Who Crosses

They came down onto the high pasture in the morning, with the sun coming up over the eastern hills into their eyes.

The grass was new and very green, and full of lambs. They were everywhere, white and black-faced and ridiculous, bouncing on stiff legs and butting their mothers and running off in crowds from nothing at all. Madoc stopped to watch them, and Pip threw a clod at him to make him come on.

The path went down past the hollow under the scree. Wren stopped at the edge of it.

It was only a hollow, with grass in it and a gray rock at the far side and yellow flowers in the lee of the rock. A ewe lay in the sun with two lambs asleep against her, and there was no rime on anything. Last August a dead man had sat against that rock in a coat three hundred years out of fashion, with a letter in his satchel for the Keeper at the Hall. Wren had put a torch in his face.

"That's where it was," Dorrit said, beside her. "Isn't it."

"Yes."

"Looks like nothing."

"It is nothing," Wren said. "Now."

A man was coming up the hill toward them with a crook, from among the sheep.

He was bandy-legged and brown as a walnut, and he came up the slope at a trot. He was talking before he was near enough to be heard, with one hand held out in front of him and waving.

"Oh, gods," Dorrit said. "Oh, mother of mercy. It's Cob."

"—knew it!" he was saying, as he came near enough to hear. "Knew it, knew it! I said to Hobb, when the Ice came down in the night, I said they'll be over by the spring. The Fallowmeres. You can't keep a Fallowmere on the wrong side of anything, I said. And Hobb said, Cob, you old fool, they're dead in the snow and the crows have had them. And I said, Hobb Millson, I'll lay you a crown. And he took it! He took it, and now look at you, he owes me a crown—" He stopped in front of them, panting. He looked at Dorrit. He looked at Wren. He looked at Alder on the mule, and at Pip, and at Barrow, and nodded to each of them as if they had been gone a week. Then he looked at Madoc. "And who's this one?"

"A friend," Dorrit said.

"Well, look at my hand."

He held it out. It was his left hand, the one the dead man had gripped in the hollow last August. It had healed white and puckered across the back, shiny as candle-wax, with four dark marks round the wrist where the dead fingers had been.

"Dorrit did that," Cob said to Bracken, with pride. "Saved it. Everybody said it'd come off. She said it'd stay on and it did. I show it to everybody. I show it to people at Marlford who've never heard of any of it. Two fingers don't bend, see, but I can hold a crook, and I can hold a pint, and what else is a hand for?" He looked at Bracken's stump, in its leather cup. "Oh," he said. "Oh. Well. Yours went, then, Sergeant."

"It did," said Bracken.

"She saw it off?"

"She did."

Cob nodded slowly, with deep respect, and looked at Dorrit as if she had grown a foot. Then he turned and looked at Wren again, and his face changed.

"Wren Fallowmere," he said. "You came back. You went up the Stair and you came back down it."

She heard the name go past her like a word in a song.

"I did," she said.

Cob turned round, cupped his good hand to his mouth, and shouted down the long green slope of the pasture toward the valley with all the breath he had.

"Wren Fallowmere! They're back! It's Wren, and Dorrit! They're come back over the Stair!"

Far down the hill, someone at a gate lifted their head. Cob set off down the pasture at his bow-legged trot, shouting it all the way. They heard it go down the valley ahead of them from gate to gate, the name going away from her down the hill.

Below the pasture, above the orchard, the way split in two. The old road went on down the mountain in its last long bends, past the orchard wall and the bee-yard, and came out at the front gate of Fallowmere. A sheep-path went off to the left across the fields, the way Cob had gone, down to the village.

Wren stopped where the two ways parted, where she could see the thatch over the tops of the orchard trees, gray and deep, with a curl of smoke going up from the kitchen chimney.

"Road's quicker," Bracken said.

"I'm not going by the road."

Dorrit looked at her. "She'll have heard Cob. The whole valley's heard Cob. She'll be at the gate."

"I know she will. I'm not going past it with six of us and a mule, all coming down the mountain at her." Wren turned onto the sheep-path. "I'll go through the village and up the lane. On my own."

They followed her across the fields without arguing, and Wren didn't look back at the thatch.

Dallbridge came out to meet them.

It came out of the houses and the smithy and the mill, and the women came up from the river with their washing in their arms. They stood along the road and stared, while children ran alongside Barrow and somebody's dog went mad. Wren saw iron nails driven into every doorframe along the street, rusty now, and black scorch-marks across the lanes where the fire-lines had been.

The burying-ground was above the mill, on the slope over the river, and Wren turned in at its gate while the others went on toward the inn. After a moment Cob came puffing back and fell in beside her.

Perrin Cole's grave was near the wall, a slab of turf, green now, with a horseshoe set upright at its head and rusted to the color of a fox.

"They put his hammer in with him," Cob said. "I put the shoe up. One of his own make. He'd have hated a flower." He looked down at the grass on the grave. "I come up Sundays. I tell him the price of wool."

"Does he mind?"

"Course he minds. He always minded. Fifty years he couldn't get away from me, and now he can't get away at all." Cob rubbed his white hand. "He held that gate for your granna, Wren. All the first night. Folk forget that."

"I don't," Wren said.

"He'd have said I talk too much. Standing here. He always said it."

"You do talk too much, Cob."

"Aye," said Cob, very pleased, and took his cap off to the stone as if Perrin had just agreed with him about something.

She stood at the grave with the sun warm on her shoulders. She could see Perrin at the gate of Fallowmere in the firelight with the hammer going up and down, and she could see his face, because the book had never touched that. Then Cob started telling her about the price of wool.

Hobb Millson wept. He stood in the doorway of the Bridge Inn with his apron on and his great red face running with tears, and held out his arms, and Dorrit walked into them. He cried into her hair, and then into Wren's, and then he looked at Bracken and at the stump, and wiped his face on his apron and held out his hand.

"Sergeant," he said. "You've mislaid something."

Bracken shook it. "I'm marrying her."

Hobb looked at Dorrit. Dorrit went red to the ears.

"Well," said Hobb. "Well. Gods help you, then. Come in. Come in, all of you, sit down, sit down, there's beer, there's bread, there's—Cob, get off that bench and let the old gentleman sit down, can't you see he's done in?"

Alder lowered himself onto the bench with great care. "Master Millson," he said. "I believe I had your best chair last August, and left in something of a hurry without paying."

"You did," said Hobb. "I've kept the bill."

Wren sat at the long table where she had eaten a hundred harvest suppers, and Hobb brought bread and cheese and butter, and a jar of honey.

She knew it at once, dark and nearly black and smelling of heather. It was Fallowmere honey from the harvest she had robbed in August, on the last morning before any of it, and she had capped those jars herself. She sat and looked at it, and didn't open it.

Madoc opened it. He looked at the honey inside and smelled it, and dipped his knife in and tasted it, and then sat without moving, with the knife in his mouth.

"That's what they make?" he said.

"That's what they make."

"The small ones. In the boxes."

"Yes."

Madoc took another knifeful and ate it slowly, with his eyes shut. "Tomorrow," he said, when he had finished. "You said you'd show me."

"Tomorrow. Bring a veil."

"I'll not want a veil."

"You'll want a veil," Wren said, and Dorrit laughed, and Hobb laughed without knowing why, and put more beer on the table.

Pip had his map out on the end of the table, among the plates. Hobb leaned over it with a jug in his hand, and his eyebrows went up and stayed up.

"What's all that?"

"The West," Pip said. "All of it I've seen. That's the Hall, there. That's Scarrow. That's the pass, up there, that's Sath's Stair." He turned the sheet round. The east edge of it was nearly blank, with the foot of the mountains drawn in and nothing past them. "I want to put Dall on. Have you got a map of it?"

"A map of Dall?" Hobb looked at him as if he'd asked for a map of the inside of his hat. "What for? Everybody knows where everything is."

"That's what they all say," Pip said, "till somebody needs to know." He took out Iyene's pen. At the east edge of the paper, under the foot of the mountains, he drew a small river running east, and a bridge over it, and beside the bridge a little square with a roof. He wrote Bridge Inn next to it in his cramped hand. Then he sat back and looked at it with his head on one side.

"Well, now," Hobb said, surprised.

"It's a start," said Pip.

Hobb told them about the rain. It had come on a night in October, and when he named the night, Alder nodded. The wind had gone round to the west in the evening, Hobb said, warm as June, and it had rained on the mountains all night long. In the morning there was a roar up the valley like the mill-race a hundred times over. People went out and saw the river Dall running brown and wild, and a great white smoke coming off the switchbacks of the Stair where the ice was going.

"And the dead," Hobb said. "We'd had them in the lanes most nights since you went. Coming down off the mountain. We'd burned more than I can think of. That morning they were all lying down. All through the lanes and up the pasture, just lying there in the rain where they'd stopped. We went round with carts after and buried them." He wiped his face. "We didn't know what it meant. Your granna knew. She stood at her gate and looked up the Stair, and she said, That's the child. That's her done it. And she went in and sat down."

"How is she?" Wren said.

Hobb looked at her before he answered. "She's up at the farm. She's hardly come down all winter. We take her things. She sits at that gate. Every day she can, when it's fine. She's got a bench there." He hesitated. "She's older, Wren. The hand never came right. But she's there."

Wren got up from the table.

"I'll come," Dorrit said, getting up too.

"No."

"Wren—"

"Alone, Dor. Please. Let me go up alone."

Dorrit looked at her. Then she sat back down, slowly, next to Bracken. "An hour," she said. "Then I'm coming. And I'm bringing him. And she can kill him then."

"I'm looking forward to it," Bracken said.

Madoc hadn't spoken. He was sitting with the honey jar in front of him, and when she went past him to the door he looked up.

"Wren," he said.

She turned round.

"Aye," said Madoc, and nodded at the door. "Go on, then."

Alder caught her at the door. "Walk with me as far as the bridge," he said. "I shan't keep you."

They went out together into the afternoon, Alder slow with his staff and Wren slow beside him. Behind them the inn was loud, for somebody had fetched old Garret and his drum, and somebody else was already arguing with Cob.

"I have asked Master Millson for a room," Alder said. "For the winter."

"It's April."

"He made the same observation. I said, the next winter, then. He seemed to find that satisfactory." He stopped at the crown of the bridge and leaned on the parapet and looked down at the river. It ran under them brown and quick, full of snowmelt from the Stair. "I have spent fifty years in the College of Wardens bowing to seven names, and I find I have no great wish to go back and bow to them any more. And there is a woman at the far end of that lane who has been insulting me since I was twenty, and I have missed it."

"She'll be glad."

"She will be nothing of the kind. She will tell me I've got old." He smiled. "I shall tell her it suits me better than her."

Wren leaned on the parapet beside him and watched a pair of swallows go under the bridge, low over the water, and out the other side.

"Pip's going to Merrow," she said. "He told me on the Stair. At the end of May, with the map. To tell them about her. At the Crown."

"I know. I shall give him letters. I shall tell the College the truth, in a very long letter, with a great many subordinate clauses. It will do them good." Alder was quiet a moment. "He'll come back, I think. He has nowhere else in the world to come back to, and he has decided he likes it here."

"Alder."

"Hm?"

"You kept one Word. You never spent it."

"I have one Word left," Alder said. "I still have it."

"You didn't use it. Not at the gorge. Not ever."

"No."

"Which one is it?"

He looked down at the river, and then turned to her. His hawk face was gray and lined, and older than it had been in September, and his eyes were kind.

"Silence," he said. "An old man should keep one thing to say."

Wren looked at him. He looked back, quite serious.

"Go on," he said. "Go up the lane. She's waiting."

She walked up the lane to Fallowmere alone.

It was the last hour of the afternoon, with the sun low over the Cloudwall behind the farm and the light coming down the lane gold and long between the hedges. The hawthorn was coming into flower, and there were iron nails in the gateposts of every field she passed. At the corner by the orchard a black line of old scorch ran across the lane, where a fire-line had burned one night in the autumn while she was away over the mountains. Grass was already growing through it. Past the orchard, somebody had mended the Fallowmere hedge where the dead had broken through it in August, with new hazel stakes still white where the bark was cut.

At the Hollins' field gate two children were playing at keepers. Wren knew them both, though she was slow to be sure of them, because they had grown. The girl stood inside the gate with a stick for a staff, and the boy stood in the lane.

"Who crosses?" the girl said, in a deep voice.

"A keeper, going home!"

"Then go, and come back!"

The boy ran off up the lane, spun round, and came running back. "Now me coming in," he said. "Ask it."

"Who crosses?"

"Kit Hollin!"

"Kit Hollin," said the girl, "come through," and swung the gate open for him.

Then they saw Wren and stood with their mouths open. She lifted a hand to them and went on, and behind her she heard them start to run toward the village, with the name going with them.

She could hear the bees before she could see the farm.

It came through the hedges and over the orchard wall, the deep warm sound of hives working on a fine day, and she knew it as she knew her heartbeat. They were out in the orchard and in the hawthorn, and one came down the lane past her face, heavy and slow, and went over the hedge toward home.

Then she came round the last bend, and there was the long gray house under its thatch, and the gate.

Tansy was sitting on a bench beside the gate, in the sun.

She was smaller than Wren remembered, with her blackthorn stick propped against her knee and a shawl round her shoulders. Her white hair was pinned up, and her right hand lay in her lap in a gray knitted glove. She had seen Wren from the bend, and she hadn't got up. She sat on the bench and watched her come, and her face didn't move at all.

Wren stopped at the gate, which was shut, and put her hand on the top bar.

She had played it a hundred times with Dorrit when they were small, one on each side of a field gate, and she knew what came now.

"Who crosses?" Tansy said.

Wren opened her mouth, and there was nothing to say. She knew what was supposed to go there. She could feel the shape of the place where it went, the way you feel with your tongue for a tooth that has been pulled. She knew her grandmother, and the gate, and the house behind it, and the bees, and she knew that she belonged on the other side of that gate more than anywhere in the world. She stood gripping the top bar with her mouth open, and no name came.

Tansy looked at her face, and at her hand on the gate, and at her face again, for a good while. Wren watched her understand it. It went into her grandmother's face slowly, as the cold goes into a stone wall at dusk, and her mouth pressed tight.

"Last one stood at my gate couldn't answer me either," Tansy said. "I didn't open to him."

She reached out with her good hand, lifted the latch, and pushed the gate open.

"Wren Fallowmere," Tansy said. "Keeper. Come home."

Wren came through the gate and sat down on the bench beside her grandmother.

Neither of them spoke. The bench was warm from the sun, and Tansy's shoulder was against hers, thin and hard under the shawl. The bees went back and forth over the yard wall, in and out of the orchard, a long unhurried traffic, and the sound of them filled up the afternoon.

Tansy took Wren's hand in her gloved one. The glove was soft, and under it the hand was stiff and wouldn't close.

"What's that?" Tansy said.

Wren had the iron link in her other hand, though she hadn't known she'd taken it out of her pocket. She opened her fingers and showed it lying in her palm, red-brown and rough with rust.

"His," she said. "From the Hall. I'll tell you. It's a long story, Granna."

"I've time." Tansy looked at the link. "Iron. Good. Don't lose it."

"I won't."

"You've got thin," Tansy said. "Dorrit's not been feeding you."

"Dorrit's been busy."

"Doing what?"

"You'll see. In about an hour."

"Hm," said Tansy.

A bee came down onto the back of Wren's hand, the one Tansy was holding, and walked across her knuckles, considering her. Then it stung her on the thumb.

"Fair," Wren said, and scraped it out with her nail.

"Serves you right," said Tansy. "Gone all winter." She looked at Wren sideways. "Did you bring the book home, then?"

"I took it home," Wren said. "Then I brought it back."

Tansy thought about that, and nodded. "Good," she said. "It knows the way now."

"Granna."

"Mm."

"It took my name. The last one. I don't know it. I know it's Wren because people tell me."

"I heard you not know it," Tansy said. "At the gate." Her gloved hand tightened on Wren's, as far as it could. "Mine was my mother's voice. At Elmcross. I used to lie awake trying to hear her say one word. Just the one."

"It took Mam's from me," Wren said. "Her singing. At Coldharbour, in the snow."

Tansy turned her head and looked at her. "Linnet," she said. "Under the note, every time. Drove me wild."

"Does it come back?"

"No. It doesn't come back." Tansy looked out at the lane. "You get other voices. That's all. You get people who'll say it."

"Dor says it. Madoc says it every day."

"Who's Madoc?"

"I'll tell you that too."

"Hm. And the heron?"

"At the inn. He's asked Hobb for a room."

"He can have the barn." Tansy sniffed. "You'll tell me a great deal, by the sound of it. Wren."

"Yes, Granna."

"Just making sure it's still in working order," Tansy said, and looked away over the yard.

They sat on at the gate while the sun went down behind the Cloudwall. The light went gold across the yard, and then red, and then gray-blue, and the mountains' shadow reached over the orchard and the house and the lane. Down in the valley a dog was barking by the river. Somewhere down the lane, getting nearer, Dorrit was telling somebody loudly to mind the ruts.

At dusk Wren went round the end of the house into the bee-yard.

The white hives stood in their two rows in the half-light, and the three old skeps squatted on their bench at the end. Somebody had kept the grass scythed between the rows all winter. She went to the first hive and knocked on the lid with her knuckles.

"Perrin Cole's in the ground," she told it. "Up above the mill. Cob goes and talks to him."

She knocked on the next. "Iyene Sath is dead. You never met her. She'd have had you drilled."

And the next. "The Chainman's gone. His name was Will Rudge, and he's got it back."

Dorrit had come up the lane with Bracken, and she stopped at the yard gate, a careful distance from the nearest hive, where she had always stopped. Bracken stood behind her with the fiddle case slung across his back. Madoc had sent it up from the inn.

"What're you telling them?" Dorrit said.

"You." Wren knocked on the fourth hive. "Dorrit's getting married. He's very big. Don't sting him."

"Tell them not to sting me either."

"They've never listened about you."

She went on down the row and back up the other, and at every lid she told them the last of it. "I'm home. I'm home." At the skeps she crouched and said it lower.

Bracken came as far as the first hive and held the case out to her in his one hand. She sat on the end of the skep bench and tuned, and played the Old Reel.

It ran up its thirty-two bars, climbing and turning, and came to the place where it had always stopped in Dall. She went on over it into the Stayers' half, down and round to the end. All along both rows the hives took up the note, deep and even, and she felt it in her chest.

Tansy was in the back doorway, leaning on her stick. She waited until the last note had gone out over the orchard.

"Play it at the harvest supper," she said. "Hobb'll cry."

"Hobb cries at everything."

"He'll cry more."

The last of the foragers came in low over the grass, one by one, and went into the hives, until there were none left out. The hum went on after them into the dark.

The end