The first person who asked Rowan to carry something home wanted him to take an empty basket.
“It went out full,” the woman said. “People remember that part.”
She had found him at the last roof before the lower fields, where Phia was persuading water out of the hem of her skirt. It fell in a narrow line beside the step, leaving the cloth dark but no longer dripping. Rowan had a bowl of bread and onions balanced on his knee. The basket stood between his boots.
“Who does it belong to?”
“Edda. She'll say it belongs to Corren, but don't leave it with him unless she's there.”
“I can take it.”
“Good. I told her I'd send it with someone sensible.”
Phia glanced up. “You might have waited until she'd seen him eat.”
He had dropped onion into the basket. He picked it out before the woman could look and finished the bread. She handed him its folded cover, the cloth clean enough that he put it inside instead of tying it round the handle.
The basket rode beneath his pack for the last part of the road, catching his cloak until he found a better place for it.
“You can give it to me,” Phia said at a gate.
“Then she'd have to find someone else sensible.”
“She knows me already.”
He laughed and kept it.
They had left the settlement after breakfast, Nall's borrowed frame empty beside Ansa's door and Ula bringing him a second bowl. At the landing, Dalta spoke to the boatman while Enna waited with her closed case.
At the carts, Cadd had received Rowan's promised copy. Belda was still attending the traveler with the head wound; the other arrangements were hers to judge, and she had opinions about anyone trying to judge them from the yard. Bren had left a message at the road roof. His party had reached the next help with the man they carried, and he was coming back toward the Glenn when he was no longer needed there.
By then Rowan wanted his own room so strongly that he had begun picturing it at unlikely turns. A wall beside the bed. The table under the narrow window. The small space between the chair and his pack that he knew how to cross in the dark.
At the broad junction Phia stopped to speak to a man with a wrapped jug. He asked nothing about their journey; whatever she told him made him laugh.
“Home?” Rowan asked.
“First the flour.”
“Did you leave it with Mare?”
“I left it where it was wanted. I intend to see what became of it.”
“There may be nothing left.”
“Then she'll have to tell me that.”
At the crossing she took the narrower street, already greeting someone beyond the turn. Rowan went toward Thane's.
The room was full.
One man stood before the wall with a sheet open between his hands. A woman Rowan knew from the upper fields was trying to see past it. Est sat at the far end of the table, writing while somebody behind her spoke. Thane was at the door to the stores, holding a length of cord and wearing the expression he usually saved for things that would be very useful once the person offering them left.
Rowan put down the basket.
Thane looked up.
“All six?”
“All six.”
Est stopped writing long enough to look up, then finished her line.
“And Phia?” Thane asked.
“Following the flour.”
“Good.” He laid the cord down. “I wondered which of you would come here first.”
Est glanced at the basket. “Edda's? Then keep it where you can see it.”
Rowan put it beside his pack. The woman from the fields came toward him, but Thane lifted a hand.
“Tomorrow. Let him put something down.”
“I only wanted to ask whether he'd seen the road above the next house.”
“Tomorrow,” Rowan said.
She looked at him, then smiled. “You can come to the gate. It's the one with the blue jug.”
“I know it.”
“You knew the other one last time.”
She went out before he could answer. Thane watched him with quiet amusement.
Est drew the received accounts out from beneath her book. Rowan recognized his own folds, then Phia's smaller writing and the marks Ansa had made. The first sheet had reached them before he did. Thane had put a short note beside it, naming the people whose help had gone south.
“Nerin has the three,” Rowan said. “Ansa has Arven and the others who need to stay. Enna's taking the officer on by the present landing. I've left the instruction with its old wording identified. The person who supplied it still needs asking.”
“Jeren will want that part.”
Rowan thought of the name on Vessa's list. “I haven't met him.”
“You will.” Thane touched the folded pages. “Not this afternoon.”
“I'll bring the rest tomorrow afternoon.”
“After you've slept.”
“I have slept.”
Est looked up. “Then after you've stopped telling people that.”
She handed him two questions where somebody needed a name. He answered them without opening the packet, took the basket and went home.
Soren's shop was shut.
The slate beside it named the street where Soren was working and when he expected to return. Rowan took out his key.
The shop smelled of resin and warmed wood. A lamp's light held above an opened frame on the bench. Soren had tied cloth across its free end and left a note about the work, not Rowan's return. He found that oddly reassuring.
Upstairs, his room waited in ordinary disorder. The field sheets lay beneath their cover. A shirt hung where he had left it. The water in his jug had been changed, though someone had set the handle facing the window instead of the room.
He put the basket beside the door and stood with his hand on the back of the chair.
Then he took off the pack.
Its weight left him so gradually that he moved his shoulders before he believed it had gone. He set it beside the wall and unfastened the ash pouch. There was mud on the bed's foot from where he had rested a boot before leaving; he left it there.
He washed, laid out his wet things and found the charcoal beneath a folded sheet.
The new marks on the field pages could wait for Thane. He opened the smaller book.
Nall's face would not come readily. The young man had spent so much of their time together watching hands that Rowan remembered his eyes turned sideways, his mouth compressed before someone lifted him. At the crossing he had looked different. Rowan set the charcoal down and thought about the water beneath the frame, the quiet laughter rising out of a man who had expected to be left.
He drew the head tilted back. The first curve was too stiff. He rubbed it away with the heel of his hand and began again, leaving the eyes almost lost beneath their creases. The smile came before the rest of the face.
He worked until somebody opened the shop door below.
“Rowan?”
“Up here.”
Soren came up without hurrying until the last few stairs, then stopped in the doorway.
“You came back.”
“This afternoon.”
Soren looked at the open pack, then the clothes spread beneath the window. His eyes returned to Rowan's face. He smiled, but it took him a moment.
“I was going to ask whether you'd eaten.”
“I have.”
“I might ask again.”
Rowan laughed. Soren came far enough into the room to set a hand against his shoulder. He left it there while Rowan covered the drawing.
“You needn't put that away.”
“I was finished for now.”
“Then show me later.”
They stood without quite deciding what came next. Soren had a smear of something pale on his sleeve and a small cut beneath one nail. Rowan had thought about seeing him from so many places on the road that the room seemed too small to contain the actual moment.
“I thought you might be at the house,” Soren said.
“I saw the slate.”
“You could have come.”
“I wanted to be here.”
Soren's hand tightened briefly on his shoulder, then fell away.
“Good.”
They washed and changed, then Rowan fetched the pot from the back of the shop. There were two small pies beside it. He brought those too.
“I thought the pot was sufficient,” Soren said.
“Then I'll leave you the pot.”
“No. You can divide them.”
They ate by the window while people went home below. Soren asked after Phia and Bren. Rowan told him where they had left the travellers and who would go onward separately. When he spoke of Enna walking off with the instruction before Harran had decided whether to let her, he smiled.
“Did he try to stop her?”
“Not by then.”
“Sensible man.”
“He was learning.”
Soren tore bread into his bowl. “Was it difficult to leave them?”
“Less than it would have been when I left Cresting.”
Soren nodded and ate.
The work at the house had gone badly, he said when Rowan asked. One piece had held perfectly until the door was opened; then the light moved toward the draught and left the far side of the room dark. The customer had spent an hour assuring him nobody ever opened that door while opening it whenever he needed something from beyond it.
“Did you tell him?”
“Eventually I sat in the far corner. He had to come and find me to say it again.”
Rowan laughed hard enough to set down his spoon.
“What did he say?”
“That I might put a second light there.”
“Will you?”
“He doesn't want to pay for it. We may come to an understanding tomorrow.”
He sounded pleased by the possibility. Rowan had missed that: the enjoyment Soren could take in a thing that had refused to behave, once he could find the part of its refusal worth working on.
“I brought you something,” Rowan said.
Soren looked at the pot.
“Not from downstairs.”
“Then you should have begun with that.”
He found the small wrapping at the bottom of his pack. It held a smooth piece of dark wood from beside one of the roofs, no larger than the length between his thumb and first finger. The grain bent round a pale oval without breaking it. He had picked it up because the shape looked like one of the frames on Soren's shelf, then kept it because it looked like nothing that needed repair.
Soren took it toward the window.
“Did you cut this?”
“Found it.”
He turned it in his fingers and rubbed the pale place with his thumb.
“What is it for?”
“I don't know.”
Soren looked across at him. “That's a promising beginning.”
He put it on the shelf beside a badly shaped piece of glass, where the late light caught both. Rowan had seen the glass before without asking why he kept it.
“And that?”
“The first thing I made that I meant to keep.”
“Did it work?”
“Not at all.”
“Why keep it?”
“I'd got the color.”
The answer pleased Rowan more than he expected. He went back to the table and divided the second pie.
They were washing the bowls when a customer called from the shop. Soren leaned over the stairs.
“Tomorrow. Leave it inside the door; I won't put it on the bench tonight.”
He returned to Rowan as the latch closed below. The room had grown darker. Soren lifted a hand to the small light beside the shelf. Warmth gathered beneath his fingers and spread into the frame. The glass caught a little of it, holding its old imperfect color against the wall.
Rowan sat where he could see it. He had expected the road to keep returning when he closed his eyes. Instead he found himself wanting to draw that light.
In the morning he woke late enough to hear the shop already open.
Below him, Soren asked a customer to put down both pieces. The customer said there had only been one until yesterday. Rowan laughed into the pillow.
He dressed, washed and carried Edda's basket downstairs. Soren had a woman at the bench, demonstrating a catch that released when she pressed the wrong side. Rowan lifted the basket by way of greeting. Soren nodded toward the street.
“She'll be there.”
“Which one?”
“Both, if you've brought that.”
Corren's gate stood open. Inside, Edda had a handful of herbs and was telling him which ones he had already cut. He listened with the expression of a man who had expected to be left alone with a task he understood.
Rowan put the basket on the step.
Edda saw it first.
“At last.”
Corren straightened. “You or the basket?”
“She meant the basket.”
“I meant both.” Edda took the folded cover out and shook it once. “Did you eat out of it?”
“Not deliberately.”
She looked at the place where he had picked out the onion. Rowan tried not to smile.
“I'll wash it.”
“You'll sit down. I've had it come back with worse.”
Corren moved the stool away from the path and put it where Rowan could reach the shade. He did not ask how far he had walked, and Rowan did not offer. Edda went inside for a cup, returning with three and no explanation of why Corren's looked better filled than hers.
“I heard you brought everyone out,” Corren said.
“The people we'd gone to find.”
He took the cup. Its warmth reached his fingers. Edda sat on the low wall instead of taking the other stool, put her herbs across her knees and began separating the stems.
“Then don't let him make you tell it all again,” she said. “I've heard him tell you about that shelter roof twice.”
“I've only told him once.”
“You began it before I went for the cups.”
Corren looked at Rowan. “I hadn't reached the roof.”
“You were going to.”
Rowan drank before he laughed. The garden smelled stronger than it had on his first visit. Some plants had flowered; others had been cut back so decisively that he could see the wall behind them. Near the barrel, the trial plant had new leaves standing clear of its older ones.
“She moved another,” Corren said, following his glance.
“The first was doing well.”
“You told me to wait.”
“You did wait.”
“Until you came back?”
“It was long enough.”
He smiled and left the argument where it was. Rowan liked the way the two of them could be irritated without needing anyone to decide which one had won.
A woman called for Edda, saw the basket on the step and came in to ask for it. Edda sent her away with it.
“You could have asked him to take it straight there,” Corren said.
“Then I wouldn't have seen it.”
Rowan leaned back, his cup against his knee, letting the basket go.
Corren had turned to look at something in the bed beside him. The light reached one side of his face and caught the hand laid across his cup, the fingers loose until he wanted to move it. Rowan found himself following the shape of them. He had watched those hands work, but this morning they held nothing more difficult than a drink.
“Can you stay there?”
Corren looked round. “How long?”
“Not long.”
Rowan put the cup beneath the stool and took out his book. Edda had returned from the gate. She saw the charcoal and stopped before sitting down.
“What is he doing?”
“Waiting for me to look the other way,” Corren said.
“He'll have plenty of practice at that.”
She sat on the wall again. Rowan held the page at an angle that kept his hand out of its own light and began with the shoulder, broad beneath the worn cloth. He left the face until the body had somewhere to hold it. Corren shifted almost at once.
“You needn't sit still.”
“You asked me to.”
“I asked you to stay there.”
“I can do both.”
“You haven't yet.”
Edda laughed. Corren looked toward her, and Rowan found the turn he had wanted. He put it down before the smile passed, a few marks where the cheek lifted and the neck came clear of the collar.
He had drawn those hands before. He did not open to the old marks; this morning Corren was trying to look indifferent to the page.
Edda stripped the last leaves from a stem.
“Do you make them all look agreeable?”
“Have you seen them?”
“I've seen you looking.”
He smiled down at the paper. “Not all.”
“Good. He can come inside when you want the other expression.”
Corren put down his cup. “I've been agreeable all morning.”
“That's why I mentioned it.”
Rowan drew the hand after he had moved it, remembering the weight settled across the rim. He liked the resting fingers more than the cup and gave them the clearer edge. Charcoal along the side of his thumb darkened the page where he steadied it. He worked it into the shadow beneath Corren's wrist.
“Are you putting the garden in?” Edda asked.
“A little.”
“Then leave that out.” She pointed at a bare patch beside the wall. “It'll be covered next week.”
“I can put it in next week.”
She looked at him, then at the place again. “You could.”
He could sit here when the wall was covered, with these two interrupting one another.
Corren watched his face.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Rowan put a last line beneath the cup. “I'd like to come back when it's grown.”
“You'll have to be more specific. Something's always grown.”
“That part, then.”
“Come when you like. She'll find you something to do.”
Edda shook her head. “He's doing it.”
Rowan turned the book toward them.
Corren took it before Edda had stood. He held the page far enough away to see the whole, then brought it closer. His thumb stopped beside the drawn hand.
“I didn't know that was what I looked like.”
Edda leaned over his shoulder. “It is.”
“I meant sitting there.”
“So did I.”
He glanced up at her, and she put her hand on his shoulder for a moment before taking the book. Rowan watched them look without trying to explain what he had done. He had left a great deal out. Neither seemed to want it supplied.
Edda turned back one leaf before he remembered what was there. Nall looked upward from the unfinished drawing. She held the book still.
“He looks relieved.”
“He was.”
She returned to Corren's page without asking Rowan to take Nall through it again.
“Can you do another?” Corren asked.
Rowan looked toward Edda.
“I can.”
She lifted her chin. “When I've had a chance to sit down properly.”
“You've been sitting there.”
“And you've been drawing him.”
Corren handed back the book, smiling. Rowan closed it on the charcoal and laid it beside him. He would come without the field sheets next time. There would be room for both of them on a larger page.
When Edda went inside, Corren asked whether his wrist had troubled him.
“No.”
“Good.”
“I used it.”
“I'd assumed you had.”
Rowan looked at his hand. He had expected to explain the shield, its taking and remaking beneath Phia's fingers. Corren was watching the gate where Edda's basket had gone.
“She made more of it than I could have done quickly,” Rowan said.
Corren turned back.
“Phia.”
“She's had practice.”
“I know. I didn't know how much I wanted to watch until I could stop holding my part.”
Corren rested his cup against the wall. “What will you do with that?”
“Ask her to show me.”
“There you are.”
“She'll say I already saw it.”
“Then ask better.”
Rowan smiled. He could almost hear her.
The gate's shadow had passed his boots by the time he remembered he was meeting Soren. Edda offered more food; Corren pointed out he could go and find him.
At the next turn, Est came out carrying a rolled sheet, two wrapped jars and a bundle wedged beneath her arm.
Rowan caught the bundle before it slipped.
“You could ask someone.”
“I did. She gave me the jars.”
Before he could offer to carry them to the hall, a girl with an empty tray came after Est.
“Mare said you'd carry them all the way if I didn't come.”
“I was passing.”
The girl looked at the street behind her. Est handed over the jars and pointed to Rowan's bundle.
“Those too. Beside the cupboard, not on top.”
When she had gone, Est shook out her shawl. “You'd think I'd never put anything down.”
“Would you like me to answer?”
“No.”
They crossed with the next gap in the carts. Rowan told her he was seeing Thane that afternoon. She would come, she said, and the Teller wanted to know when Rowan returned.
“Jeren?”
“Unless you've brought another one.”
“I haven't brought anyone.”
“Then we needn't find another chair.”
She left him at the corner. Rowan went toward the shop with his hands empty.
Soren had closed the door for the midday meal. He opened it when Rowan knocked, looking over his shoulder at something spread across the counter.
Soren moved aside to let him see the failed fitting and its new arrangement. A small light held between them, reaching the dark corner without drawing toward the door. Soren opened it wider. The light shifted, then steadied.
“Did you add another?”
“I moved this one.”
“Will he like it?”
“He'll have to open his door and find out.”
He covered the piece before they went upstairs. On the table, the dark wood Rowan had brought lay beside the glass. Soren had put neither to work.
They ate without going out. Afterward Rowan brought the drawing from his room. Soren turned it toward the light and looked at the face tilted back above the water.
“One of the people?”
“Nall.”
“What was he looking at?”
“What was carrying him.”
Soren looked again. The curve of Nall's mouth was clearer than his eyes, the lifted cheek almost lost in the pale cloth. Rowan had left the water unfinished.
“You liked him.”
“I hadn't thought about it until I drew him.”
Soren put the page down carefully. “Will you finish it?”
“Yes.”
“Will you send it?”
Rowan had not considered that. “I'd have to find out where he is.”
“You know someone who could tell you.”
He had drawn an expression Nall might not know he wore. He put the page beneath a clean sheet at the end of the table.
Soren watched him lay down the charcoal.
“Have you time before Thane?”
“A little.”
“Come and see something.”
They went out by the side door. Soren had been asked to look at a working beyond the upper gardens, he said, but the customer would not be home until later. He had walked farther while he waited and found a path he had not taken before.
It climbed past the last wall, then turned along the rise. Below it, the town's roofs lay at different heights among trees. Rowan could place the crossing, but not Soren's shop until he pointed it out. The upper windows faced another way from here.
“I could see this room,” Soren said. “The one at the back.”
“Mine.”
“Yes.”
They stood at the wall. There was a garden below, small enough that its owner had put the herbs along the steps. Something had been planted in a cracked bowl beside the gate and was growing as though the crack had been included for its convenience.
“You can hear the town,” Rowan said.
“Less of it.”
“Different parts.”
Soren listened. A hammer sounded below them, and somebody called to an animal out of sight. Wind moved the leaves nearer their heads.
“Would you like it?”
Rowan looked toward him.
“Living farther out,” Soren said. “You spent most of your time beyond the station.”
“I like knowing who's downstairs.”
“So do I.”
“And having somewhere to leave the work.”
“That wasn't what I asked.”
Rowan looked back at the roofs. He could imagine coming up here after a day at Thane's table, the path lifting him out of the doorways where people would stop him. He could imagine choosing to go back down.
“I might.”
Soren nodded. “I'd like a door that wasn't also the shop's.”
“Your customers would find it.”
“Some of them. I'd put it farther away for the others.”
Rowan laughed. They stayed until the hammer stopped and another sound took its place, then went down by the path Soren had found.
At the crossing, they separated. Soren had the waiting customer to see. Rowan had enough time to fetch his field packet, though he no longer felt the same urgency to reach it.
He went upstairs through the open shop, past the piece waiting beneath its cover, and found his own table in the afternoon light. He put the new drawing away. Then he chose the sheets Thane would need and left the rest where they lay.