Soren was waiting beyond the crossing, on the side Rowan would not have taken if he had been going to work.
He wore a clean shirt beneath his coat and carried nothing. Rowan had left the field book at home; the smaller one fitted inside his coat.
“You're early,” Soren said.
“I wanted to walk.”
“We are walking.”
“Before we had to be somewhere.”
They took the upper lane through quieter work: a woman beating dust from a cloth, a man examining a boot sole. Rowan stopped at a window set crookedly above a plant too broad for its ledge.
“Would that trouble you?”
“Not if it opens,” Soren said.
“You wouldn't want it straight?”
“I might move the pot.”
Rowan liked the answer, though he did not entirely agree.
Noma had been leaving with a cloth over her shoulder. She put it inside when she saw them.
“He's there already. In case I'd forgotten which house.”
“Has he told you what stays?” Soren asked.
“Everything he's decided not to take. He'll tell you which that is when he gets to it.”
She led them to a worn threshold beneath a shallow roof. The man waiting there had rolled his coat sleeves above his wrists; a shaving clung to one cuff.
“These are the two?”
“Together,” Noma said. “A good beginning.”
He held out his hand.
“Malk.”
Soren gave his name, Rowan his. The man moved aside, then stopped to lift something from the floor before they could step over it. It was a wooden wedge, worn smooth along its lower edge. He put it beneath the open door.
“It likes to shut when you aren't watching.”
“I've brought that back twice,” Noma said.
“And I've thanked you twice.”
“I brought the door with it once.”
He laughed and took them inside.
The front room was wider than it looked from the lane. Its lower end held a table with one leaf folded down, two chairs and a narrow cupboard darkened around the handle. Beyond the table, a little hearth sat within the thickness of the wall. The stone beside it gave off a steady warmth, though no fire burned in the grate. Malk touched the small working set against its side and let the warmth fall back.
“I don't need that with the door open.”
Malk drew aside a window cloth. Light crossed the rug toward a shelf of books, a little lidless vessel and a long white-seamed stone.
“That comes,” he said.
“The shelf?”
“The stone. The shelf's fastened.”
Noma smiled. Soren stood beside the table, looking at the light.
“You eat here?”
“Usually. Outside when the wind lets me.”
Malk led them past the stair to the back room, telling them the upstairs doors were open.
The bench was there.
It filled the broad window Rowan had seen from Noma's yard, tools hung along its side and an unfinished piece at one corner. Soren looked from it to the door.
“It came in before that,” Malk said. “It will come out.”
“His sister knows how much room it needs,” Noma said.
“She has room now.” Malk covered the unfinished piece. “I wouldn't leave the bench here. She said I could work in her kitchen. We're both old enough to know what would happen to the table.”
“So she made you a place.”
“We made one.”
He was pleased by the distinction. A board screened the low window's lower half. Rowan could see the tree's upper branches, pots and sky, but not the ground where somebody would sit. Soren opened the garden door onto two shallow steps and went out with Malk.
“The board can come off,” Noma said.
Rowan sat on the stool to see what changed. Not enough; he would think about that. Outside, Soren listened while Malk named the things planted along the wall, which he meant to take and which he had promised not to disturb. The open garden gate showed the lane beyond. Rowan watched them for a moment, then went upstairs.
The front room upstairs held a bed and a chest; its window looked along the lane. The other was smaller. Rowan could hear Soren asking about the garden-door roof below and imagined being called down while he was still dressing.
He liked the room suddenly. Waking here would lead somewhere other than straight to the table he had left the night before.
Soren came up while he was looking into the second room.
“Which would you take?”
Rowan turned.
“For the work,” Soren said, then smiled at himself. “I've done it too.”
He came through the doorway and stood beside him. The smaller window caught light from between the two roofs. It was enough to read by, brighter across one side than the other.
“I'd take the other,” Rowan said.
“So would I.”
“For waking.”
Soren looked toward him. “Yes.”
They went into it together. A corner of Malk's bedcover had pulled free; a small framed piece stood on his chest. Soren glanced at it and looked away.
They had come to see his home, not imagine him already gone.
Rowan moved toward the window. Below, Noma had taken the chair off its side and sat while Malk spoke. He leaned against the wall, his hands moving through a story neither of them could hear.
“I can see you coming round that turn,” Rowan said.
“You'd hear me first.”
“If I had the window open.”
“You would.”
Soren put his hand on the sill. “I'd come home that way. Without the shop, some days.”
“And go back on others.”
“Because I chose to.”
He stepped away, the light catching the mend at his wrist. Rowan thought of drawing him and kept the thought without reaching for the book.
They went down.
Downstairs, Malk had raised the front table's leaf. There was space to pass if a chair stood differently. Soren touched its edge.
“When would you go?”
Malk rested his hands on the table's edge. “When I've got things out. Some sooner than others. I've no wish to make a promise that leaves the bench in your bedroom.”
“Would you leave the table?”
“If you wanted it.”
“I might.”
Rowan looked at him. Soren met his eyes.
“It's a good table.”
“It is.”
Malk asked whether they had a place to be while they considered it. Soren told him about the rooms above the shop.
“Good,” the man said. “I want to go to her, not spend the last part of it wondering whether I'm keeping you outside.”
He named what he would ask for the house. Soren checked what stayed; neither offered an answer. Noma took Malk to the garden while they remained by the table.
“I like the front room,” Rowan said. “And the one above it. But I'd want to eat looking out.”
They tried the back window together. From the stool he could still see only tree and sky.
“Higher chairs?” Soren said.
“I'd rather change the window.”
That meant changing stone, not a fitting Soren could turn. Somebody would have to know the work.
“I'd like to see it when the bench is gone,” Soren said. “You'd get more light.”
“And less tree?”
“The tree wouldn't move.”
“I know.”
Rowan stood and went to the garden door. There was enough room beneath the little roof for him to stay dry and look at the green ground even when it rained.
“You like that it could be soon,” he said.
Soren rose. “I like that it is a home. We wouldn't need to imagine every part before we tried living in it.”
“It would still be his.”
“For a while.”
Rowan looked at the garden. Malk had set empty pots beside the wall, leaving circles of darker earth where they had stood. Something else would grow there after he took them, whether Rowan and Soren came or not.
“I thought that would trouble me,” he said. “It doesn't.”
They ducked through the low garden door together.
“I'd remind you to duck,” Soren said.
“Before?”
“When I could.”
They went out laughing.
“You've questions?” Malk asked.
“I'd like to come again in the evening,” Rowan said.
“I'll be here.”
Malk took them to the front, showing the darker passage with its door closed. He wanted them to see what he had stopped noticing.
At the step Noma remembered the person she'd meant to visit. “I'll find her. She knows where I live.” She left them to think, calling to somebody near her gate.
They walked to the upper bend, where a gap showed the shop's roof below. Soren stopped.
“I'd be happy there.”
Rowan looked at him.
“I haven't said we ought to take it.”
“I know.”
“I want you to know that part.”
He nodded.
“I'd be happy with you,” Rowan said.
Soren's mouth moved. “I was hoping that part had been settled.”
“It has.”
“Then tell me about the house.”
Rowan laughed, then looked back along the lane. It bent out of sight before Malk's door, leaving him with the little room, the table and the voice of the man who had lived there.
“I'd like to know I chose it because I wanted that place. Not because it was the first place someone knew to show us.”
“So would I.”
“You would?”
“I'd like to see the ground you mean.”
“I haven't got any.”
“Then we should find some.”
They caught Noma before her gate.
“Not the house,” Soren said before she could ask. “Do you know who has ground along a lane? To build, if we chose.”
She thought of Kelm's piece behind the old garden wall. He talked of building whenever he passed, but lived at the other end of town and never began.
“He's at the lower yard with the pots. Tell him you've seen Malk's, or he'll spend all morning telling you where its windows face.”
This time they left her to her errand.
Kelm was serving a woman holding a small sleeping dog. He offered a pot she hadn't chosen.
“It's the same,” he said.
“Then give me the one I chose.”
He did. Soren moved a stack so she could leave with dog and pot, then stopped Kelm reaching for a covered piece inside.
“I've come about your ground.”
“Have you?”
“The place by the old garden wall.”
Kelm looked at Rowan, then back at Soren. “I haven't put anything up.”
“That's why we're asking.”
He laughed and set down the cover. “Noma?”
“She told us where to find you.”
“Let me put these inside.” Kelm cleared the passage with their help. He touched his key to the plate beside the door; a pale working answered. When it settled, he locked the fastening below it.
“I used to forget one. Now I keep them together.”
He led them up a quieter lane where houses stood farther apart, then lifted the loose fastening on a grey gate.
“This hasn't needed my key in a while.”
Inside, the ground was rougher than Malk's garden. Grass had grown across a path, breaking into tufts where old stones lay beneath it. A low wall marked one end. The higher wall along the lane held the day's warmth; beneath it, a little patch of plants had spread into the space where somebody once kept them separate.
There was no house.
Rowan had known there would not be. Standing there made the absence much larger. No window told him where to look. No doorway chose the place where he would turn his shoulders. Beyond the far end, a tree stood against the lower roofs, its branches open enough to see the sky between them.
Soren stepped through the gate after him and stopped.
“How far?”
Kelm showed them the wall, farther stones and the ground beyond the tree. He had first planned storage, then a room above it, before the lower yard became somewhere he wanted to stay.
“I've drawn it several times. Each one had the door somewhere else.”
Soren looked at Rowan.
“We haven't drawn one,” Rowan said.
“Then you can begin with what you want.” Kelm pushed aside a branch at the tree. The ground was dry enough to sit on beside a flat stone.
“You come here?” Soren asked.
“Sometimes. I don't make much use of it. I'd rather somebody did.”
He showed the ground he meant to keep and where the lane access would remain. Rowan crossed to the far side, finding the gate, tree and open space between.
“We'd come in there.”
Soren joined him. “From the shop?”
“And the other turn from Thane's. No farther.”
Rowan moved from the wall. A window here could catch the light without people crossing beneath it; a table would face the tree. He could see it so readily that he almost forgot Soren couldn't.
“Come here,” he said.
Soren came, watching the ground. Rowan showed him the line he had followed, the tree beyond it and the wall that would hold the garden's far edge.
“I thought here. For the room where we eat.”
“The garden there,” Soren said. “It gets the afternoon.”
“I want to be here enough to know what it looks like at different times. Not just the hours left over.”
“So do I.”
He walked to the tree, stood beneath it and looked back. His face changed with the angle, the seriousness easing as he put himself in the place Rowan had been seeing.
“You'd see me coming round there,” Soren said.
“From the table. With the window open.”
Kelm had remained near the gate. He came far enough to hear when Soren called, then looked where Rowan pointed.
“Would a house sit there?”
“There's room. You'd want somebody who builds to look at it with you. I've kept my plans, but they were for the things I wanted then.”
“Who would you ask?”
He gave them two names. Soren knew one, Rowan neither. Kelm would speak to them if they wanted; the second passed through his yard often enough that he could catch her before they spent another day asking where she was.
Rowan found Noma's note between the pages of his book and passed it to Soren, who wrote the names on its blank side.
“What would you want for it?”
Kelm told them. It was less than Malk's house, but it bought no roof, no room, no table someone had learned to like. Rowan could begin putting what they would need beside it without reaching a useful end to the sum.
Soren folded the note.
“We'd have to ask what the rest would take.”
“You would.” Kelm glanced toward the lane. “I could speak to her tomorrow. Let me know when you've decided.”
Kelm had a person coming to the lower yard. He said they could stay, showed Soren where to set the loose fastening and went back to his work.
The place quieted when his footsteps left the lane.
Rowan stood in the middle of it with his hands loose at his sides. A little wind moved through the tree. Beyond the lower roofs, somebody struck three clear notes on something that rang, waited and struck them again.
“I like it,” Soren said.
Rowan turned.
“I'd like to see what you saw when you came over here.”
He took out his book. The first marks were not walls. He drew the tree, the gate and the low place beyond it, then gave the table a small shape between them. Soren watched over his shoulder without telling him where a bench would fit.
Rowan put in the afternoon light.
“There.”
Soren took the book and moved toward the stone. He sat, looked from the page to the ground and shifted until the tree stood at the same angle. Rowan watched him make the little change that let him inhabit the drawing instead of only seeing it.
“I'd come home to that,” he said.
“Even while we were making it?”
“There wouldn't be much to come home to at first.”
“We'd still have the rooms,” Rowan said.
He sat on the warm ground beside the stone, leaves breaking light across Soren's sleeve.
“I thought you wanted the house.”
“I still like it. But I'd rather wait for what we both wanted than move in and find half of you standing here.”
“I haven't chosen.”
“I know. Neither have I.”
They sat long enough for the clear notes to stop beyond the roofs. Rowan could smell the earth beneath the grass, warmer nearer the wall. It was the first thing about the place that would never appear in the drawing.
“What would make you want this instead?” he asked.
“Knowing I wasn't going to spend every evening deciding where somebody ought to put something.”
“We could choose the people to do it.”
“And let them.”
Rowan smiled. “Yes.”
“I'd want to know when we could live here. Not a promise before anyone's looked. Something we can understand well enough to plan round.”
“And if it took longer?”
“Then we'd say how much longer we wanted it.”
“I'd want that too.”
Soren closed the book on Noma's note. “Let's ask them.”
Rowan put his palm against the ground once before standing. Its warmth remained against his hand when he lifted it. He brushed the grass from his trousers and held the book while Soren got up from the stone.
They went to the gate together. From there, the whole piece looked smaller than it had when he stood within it. He could see why someone might pass without thinking a house could fit between the wall and the tree.
Soren set the fastening where Kelm had shown them.
“I'd like to come in the evening,” he said.
“To see where the light goes?”
“To see where we'd be when we came back.”
Rowan nodded. “We can do that.”
They took the lane down toward the lower yard. There was time to find Kelm and ask him to speak to the people whose names Soren had written. After the meal, Rowan would be at Thane's. Before then they could make the question real enough to receive an answer.
At the first turn, Soren reached for the book.
“Let me see that again.”
Rowan handed it over while they walked. The small table stood beneath no roof, the tree bright beyond it. Soren kept looking from the page to the lane ahead, carrying both possible homes into the town with him.