Chapter 217: The Empty Shrine

There was bread on the step of the lamp-house in the morning.

Half a loaf, wrapped in a clean cloth, set very square on the worn stone sill outside the doorway that had no door. Nobody had knocked. Nobody had seen anyone come. Ignatius had sat all night with his back to that doorway, and he swore nothing had come near it but a gull.

"She came while the gull was here," said Selvane, and picked it up in both hands as if it were warm. It wasn't. It was yesterday's. "She'll have been watching the light all night from her window. And when she saw it was still there in the morning, she brought bread." She looked up the hill at the back row of houses, at one window with a thread of smoke above it. "That's what they used to do at Tessaly. For me. A loaf on the step of the lamp-house. Every week. So the lamp-keeper wouldn't go hungry." She held the bread against her chest. "There hasn't been a lamp-keeper at Fellsend for a hundred years. She brought it anyway."

"Somebody's grandmother told her," said Iselle.

"Somebody's grandmother always does."

We ate it. Selvane said you have to. It's rude not to. She broke it into ten pieces on the sill, very carefully, and gave the biggest one to Kessavel, who held it the way he holds everything, as if it were too full, and then, for the first time since I've known him, ate it.

He didn't say anything. He looked at his empty hand afterward for a long time.

"Nobody's ever left me bread," he said at last.

"Somebody did now," said Selvane. "It was for the lamp-keeper. You were in the lamp-house. It counts."

* * *

The coast road leaves the sea south of Fellsend. There's a high marshy headland in the way, Selvane said, all reeds and black water, and the road goes inland around it for five or six miles before it comes back down to Dunnock. So we went inland, and the sea went away behind us, and with it, a little at a time, everything that had felt like home.

I could feel it go. I'd stopped testing the folds, the way I'd promised Carol. But I could feel the land anyway, the way you feel the floor of a strange house through your boots. Near the sea it had been heavy. Inland it was heavy and blank. I don't know how else to say it. At home, every field and wood and crossing I walk over knows it's somewhere. It has a name. People have said its name out loud for a thousand years, Long Meadow, Ash Bottom, the Three Stiles, and the land has heard it so often it knows what it is. This land didn't. It knew it was held. That was all it knew. Forty-eight miles from him. Forty-seven. It went by under our feet like a page with the writing scraped off.

We passed the milestones. XLVIII. XLVII. Iselle stopped looking at them after the second one.

The fog was still in my right hand. I'd closed my fingers around it in the night, gently, the way you'd hold a moth. It lay there, cool and quiet, curled around the coal. Every so often it moved, a little, the way a sleeping animal moves. I don't think it liked being away from the sea either.

About two miles past Fellsend, the road came to a crossroads.

It was nothing much. Our road, going south. Another road, narrower, crossing it east to west, going inland toward Ammet on one side and down toward the marsh on the other. A thorn tree, bent flat by the wind. And on the corner, where the roads met, a shrine.

A little one. Smaller than Lanth's. A stone box, really, no taller than Lexander, with a slate roof and a black door and the iron fist on top, rusted almost through. No priest. No line. Nobody had swept its step. The door was standing open an inch, and moving a little in the wind, and creaking.

"Wayside shrine," said Kessavel. "There's one at every cross. You're supposed to stop and touch the door and say it."

"Say what?" said Carol, though she knew.

"His," said Kessavel. "Going in either direction. So that wherever you're going, you go as his."

Nobody touched the door.

* * *

Lexander heard the cart first.

He stopped dead on the road with his hand up, and we all stopped, and then I heard it too. Wheels. Iron tires on frozen ruts. A mule's harness jingling. Coming up the narrow road from the west, from the direction of the marsh, out of a dip we couldn't see into. Close. A few hundred yards.

"Priests," said Iselle. She'd gone white. "That's the list cart. They go out along the cross-roads from the city. It's the tenth day. They'll be going to Ammet." She swallowed. "Or Fellsend. Or Lanth."

Lanth. Kenna's lamp, burning in the window in broad daylight. So they can see it in the city. One more.

There was nowhere to go. That's the trouble with country that has no hedges. Flat brown plowed land on every side, white with frost, and a crossroads in the middle of it, and ten strangers standing on it in the open: a woman with burning feet and a man with burning hair, a one-eyed king, a gray god everyone in Kethra has been taught to put their fingers over their mouths for.

I opened my right hand.

"I'm sorry," I said to the fog. "I know I said only till we found her. I need you now. Just for a minute. Will you?"

It came out of my palm the way breath comes out on a cold morning. All at once and soft. White and thick and quiet, and it spread. Not like ordinary fog, drifting. It went, the way it had lain in the cove at Fellsend, with purpose, low across the frozen furrows and up around our knees and our chests and over our heads, until the thorn tree was gone, and the shrine was gone, and Carol beside me was a shape in white with a blue coat somewhere inside it, and the whole crossroads was a bowl of milk.

Cold. Wet on my face. Smelling of the sea.

"Nobody move," said Lexander, very low. "Nobody speak."

Nobody did.

The cart came up out of the dip and onto the crossroads. I heard it more than saw it. A shape, gray in the white, a mule's long ears, a driver hunched on the bench with a whip he wasn't using. And behind him, two gray shapes sitting upright, close together. Each with a lamp, lit, in the middle of the day, glowing in the fog like two drowned moons.

The mule stopped.

It stopped right in the middle of the crossroads, with the fog around its knees, and put its ears back and wouldn't go on. The driver said something to it in Kethran and it didn't move. One of the priests said something sharper. I heard a lamp lift.

It didn't shine through. That fog had kept the harbor at Fellsend hidden from the sea for a thousand years, whenever she wanted it to. A priest's lamp was nothing to it. The light just lit the white a little brighter around the cart, and stopped, a few feet out, like a lantern held up in a snowstorm.

I could see the mule's eye. It was looking straight at me through the fog. It knew perfectly well we were there.

Please, I thought at it. I don't know why. Please, just go on.

The mule looked at me a moment longer. Then it put its ears forward, and blew out through its nose, and walked on. Not west. Not north, toward Fellsend and Lanth. East. Inland. On the cross-road toward Ammet.

The cart went with it. The two drowned moons went with it. The sound of the wheels went up the cross-road and over a rise and faded, and was gone.

Nobody moved for a long time.

"Ammet," said Iselle at last. Her voice was shaking. "They're going to Ammet. Not Lanth." She put her hand over her face. "Not Lanth."

"Not today," said Lexander quietly. "Some other tenth day." He looked at me through the thinning white. "We'll have to think about that, Garrick. Not now. But we'll have to."

"I know," I said.

I held out my hand, and the fog came back into it. Slowly, this time. As if it were reluctant to. It had liked being out, I think. It had liked being for something again.

And as the last of it drew in off the crossroads and curled back around the coal, I heard a voice.

* * *

It came from the shrine.

Small and dry and very far away, like a voice from the bottom of a well. Not words, at first. Just a sound. And then words, over and over, the way you'd say something you'd forgotten the rest of.

Where is this?

Where is this?

Where is this?

Selvane turned around so fast her lamp swung.

"There's someone in there," she said.

"There's nothing in there," said Kessavel. "There's never anything in them. That's the point. They're empty. They're a door with nothing behind it, so that people get used to saying His to nothing."

Where is this? said the voice.

I went to the shrine. I stopped in front of the black door, which was still creaking an inch open in the wind, and I didn't push it. I knocked. Three times. On the black wood, under the rusted fist.

"Hello?" I said. "My name is Garrick Grey. May I come in?"

The voice stopped.

It didn't answer. It was quiet for so long that I thought I'd frightened it away, if there'd been anything there to frighten. And then, very small:

Nobody asks. Nobody asks to come in. They say the word at the door and go on. A pause. What's a name?

I opened the door.

* * *

The shrine was empty.

Kessavel was right about that. Bare stone walls, whitewashed once, gone gray with damp. A floor of big flat flags. No altar. No lamp. No image of anything. Not even a shelf. Just a little stone room the size of a cupboard, with a black door, and four walls, and nothing in it.

Except, in the corner, something sitting on the floor.

I didn't see it at first. My eyes slid over it, the way your eyes slide over a coat on a hook in a dark hallway. It was the color of the walls. Gray-brown. The color of an old sack, or the bark of a dead thorn tree, or a road in winter. It was sitting with its knees drawn up and its arms around them, the way a man sits who's been waiting a very long time, and it was so thin, so faded, that I could see the mortar lines of the wall behind it through its chest.

It had a face. Barely. Like a face drawn on a steamed window that has nearly run away.

And it was holding a stick. A walking stick, thorn-wood, with notches cut down the length of it. The stick was the only part of it that looked real.

Where is this? it said to me.

I crouched down in the doorway. Not too close.

"It's a crossroads," I said. "A shrine at a crossroads. Two miles south of Fellsend."

It looked at me. Its faded eyes, or the place where its eyes should have been.

Fellsend, it said. Slowly. As if the word were a stone it was turning over in its hand. Fellsend. I know that. I knew that. It was quiet. How far?

"Two miles."

Two miles. It turned the stick in its hands. Its fingers went down the notches, one at a time, as if it were counting. That's right. That's right. Two miles to Fellsend. I used to— It stopped. The faded face went blank. I used to. It looked at the stick. I can't remember what I used to. I can't remember what I am.

Behind me, I heard Kessavel make a sound.

* * *

"I know what that is," said Kessavel.

He'd come up behind me to the shrine door. He didn't come in. He stood on the step with his gray hands at his sides and looked down at the thing in the corner, and his face was like I'd never seen it. Not guilty. Not ashamed. Frightened.

"That's one of the stripped ones," he said. "That's what he does to the ones who didn't fight. Not the Choir. The Choir is mine. I take the name. This is his." He swallowed. "He doesn't take the name. He takes the place. He holds the place a god is god of, until the place forgets the god. And then the god forgets itself." He looked at the stick. "I've never seen one. Not after. Not finished. I never knew what it looked like at the end."

"How does he do it?" said Lexander, from the road.

"I don't know," said Kessavel. "I never knew. He never told me. He just holds them." His voice dropped. "A goddess of fences told me, once, in a hold, before I took her name. She said: he doesn't do anything. He just holds them. Until they're his."

I looked at the thing in the corner. At its faded face. At the mortar showing through its chest.

It wasn't frightening. That was the worst part. A Choir thing is frightening; it's cold and hungry and it sings for your name. This wasn't hungry. It was just less. Like a word you've said so many times it stops meaning anything. Like His, on the step at Ammet.

"What were you god of?" I said.

I don't know.

"What's your name?"

I don't know. I had one. I think I had one. The faded fingers went down the notches on the stick. People used to say it. At the crossroads. When they were lost. It stopped. Lost. That's something. People used to be lost here. It looked up at me. Nobody's lost now. They all know where they're going. They're going to him. Forty-seven miles. Forty-six. They don't need to ask anybody.

"I'm lost," I said.

It stopped.

The faded face turned toward me, all the way, for the first time.

You're lost?

"I'm in a country I've never been to. I don't know any of the roads. I don't know where anything is. I've got a coal in my hand that points at my wife, and a milestone every mile that tells me how far I am from a man I don't want to go near, and nobody in this whole country will tell me where I am." I held out my right hand, open, so it could see the coal and the curl of fog around it. "I'm lost. I'm asking."

* * *

It looked at my hand for a long time.

Then something happened to its face. It didn't come back, exactly. It tried. The way a lamp wick tries when you've turned it down to nothing and then turn it up again: a long gray smoke, and a struggle, and a very small blue flame at the bottom of it that might or might not catch.

Ask me, it said.

"Ask you what?"

Ask me where you are. Properly. The way they used to. The faded fingers had stopped on one notch on the stick and were pressing it, hard. Nobody's asked me in a hundred years. I don't know if I still can.

I didn't know the way they used to. I'd never been lost on a Kethran road. But I've been lost. Everybody has. And when you're lost, there's only one way to ask.

"Please," I said. "Where am I?"

The thing in the corner of the shrine closed its eyes.

And the floor moved.

Not much. Not like a quake. Like a breath. The flagstones under my boots shifted, very slightly, as if the ground beneath them had turned over in its sleep. And out of the corner of the shrine, out of the faded gray-brown shape with the stick, a voice came that wasn't small and dry at all. It was low and steady and patient, the voice of somebody who has stood at the same crossroads for a thousand years and given the same directions ten thousand times and never once got tired of it:

You're at the cross below Hallow Down, where the Fellsend road meets the marsh road. Fellsend's two miles north. Dunnock's three south, over the down, past the hanging stone. Ammet's four, east, if you must. The marsh is west, and you mustn't. Lanth is six behind you. The sea is always to your right going south.

It opened its eyes.

You're at Hallow Cross, it said. That's where you are. You're somewhere.

And the crossroads knew it.

I felt it. Through my boots, through my knees on the shrine floor, through the coal in my palm. The flat blank brown land outside the door, the frozen furrows, the bent thorn tree, the four roads going off toward four places: all of it, for one moment, woke up and remembered it had a name. Hallow Cross. People had said it here. Lost people. Thousands of them. With their packs on their backs and the light going, standing at this corner, not knowing which way, asking. And something had answered.

The fog in my hand stirred and lifted its head.

* * *

"Garrick," said Iselle.

She'd come into the doorway beside Kessavel, and she was looking at the floor. Not at the god in the corner. At the floor. At one of the big flat flags, in the middle, under my knees.

"Move," she said. "Please. Look."

I moved. And looked.

The flag I'd been kneeling on wasn't like the others. The others were plain. This one was a different stone, darker, and it was cut. Not smooth, like a floor. It had been dressed on the sides and rounded at one end, like a gravestone. Or a milestone. And it had been laid face down. You could see the edges of carving, very worn, where the face of it met the mortar.

"That's a waymark," said Iselle. "An old one. Before the fists. My grandmother's village had one at the mill. They took it away when I was small." She knelt down beside it. "They didn't break them. They couldn't break them all, there were too many. So they took them up and laid them face down. In the shrines. Under the floors." Her voice went very quiet. "So that everyone who says His at the door is standing on the stone that used to tell them where they were."

Nobody said anything.

Then Roderic came into the shrine, ducking under the low door, and knelt down on the other side of the stone from Iselle, and looked at the god in the corner.

"May we turn it over?" he said. "It's yours, I think. You can say no."

The thing in the corner looked at him.

Yes, it said. Please. I've been lying on my face for so long.

* * *

It took three of us. Roderic and Kessavel and me, with my one good hand, and Loki prying up the edge with his knife. Iselle held the lamp. The flag came up out of the floor with a sound like a sigh, and a smell of cold earth, and we tipped it, slowly, onto its back.

It was a waymark. Waist-high, if you'd stood it up. Dark stone, rounded at the top, and covered all over with carving, worn soft by a hundred years of being lain on its face and a thousand before that of being out in the weather.

Iselle read it. Slowly, tracing the letters with her finger, because the old Kethran letters aren't the same as the new.

"Hallow Cross," she read. "Fellsend, two. Dunnock, three. Ammet, four. Lanth, six. The sea on your right hand going south." Her finger moved down to the bottom of the stone, where the carving was deepest, cut by someone who had meant it to last. "And then: If you are lost, ask Ossery."

The god in the corner of the shrine lifted his head.

"Ossery," said Iselle again. Gently. To him. "If you are lost, ask Ossery."

And I said it too. Because a naming needs two voices. Meriel taught us that.

"Ossery," I said. "Of Hallow Cross. Who tells people where they are."

He stood up.

It took him a long time. He got up the way old men get up, with both hands on the stick, in stages. But he got up, and when he was standing he wasn't the color of the wall anymore. He was the color of a road. A good road, in autumn, brown and gold and hard-packed, with the leaves blown into the ruts. Thin still. Very thin. I could still see the mortar through him, a little, if I looked. But he had a face now. An old, lined, weathered face, with a short gray beard and eyes the color of a signpost after rain, and he was looking at the stone on the floor, at his own name cut in it, as if he'd never seen anything so beautiful in his life.

"Ossery," he said. His voice cracked on it, the way Kenna's had. "That's me. That's me. If you are lost, ask Ossery." He looked at me. "You were lost."

"I was."

"And you asked."

"I asked."

"Nobody's been lost in a hundred years," said Ossery. "He doesn't let them. Everyone knows where they're going." He leaned on the stick. "You can't be a god of being lost in a country where nobody's allowed to be. You just stop. You forget. The place forgets you first, and then you forget." He looked down at the stone. "They laid me on my face in the dark under a word I don't like, and people said that word over me every day for a hundred years, and after a while I couldn't remember there'd ever been any other word."

"There was," said Iselle. "There is. There's your name."

* * *

We stood the stone up outside.

Ossery asked us to. Not in the shrine. At the corner of the crossroads, under the bent thorn tree, where he said it had always stood until they took it. Roderic and Kessavel dug the hole with their hands in the frozen earth, and Io warmed the ground for them so it would give, and Ignatius held the stone upright while they packed it in. When it was done, it stood waist-high at the corner of the four roads, with its face to the south, the way it used to.

If you are lost, ask Ossery.

The shrine stood beside it, with its black door and its rusted fist. Empty. It had always been empty. Now everybody could see that it was.

"Will they take it up again?" said Carol.

"Probably," said Ossery. He was sitting on the stone, his stick across his knees, the way I think he used to sit there a thousand years ago, waiting for someone to come along the road and not know which way. "Next tenth day. Or the one after." He didn't sound worried. "It doesn't matter. I know where I am now. They can lay me on my face again if they like. I'll remember. That's the thing about being lost and found. You don't forget the found part."

Then he looked at me. Properly. The signpost eyes went over the coal in my hand, and the white left one, and the dark left eye, and the fog.

"You're going to the city," he said.

"Yes."

"Folding?"

I stared at him.

"I can feel it," said Ossery. "On you. Like road-dust. You're the sort that goes from one place to another without the in-between." He tilted his head. "And it's been hard. Hasn't it? Here."

"Like pushing through a curtain," I said.

"Of course it has." He tapped the stone under him with his stick. "You can't fold to somewhere that doesn't know it's somewhere, boy. Every road you can see from here, every field, every mile with a fist on it, has forgotten its name. It's not anywhere anymore. It's just his, and so many miles from him. How can you step from one place to another when there aren't any places?" He nodded across the crossroads. "Try it now. From here to there. Ten yards. On my road."

I looked at Carol. She was already holding the other end of my name.

I put out the fold. Ten yards, across the crossroads, to the thorn tree.

It went.

Not easily. Not like home. But it went like a door that's been oiled, instead of one swollen shut. The heavy curtain was still there, but it was a curtain now, not a wall of water. I came out under the thorn tree on my feet, and my heart was going, but only a little, the way it does after a flight of stairs.

I turned around.

"There," said Ossery, from the stone, pleased as a grandfather. "Hallow Cross knows its name now. It knows it's somewhere. So you can get to it."

"Only here," I said.

"Only here." He nodded. "And as far as my stones go. Every crossroads on this coast had a stone, once. I'm in all of them. Or I was. They're under the shrines now, every one, face down, like this one was." He tapped the stick on the ground. "Turn them over. Ask them. You'll find the roads remember. And you'll find you can go along them."

I stood at the corner of Hallow Cross and looked south, down the road toward Dunnock, toward the city, toward the glow I couldn't see from there but could feel in my palm.

Every crossroads. Every shrine. A stone under every floor.

"Will you come with us?" I said.

Ossery blinked.

"You know every road. You know where they all go. Not how far from him. Where." I held out my hand. My right hand, with the coal in it. "We're asking at every door. That's the promise. It'd go faster with somebody who knows where the doors are. And you could turn over your own stones. Every one between here and the city. And say your own name at every cross." I swallowed. "You can say no. You've only just stood up."

Ossery looked at my hand.

Then he looked at the shrine. At the black door. At the iron fist, rusted almost through.

"I've stood at this cross for a thousand years," he said. "Telling people where to go. I've never once gone anywhere." He got up off the stone, in stages, with both hands on the stick. "Yes. I'll come. I'd like to see where they all go. The roads. I've only ever pointed."

* * *

We came down over Hallow Down in the afternoon, past the hanging stone, which is a great gray boulder balanced on a shelf of rock as if it might roll down at any moment and has looked like that, Ossery said, for longer than he's been a god. He walked at the front with Selvane. They talked the whole way. Roads and harbors. Where the old lanes came down to the sea. Which lamps had been lit, once, at the ends of which roads, so that travelers coming down the hills in the dark could see the harbors. They'd known each other, a long time ago, it turned out. Not well. Just enough. The lamp lady, he called her. The one who stands at the end of the road, she called him. Neither of them had seen the other in a hundred years. Neither of them had known whether the other still was.

At the next crossroads, a mile on, there was another shrine. Smaller still. Ossery stopped in front of it and looked at me.

I knocked on the black door, and asked, and nobody answered, and Selvane said come in for whoever might have been there, and promised to come back and tell them. And Roderic and Kessavel went in and lifted the flag in the middle of the floor, and there was a stone under it, face down.

Dunnock, one. Hallow Cross, two. The sea on your right hand going south. If you are lost, ask Ossery.

Ossery put his hand on it. Just his hand. And said his name.

And that crossroads woke up too.

* * *

Dunnock was dark.

We came down to it at sunset, the way we'd come down to Fellsend: a harbor at the bottom of a steep valley, a stream running down the middle of the village into the sea, a stone bridge, two rows of houses, a little quay. Boats drawn up. Fewer than Fellsend's, and in better repair. Somebody still fished out of Dunnock. But the end of the quay was dark, and the lamp-house on the point was dark, and there was no fog lying in this harbor, waiting. Dunnock's keeper hadn't been a fog. Selvane said she'd been a little brown goddess of eels and mudflats, very shy, who used to sit under the bridge with her feet in the stream and giggle when the children dropped things on her.

There was nothing under the bridge now. Selvane went and looked.

She knocked on the end of the quay, and asked, and waited, and nobody answered. She said come in for Dunnock, and promised to come back and tell her. Her voice didn't shake this time. I think she'd got used to it. I think that was worse.

We stood on the quay at Dunnock in the dusk. Ten of us and Ossery, with his stick, and What's Left of Draum lying in the shallows at the foot of the steps, quiet as a pond. The houses above us were dark. Not empty. You could see the smoke from the chimneys. But dark at the windows, the way houses are when the people inside them have learned not to show a light toward the sea.

"There's nobody here who'll take us in," said Iselle quietly. "Not ten strangers. Not with him." She meant Kessavel. She didn't say it unkindly. "We should go up onto the down and sleep in the lee of the hanging stone."

"Wait," said Ossery.

He walked to the end of the quay. To the very end, where the dark lamp-house stood on the point. He stood there with his stick, facing the village, facing the two dark rows of houses climbing the valley. And then he lifted his head and said, in a voice that carried, the low patient voice of somebody who has given directions at a crossroads for a thousand years:

"You're at Dunnock. Where the eel-stream comes down to the sea. Hallow Cross is three miles north, over the down. Kittering's five, south, along the beach. The sea is on your right hand going south. You're at Dunnock. You're somewhere."

It wasn't loud. But it went up the valley. I felt it go. Up the stream, under the bridge, along both rows of dark houses, and every house it passed remembered. Just for a moment. That it was a house, in a place, and the place had a name. Dunnock.

Halfway up the valley, a door opened.

Yellow light, spilling out onto the cobbles. And a shape in it. A man. Old, by the way he stood, with one hand on the doorframe. He stood in his own doorway with the light behind him and looked down the dark street toward the harbor, toward the quay, toward us.

And then he did something that I had not seen a single person do in two days in Kethra. Not Kenna. Not anyone in the line at Ammet. Not anyone.

He called out.

"Who's there?"

In shore-speech. Cracked, and old, and frightened half to death. But he'd said it. Out loud. Into the dark. To strangers.

Who's there.

Selvane made a sound beside me like someone who's been holding her breath for a hundred years and has just been allowed to let it go.

"Go on," said Ossery. Very softly, to me, leaning on his stick. "He asked. You know what to do when somebody asks."

I did.

I walked to the bottom of the street, where the light from his door just reached the cobbles, and stopped there, where he could see me. My white hand and my shining one.

"My name is Garrick Grey," I said. "I'm a long way from home. And I'm lost."

* * *

From Mary's book. Saturday. Mary's hand, small and steady:

Sel's twelfth tree.

Friday, mid-morning, the boy stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor and said Fog. Then he went to the garden door and pushed it open and stood there looking at the yard. There wasn't any fog. It was a clear day. He stood there a long time anyway. Fenrir stood with him.

Davren came in at noon on Friday and said the needle had jumped. Not toward her. Sideways, a hair, and back. He says it was like the needle had felt something wake up nearby and turned to look at it. He's never seen it do that. He has started a page in his notebook headed Things the Needle Does That It Shouldn't. There are four things on it.

9:10 p.m. Friday at the stone. Three and three. Mirelle lit the lamp. Benjamin answered. She said I saw. Then three and ten again from the nearer bearing. Uriah didn't say anything this time. He just nodded and went back to the nook. Evelyn says he slept for two hours afterward, sitting up, with his hand still flat on the wall. The first proper sleep since Westmere.

Caitlin and Tamar went out again. Caitlin says the count is past three hundred and she's not halfway. She's written OARS at the top of a second page.

Loki's tea froze again in the little kitchen. The same cup. Helena put it on the windowsill and said she'd deal with it when he got home.

Four days to midwinter.

And under that, in a square carpenter's hand that slopes downhill, every letter cut as if with a chisel:

Grandpa. I'd like it noted that I've been carving all week, and I didn't know what, and tonight I finished it, and it's a signpost. A little one. Four arms, and a man sitting on the bottom of it with a stick. I don't know why. I've never carved a signpost in my life. The boy came and looked at it and said Where. He's never said that before either. Helena says it's a new word. I'd like it noted that I put it in the boat, at the front, next to the one of Selvane with the lamp. It seemed to want to go there. I'd like it noted that I'm too old to be surprised by anything, and that I'm surprised.