired and not unkind. "She'd say the same thing. She said it to every student she ever had, when they came to her frightened. *Keep walking until you know.*"

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the only one there is."

Neva stood very still in the soft spring sun, and for a long moment she did not feel the ground under her feet. She thought: Keep walking until you know. She thought of a thin girl in a stone yard. She thought: it is a ridiculous thing to ask of a person.

Then she nodded.

"Then I'll make a rule," she said. "For me. Until I know." She looked from face to face. "If a feeling comes too fast, or too big, or from nowhere, if I feel it in my hands before my head, I'm not going to act on it. Not toward either of you. Not until I've stepped back and waited. I won't trust it. I won't use it. If it's mine it'll still be there tomorrow."

"That's sensible," said Taren, after a moment.

"Isolde?"

A pause. Then, with great reluctance, Isolde said, "It's fair."

"Then we're agreed." Neva stooped and picked up the bandage from the mud. She held it out. "I won't touch you again. Not like that. Can you wrap it yourself?"

For a moment Isolde looked at the dirty roll of lint, and Neva thought she would refuse. Then she reached out and took it. Her fingers brushed Neva's, only for an instant, and neither of them flinched.

"I can manage," she said.

That was the end of it. They went back to their work, the three of them, in careful silence. The sun climbed. A horse whinnied. Up on the barn roof, Taren hammered a slate into place with a long dry crack. They sorted the straps. They did not speak of it again.

But all day, at the edge of her mind, Neva felt the hum of the thing like a held note.

She was alone for an hour in the evening. The others had gone to the kitchen to check the stores, and she sat on the upturned bucket in the stable, with the bay mare's nose pushing at her shoulder, and she thought of nothing at all. It was quiet and warm in the straw. A single shaft of low gold light came through a gap in the boards and lay across her knees.

She found, without meaning to, that she was remembering.

It came up unprompted, the way a smell does. She was fifteen, and it was her third week at Thornwick, and she had been taken out to the south field before dawn in the freezing dark, in a borrowed coat three sizes too big. Oriel had made her stand in the frost in her bare feet. *Close your eyes,* she had said. *Stop listening. Hear.* For hours, it seemed, she had stood, furious, shivering, aching with the humiliation of being the one child in the world who could not do the thing. And then, between one moment and the next, something had changed. A warmth, slow and deep, coming up through the cold ground into the arch of her foot. A note. A direction. She had gasped. She had opened her eyes and looked up into Oriel's face, and seen the old woman smile for the first time.

*There,* Oriel had said. *That's yours.*

Neva sat in the stable and held the memory. It was hers. She was sure of it. It was shaped like her, a thin shivering girl in a stolen coat, small and fierce and astonished. It had no sweetness in it that was not her own. And as she held it, she noticed a thing she had not noticed before.

The shadow had gone quiet.

It lay across the straw at her feet. She had been aware of it all day, a humming, a leaning, a faint insistent pressure like a hand at her back. Now the pressure was gone. It had lain down, still as water. For three long breaths, then four, the dead woman's shadow did not stir, did not stretch, did not reach. It simply rested there, as though it had put down something heavy.

Then she blinked, and the memory went, and the humming came flooding back.

She frowned. She did not know what to make of it. She sat for a long time with her hand on the mare's neck and the question turning slowly in her head, and she found no answer, and eventually she let it go. It was a small thing. It was nothing.

That night, in the dark of the common room, she lay awake and watched the shadow go to the doorway. It rose from the floor. It stretched out its hand and drew one long finger down the doorframe, slowly, from lintel to threshold, as Oriel had done every night of her life. *Hello, house. Goodnight, house.* Neva had thought it silly. Now, watching, her throat ached.

And from the dark of the passage beyond, very faintly, came the creak of a floorboard.

She turned her head. In the thin light from the embers, Isolde was standing in the doorway.

She had been walking the hall. She was in her shirtsleeves with her braid down and a hand pressed to the bandaged wrist. She had stopped where she was, one step inside the room, and she was looking at the shadow's hand on the frame. She stood so still that for a moment Neva thought she had stopped breathing. Her face was an unreadable pale blur. Her other hand had closed around the hilt of her sword.

She stood there a long time. Then, deliberately, as though it cost her something, she turned her back on the sight, and walked away into the dark.