The night of the first dark moon was so still that Neva could hear her own blood.

They went up to the stones at dusk, the three of them, carrying packs that had been checked and rechecked until there was nothing left to check. The sky had cleared to a deep, cold green. No wind moved on the hill. The grass was wet with the last of the storm, and it soaked through her boots to the skin, and she did not care. She walked in the middle, as Madda had told her to, with Taren a pace ahead on her right and Isolde a pace behind on her left, and her shadow lay long across the turf before her like a dark road laid down in advance.

The Thornwick stones stood in a ring on the crest of the ridge, twelve of them, each taller than a man, grey and leaning, scabbed with lichen the colour of old coins. She had seen them every day for six years and had never once been afraid of them. She was afraid now. They did not look like stones. They looked like people who had stopped in the middle of a sentence.

Taren halted at the edge of the ring. He set down his pack and knelt, and with the unhurried gestures of long practice he began to check the knots at the cord that bound the three of them together: a plain rope, thirty feet of it, tied about each waist, with a loop and a pin at each end. He tested every knot twice. He tugged at the one on Neva's belt, two short sharp tugs, as he tested everything, and she felt the old thing go through her, the memory of a strap in a dim kitchen and a man's lowered head.

She kept her face still.

"Too tight?" he said, not looking up.

"No."

"Tell me if it chafes. Once we're through, there's no stopping to fix it."

"It's fine."

He nodded. His fingers moved on. Isolde stood a little apart with her hand on her sword and her eyes on the stones, not speaking, as she had not spoken since noon. She had unbound the wrist to check it, and rebound it, and said nothing. The pale oval of her face in the dying light was perfectly serene, and Neva knew by now what that serenity cost.

The last of the light drained from the sky. A star came out, then another. Neva looked up, and saw that the thin sliver of the moon, the last stubborn paring that had lingered at the ridge all week, had gone. There was only black where it had been, a hole the shape of a missing coin.

The stones began to hum.

It started so softly that she mistook it for her own pulse. A low note, very deep, pitched somewhere below the range of hearing, so that she felt it in her teeth and breastbone before she heard it at all. It rose through the grass and through the soles of her boots. It spread from stone to stone around the ring, one voice after another, until the whole hilltop shivered with it like the surface of a struck bell.

*Oh,* Neva thought.

It was the note. The same note she had heard in the loft above the net-house, in the stable, in the study; the one that said *north, this way, come.* But it was no longer under her feet, faint and sleeping. It was in the air, in the stones, in the sky itself. And she could hear every shading of it. Not just the one long pull but the whole structure laid out like a cloth: a high bright line that curved eastward, a darker undertone like a river running under the hill, a thread of something strange and sour at the edge where the ground ended. It went on and on, a landscape made entirely of sound.

"Taren," said Isolde, very sharply.

He had stood up. He was looking not at the stones but at Neva, and his face in the starlight had gone slack with astonishment.

"What are you hearing?" he said.

"I... the Road." She laughed, a thin helpless sound. "I can hear it. All of it. It's..." She turned in a slow circle. "There's a bend, there, past the third stone, it goes down and then sideways. And that, behind, that's the way we came. And there's a thing off to the left that sounds like a, like a bridge, but it isn't there yet."

"A bridge."

"It hasn't happened yet. It'll be there later." She put a hand over her mouth. "I don't know how I know that."

He did not move. He was looking at her as though she had spoken in a foreign tongue. "She never did that," he said slowly. "She read the ground. She read heat and wind and smell. She read what was *there*. I've never known her to hear it. I've never known anyone."

"Is it wrong?"

"I don't know."

"Does it matter?"

He opened his mouth, and shut it.

Isolde, behind her, said very quietly, "She would have wanted to hear that."

Neva turned. Isolde was staring at her, and the look on her face was one Neva had not seen before. Not the guarded blank of the yard, not the hurt of the bench. It was almost wonder. It was the look of someone who has been shown an old, familiar painting and has seen, in a corner she never noticed, a brushstroke that was not the master's. Her grey eyes searched Neva's face. They seemed to be seeing, for the first time, not an echo of Oriel but a woman.

It lasted a breath. Then she looked down, flushed faintly, and her fingers tightened on her sword.

"We should go," she said.

The ring of stones had begun to glow.

It was a pale cold light, like phosphorus on a night sea, rising from the base of each pillar and creeping slowly upward. The air in the middle of the ring seemed to thicken and shimmer. The grass flattened in a circle. And there, in the space between the tallest two stones, a darkness opened that was not the darkness of the sky. It was deeper. It had a texture, like velvet. And it breathed.

"The Gate," said Taren, quietly.

He bent for his pack. He straightened. He took up the head of the rope, with the plain steady air of a man who has done this a thousand times and does not expect to do it again, and put his left foot forward.

The shadow moved.

Neva felt it pass her like a draught. It slid across the grass, long and swift, and went ahead of Taren, and halted at the lip of the dark. And as it stood there, tall, silent, patient, with its coat swinging in no wind, the darkness shuddered and changed. A line of pale gold ran across it, a thread, a path. It stretched away into the black, bending slightly to the left, bright as a drawn wire.

The Road was opening, and it was opening for the dead woman.

"No," said Taren.

He had stopped with one foot in the air. His face had gone dark with anger, though it was not anger at her. "It's not supposed to go ahead. I lead. The Pathfinder's guard goes first, then the Shadow, then..."

"There's no Pathfinder," said Isolde.

"There's me."

"The Road doesn't know you."

"It knew me for twelve years!"

"It knew *her*." Isolde's voice was low and fierce. "You walked in her footsteps. You never led. You can't expect it to open for you now."

"I'm not asking it to open for me. I'm asking it to open for the one it chose." He rounded on Neva. "You. Step up. You heard it. You hear it. Tell it you're going."

"I don't know how!"

"Then I'll lead, and the Shadow can follow."

"Taren," said Neva, "it doesn't want to follow."

They stood glaring at one another across the humming air. The stones sang. The gold thread lay glittering in the gate, with the shadow standing at its end, tall and quiet, one hand extended slightly to the side.

She felt the pull.

It was not subtle. It was a great tide in her chest, drawing her forward, and it was full of a deep, terrible tenderness, a longing so enormous that the edges of her vision went wet. The shadow wanted her to follow it. Not to be led, but to be *with*. It wanted to walk this road as it had walked it ten thousand times, and for once, for the first time in nine days, it wanted not to walk alone. *Come,* said the feeling. *I'll show you. Come. I've got you.*

*No,* thought Neva.

*No. Not like that.*

She did not know where it came from. It was a small hard thing, hot as a coal. She stepped forward. She walked past Taren, who stared, and past the shadow's outstretched hand, and she put her right boot down onto the bright thread of the Road with the whole weight of her body.

The ground rang.

It was the oddest sensation, as though she had stepped on the lid of a great bell. The note leaped up around her, joyful, vast, and the whole line of gold flared white as a struck match. She heard Taren swear. She heard Isolde gasp.

"I'll go first," she said.

Her voice shook. She took a breath and made it steady. "I'll go. Not her. Not the Shadow. Me." She turned her head and spoke over her shoulder, to the tall dark figure waiting at the lip of the dark. "I'm walking this road. It's mine to walk. You can come along if you want, but you're following me."

For a moment nothing moved.

Then, very slowly, the shadow lowered its hand. It stepped to one side and bowed its head, with a grace that was almost courtly, and fell in behind her. It lay down at her heel like a loyal dog. And the gold thread burned steadily in the dark ahead, and there was no longer any quarrel.

Neva stood on the Road and shook.

"That," said Taren, in a strange voice, "was either very brave or very stupid."

"Probably both."

"Probably." He almost smiled. It was a ghost of one, no more, a tightening at the corner of his mouth. It was the first she had seen in five years, and it went through her like a blade. "All right, Neva Calloway. You lead."

They came up on either side of her.

She felt them do it. Taren's big hand closed on the strap of her pack, high on the shoulder, a solid warm pressure that steadied her whole body. On her other side, Isolde stepped in close, so close that their sleeves touched, and stood there like a wall. Neither of them said a word. They had simply put themselves on either side of her, without discussion, as one would flank a person in a dangerous place.

She was in the middle. She had not wanted to be there. She did not know whether to be grateful.

She took one step. Then another. The gate drew in around them like a held breath.

It was a crossing of a kind she could not afterwards describe. The darkness took the stones, the hill, the sky. It took the cold. For one long second there was no up or down, and the rope at her waist was the only thing that said she had a body. She felt the note rise in her until she thought she would split. She felt Taren's hand clench on her strap. She felt Isolde's sleeve against her arm. And behind her, with a sound like a door closing a very long way off, the world she knew went quiet.

She stumbled. Light struck her eyes.

She was standing on a grassy slope under a sky full of the wrong stars.

There were too many. They hung low and enormous, shifting slowly in colours she had no name for, green and violet and a pale bruised gold. The hills before her rolled in great slow swells like the back of something asleep. And they were moving. She saw it with a kind of stupid awe: the whole land was breathing, rising and falling, gently, as a sleeper's chest does. Between the hills a path unspooled in the grass, pale and winding, and as she watched, it shifted and slid a yard to the left, like a ribbon drawn across a table.

"The Hollow," said Isolde, behind her. It was barely a whisper.

Neva looked back.

The gate was closing. She could see it going, a tall black oval, narrowing like an eye, with the humming stones just visible through it. A thin line of grey light showed where the ground had been. Then the oval shrank to a slit, and the slit to a thread, and the thread went out.

There was nothing there. Only grass, and the slow stars, and the long wind.

"There's no way back," she said.

"Not until the next dark moon." Taren's voice was quiet. He had let go of her strap. He stood a little apart, looking at the place where the gate had been. "That's the rule. You go through, you go on. The Road opens twice for a traveller. Once going in, and once, if you've reached the end, going out." He rubbed a hand across his face. "From here, there's only forward."

"All three of us," said Isolde.

"All three."

She was looking at Neva, and there was something in her voice that had not been there before. It was not warmth. It was not trust. It was something small, wary, and exposed, like the first green shoot in a burnt field.

"Stay where I can see you," said Isolde. "Please."

Neva nodded.

She did not trust herself to speak. The three of them stood on the breathing hill under the shifting stars, tied at the waist by thirty feet of rope, and the shadow lay long on the grass behind them. A wind came over the slope and stirred her hair, and she smelled something she could not place: green, and cold, and old, and faintly sweet.

The first quarter hour was nothing but walking, and it was the strangest walking of her life.

The path did not stay where it was put. It slid, and the three of them slid with it, as a cart rides the bed of a sluggish river. Twice it swung sharply left, so that Neva, listening hard to the bright line of the note, had to leap a yard sideways to keep her boots on the glimmer. Once it dipped, without warning, into a hollow so steep that she went down on one knee and felt the rope bite at her waist. The grass on either side was long and silver-grey and it whispered as they passed, a soft continuous murmur, like a crowd of people all speaking very quietly in a language she almost understood.

"Don't listen to it," said Taren, over his shoulder. "It tries to tell you things."

"What things?"

"Whatever you most want to hear."

She tried not to. It was harder than she had expected. The whisper threaded through the hush, and some part of her kept leaning toward it, as one leans toward a door left ajar in a quiet house. It sounded, for a moment, almost like a woman humming three notes.

The ground lurched.

It was no more than a hand's-breadth, but it was sudden, and it came on Isolde's side. Neva heard the scuff of a boot, a sharp indrawn breath. Without thinking, she spun and shot out her arm and caught Isolde by the sleeve, just above the bandaged wrist, as the path swung out from under her.

Isolde fetched up hard against her shoulder. For a moment they were pressed side by side, close enough that Neva felt the quick rise and fall of her ribs, and smelled lamp-oil and rain-washed linen and something clean and faintly bitter, like crushed leaves. She did not let go. She could not have said why. Her fingers had closed on the cloth of Isolde's sleeve and would not unlock.

She waited for the flood. She braced for it, for the great borrowed tenderness, for the hands that were not her hands. It did not come.

What came instead was small, and plain, and entirely her own: the thump of her heart, and the cold sweat in her palm, and a startled, unreasonable flicker of gladness that the woman beside her had not fallen. That was all. A person catching a person. She searched herself for the shadow's weight and found it lying quiet at her heel, doing nothing.

Isolde had gone very still.

She was looking down at the hand on her sleeve. Her lashes were lowered, so that Neva could not read her eyes. Slowly, carefully, as though the movement might break something, she steadied her feet. The path settled beneath them, and she stood upright, and Neva made her fingers open.

"Thank you," said Isolde, to the ground.

"It was nothing."

"I know." A pause. A faint flush had come up along the line of her cheekbone. "It wasn't her," she added, very low, so that Taren, three paces ahead, could not have heard. "Was it? That time."

Neva swallowed. "I don't think so."

"No." Isolde lifted her eyes at last. There was a strange, bright, guarded look in them. "I didn't think so either."

That was all. She faced the front and walked on, and after a moment Neva, with her cheeks burning and a feeling like a small bird loose in her chest, followed.

They walked on under the slow wheeling stars, and ahead of them the hills lifted and fell in the long unhurried rhythm of something asleep.

She slid her hand into her pack, for no reason she could name. Her fingers found the tin.

It was warm.

It had not been warm when she packed it. It was warm now, like a loaf from the oven, and when she drew it out and held it up, there was a faint glow along its seams. She pressed the lid. Inside, the five letters lay in a row, as they had for five years. But the first one, the oldest, the one with the soft frayed corner, was glowing. A thin light was leaking from under the wax, steady and golden. It was breathing in time with the hills.

"Neva?" said Taren.

She closed the lid. "It's nothing."

"That's one of hers."

"I know." She tucked the tin away. Her hand was not quite steady. "I'll... not yet. Not now."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and turned toward the path. "From here, we only go forward," he said. "Keep to the middle. Don't step off the line. And whatever you hear..."

"Stay in sight," said Isolde, very quietly.

They started to walk. The path slid and turned under their feet, and the slow stars wheeled above, and neither of them looked back. Neva walked between them with her heart pounding and the shadow at her heels, and a thing crossed her mind that she could not drive out.

They had put her in the middle without a word. Both of them. At once. Neither had even looked at the other.

Was it because they were afraid for her? Or because, when they looked at her, they were seeing someone else?

She did not know. She walked on. Behind her, on the grass, the long dark shape of a dead woman's shadow lay down its length across the road like an arrow pointing the way they had come, and then, as though it had thought better of it, rose, and turned, and pointed forward.