Who Crosses

They left at dawn on the second of September, in a thin gray mist that lay in the valley bottom and hid the river.

The yard was full of people and animals and breath. The riders stood by the mules in their blue coats, with packs on their backs and swords at their hips. Bracken had his spear, Merritt had her crossbow slung, and Ash had a bundle of pitch torches tied across his pack like firewood. Alder stood apart by the well, leaning on his staff, with the hood of his brown cloak up. He looked better than he had in days, and had eaten two eggs for breakfast and complained about both of them.

Pip was holding Barrow's halter, and the brown mule had his nose in Pip's collar. Nettle stood a little apart with her ears back, loaded with food-sacks and oil jugs, and nobody went near her.

Half of Dallbridge had come up the lane in the dark to see them off: Hobb, crying already, and Cob with his bad hand slung, and Garret with another sack of apples. Bracken took it from him without a word and tied it onto Barrow. The Hedley cousins were there, and Arn Pike, and Tam Hollin with his pipes under his arm in case anyone wanted a tune, though nobody did.

Wren came out of the house last.

She had the Waybook in an oiled leather satchel on a strap across her body, under her coat, where she could feel it against her ribs. Her mother's fiddle was in its case on her back with her pack. Her sling was in her pocket, and the iron ring on the middle finger of her left hand was cold in the cold morning. Dorrit came behind her with her medicine roll over one shoulder and her pack over the other and her face scrubbed pink.

Tansy had left her bench and stood in the gateway, on the road side of the new gate, with her stick in her left hand and her back to the mountains. She had put on her good black shawl again, and the mist was round her feet. Behind her, the lane went up between the hedges and vanished in the gray.

Everybody stopped talking. Wren walked across the yard, and the riders parted to let her through, and she stopped on her side of the gate with Tansy on the other and the bars between them. She knew what came next, as every child at Fallowmere knew it, as they knew the saying. She had heard it told as a story, but never heard it said.

Tansy lifted her stick and laid it across the top of the gate, barring it.

"Who crosses?" she said. Her voice was not loud, but it carried through the whole yard.

"A keeper," Wren said. Her own voice came out rougher than she wanted. "Going home."

Tansy looked at her with eyes very bright in her small lined face, so long that Wren thought she had forgotten the rest, or that she would not say it.

"Then go," said Tansy. "And come back."

She lifted the stick, and Wren opened the gate and went through it. Tansy put her good arm round her neck and pulled her down and held her, hard, smelling of wax and woodsmoke, and then she pushed her away.

"Go on," she said. "Before the great lump starts crying."

"I'm not crying," said Dorrit, crying.

Tansy caught her by the sleeve as she came through the gate. "You. Keep her alive."

"I will, Granna."

"And yourself. You hear me? I'm not having only one of you back."

"You won't," said Dorrit, and kissed her, and went on up the lane fast without looking round.

The rest came through the gate one by one. Iyene stopped in the gateway and inclined her head to Tansy, very correctly, as to a senior officer. Tansy nodded back. Alder stopped too, and bent, and said something too low for Wren to hear, and Tansy said, "Go on, you old heron, you're blocking my gate." Bracken touched his forehead to her. Pip said, "Morning, missus," and went red.

The last thing Wren saw of Fallowmere was her grandmother at the gate in the mist with her stick, and behind her the white hives, and a thread of smoke going up from the kitchen chimney. Then the lane bent, and the hedge was in the way.

The lane gave out at the last wall, and after that they climbed.

It was hard work from the first hour. The sheep-track went up across the pastures in long zigzags, and the mules did not like it. Barrow plodded, but Nettle stopped every quarter-mile and planted her feet, until Tolly got behind her and Ash got in front with an apple, and she bit whichever of them was nearest.

By mid-morning the mist had burned off, and the sun came up behind them and struck hot on the backs of their necks. Dall opened out below, green and gold, the river flashing, and Wren did not look back at it more than she could help. She looked up at the high pasture ahead of them, and the scree, and the Cloudwall going up and up, and the snow.

She had seen the snow on the Cloudwall every day of her life. There was always snow on the very top, on the peaks and the high saddle where the Stair went over, all summer long. It was a white line along the top of the world, and in September, in a good year, a thin one, high up.

This year it had come down. It lay on the upper switchbacks of the Stair, a long way below the summit, in a broad white skirt, past the black cliffs that the shepherds called the Anvils. It was lower than Wren had ever seen it in September, lower than it was some years in November.

She stopped and looked at it, and Iyene, climbing just behind her, stopped too. "Is that usual?" Iyene said.

"No."

"How far down should it be?"

Wren pointed, high up, near the top. "There. About there. This time of year."

Iyene looked at it a moment with her eyes narrowed against the glare, and then walked on without a word. Wren saw her hand go to the breast of her coat, where the dispatch case was, and rest there a moment, and come away.

Pip was having trouble, though it took Wren some time to notice, because Pip did not stop talking. He talked about the sheep, and the view, and the mules, and what Merrow looked like from the top of the cathedral tower, which he said he had climbed. He talked about the time he'd climbed the Customs House to get at a gutter-pigeon. But when the track came out onto a steep open slope with a long fall of scree below it, he went quiet. He moved to the uphill side of the path and kept his left hand trailing on the slope. His face had gone the color of whey.

"You all right?" Wren said.

"'Course I'm all right." Pip did not look down. "Why wouldn't I be all right?"

"You said you climbed the cathedral."

"That's different. That's got walls. You can hold on to walls. This hasn't got anything. It's just—" He waved a hand at the slope below, and did not look at it. "It's just air, all the way down. Who builds a road up a mountain with nothing on the side? That's just bad planning."

"It's a sheep-track."

"Well, the sheep want their heads looked at."

Barrow came up behind him and blew in his hair. Pip jumped, swore, grabbed the mule's halter, and after that walked with one hand on Barrow's neck. Bracken, who was bringing up the rear, caught Wren's eye as he passed and very slightly shook his head, and she let it be.

They came to the hollow a little after noon.

The burned heather was there along its rim, black and scorched, and the white patch of grass was gone. The grass was green again, if a little yellow, and there was no ewe. There was nothing in the hollow at all but a blackened patch among the heather, and the gray boulder at the back, with a dark stain down its face where the dead man had sat.

Dorrit looked at the stain and then walked on past it quickly, and Wren did the same. The riders slowed to look, and Iyene said, "Keep moving," and they kept moving.

The Last Cairn stood above the hollow on its shoulder of hill, with the spring beside it. The spring came out of the rock under a slab of stone and ran bright and very cold into a trough the shepherds had cut long ago. They stopped there to water the mules and fill their skins.

Tolly found the fox. "Sir," he called. "Sergeant. Over here."

It lay at the edge of the trough, behind the cairn, in the shadow of the stones: a dog fox, big and red, with a white tip to its brush. It was standing up with one forepaw raised, its head forward and its mouth a little open, as it had been going to drink, or to run. Frost was thick on its fur, glittering, and its eyes were white.

Around it, in the shadow where the sun didn't reach, the ground was white too. There was a broad trampled patch of old rime, scuffed and churned, as if many feet had crossed it. The rime ran away past the cairn and down the slope, and in the sunny places it was gone. But here, in the shade of the stones, it had stayed through a week of hot sun.

Nobody touched the fox. Merritt crouched and looked at it with her crossbow across her knees, and Dorrit stood behind her with her arms folded tight.

"This is where they came down," Iyene said. "All of them. This way."

"Thirty of them," said Wren. "Or near that."

"They passed the fox. And it froze. Just from being near." Iyene straightened. "Fenn. Anyone touches one of these things, I want to know about it. Anyone gets cold hands, cold feet, anything, I want to know. Pass it on."

"Sir."

Alder had come to stand beside the fox. He leaned on his staff and looked down at it, his face grave and tired.

"Warden?" said Iyene.

"It is a small thing," Alder said. "A small cold. Left behind." He turned away. "I would not like to meet the large one."

Wren went to the cairn, a great untidy heap of gray stones taller than she was. Every one of them had been put there by a shepherd from Dall, over hundreds of years, one stone each time a man came up this far. There was a stone of Cob's in there somewhere, and of his father, and his father's father. Wren had never been up this far before. She stooped and picked a stone up off the path, a flat gray one with a streak of white quartz through it, and reached up and set it on the cairn.

"What's that for?" said Pip, behind her.

"Luck," said Wren. "It's what the shepherds do. You put a stone on the cairn and then you go back down."

"But we're not going back down."

"No."

Pip looked at the cairn, and then picked up a stone and put it on, next to hers. "In case," he said.

Above the cairn, the path stopped being a path.

The road began a hundred yards higher up.

There was no gate and no sign. The sheep-track simply ran up into the scree and faded, and then, under the scree, there was stone. Wren stepped onto it before she saw it: a paving slab, square and gray and fitted, as big as a kitchen table. Under her boot it felt as solid as the floor of the inn. Beyond it there was another, half buried, and another beyond that: a road. It went up the mountain to the first bend and turned back on itself and went up again. It was clear in places and in places buried under slides of loose stone, but it was there, and had always been there.

Iyene knelt and put her hand flat on the stone. Then she brushed the grit away from the edge of it with her fingers, and found the joint where the next slab met it, and ran her thumb along it. The joint was so fine that Wren could not have put a knife-blade in it.

"Survey paving," Iyene said. She said it quietly, to herself, in the voice of someone meeting at last a person she had heard about for years. "Look at that. Look at the fit of it. They laid this road in the old days and it's still here."

"Sir," said Bracken, "the mules."

"Yes." Iyene stood up. Her face was its usual self again. "Fenn, lead on. Stay on the stone where you can. Where you can't, test the scree."

They climbed. The switchbacks were long and steep and each one was like the last, back and forth across the face of the mountain, every turn higher. The valley fell away beneath them until the river was a silver thread and the farms were dots. The air got thinner and colder, and when the sun went round behind the mountain they climbed in shadow. Wren's calves burned, and then her thighs, and then her lungs. The mules blew and stumbled on the scree and had to be hauled over the worst of it.

To keep the pace, Dorrit began the song the Dall harvesters sang on the long walk home from the top fields, and Wren took it up. Before long Tolly and Ash came in on the end of each line with words of their own, which were worse.

Carry me up by the long lane, love,
and carry me home by the ford.

The barley's cut and the sheaves are stood,
and the dark comes down on the road.

At one of the turns, Wren saw a mark cut into the rock face beside the road, a small sign, a circle with a line through it, worn nearly smooth. She knew it, for Iyene had shown it to her at the kitchen table the night before, with a dozen others, and made her say them back.

"Water," Wren said aloud.

Iyene looked round. "Where?"

Wren pointed to a trickle coming down a crack in the rock twenty yards on, dripping into a little basin cut to catch it.

"Good," said Iyene. Wren had not heard her say it before.

The shelter was where the map said it would be, three switchbacks above the Last Cairn, on a broad bend where the road had been cut wide for carts to turn.

It had been a Survey hut, a low building of the same fitted gray stone as the road, with walls as thick as Wren's arm was long, and a doorway with no door. Half the roof had fallen in, but the other half held, a vault of stone slabs over the back of the hut. Under it, on the flagged floor, there was room for all of them to lie down out of the wind.

They made a fire in the old hearth with wood they had carried up, and tethered the mules in the roofless half, and unrolled their blankets. Dorrit made a stew from Tansy's dried peas and a lump of Hobb's ham, and everyone ate it, and Tolly scraped the pot and looked round for more.

It was colder up here than Wren had expected. The sun had gone, and the wind came down off the snow above them and sang in the gap of the doorway. They sat close round the fire with their blankets over their shoulders and their hands out to the flames.

"This," said Bracken, from across the fire, "is nothing."

"Nothing?" said Dorrit.

"Nothing. You should have been at Brenn." Bracken stretched his great legs out toward the fire. "Salt marsh. Three days, lost. Couldn't see the sky for fog. Couldn't find the ground for water. Ate a heron."

"You ate a heron?"

"Raw. No fire. Tastes of fish and regret." He jerked his chin at Iyene. "The Captain drew a map to get us out. No paper. Drew it on my back. With a burnt stick. I had to stand in the reeds with my shirt off for an hour while the whole troop looked at me and argued."

"I remember," said Iyene, not looking up from the fire. "It was an accurate map."

"It was a very accurate map. I couldn't wash for a week in case we needed it again."

Ash laughed so hard he choked. Dorrit looked at Bracken with deep suspicion. "That's not true," she said.

"Every word."

"You're making it up."

"Ask the Captain."

Dorrit looked at Iyene, and Iyene looked at the fire. "It was the only flat surface available," she said.

Dorrit opened her mouth and shut it, and then, against her will, she began to laugh. It came out of her as a snort, and she clapped her hand over her mouth, and it came out anyway, and she laughed until her eyes watered. Bracken watched her with no expression at all, except that the corner of his mouth had gone up again under the beard.

"It's not funny," Dorrit said, wiping her eyes. "Standing about in the reeds with your shirt off. It's disgusting."

"It was very cold," Bracken agreed.

"I hope you caught your death."

"I caught a heron."

That set Ash off again. Tolly told him to shut up. Merritt, who had not said ten words all day, said, "Tell them about the goat, Sergeant."

"No," said Bracken.

"Tell them."

"There was a goat," said Bracken, and would say no more, however much Pip begged.

Pip had got over the heights. He sat in the roofless half, where Barrow had chosen to lie down, with his back against the mule's warm side, eating an apple.

"Is it true you've been shot?" he said to Iyene. "Sergeant says you've been shot."

"Once."

"Where?"

"In the side."

"Who by?"

Iyene turned a stick in the fire, and for a moment Wren thought she would not answer. She had not said one thing about herself since she arrived at Fallowmere except her name and her rank.

"By a farmer," Iyene said. "On the south border, at a place called Hollow Ridge. Twenty years ago. I was surveying the boundary for the Crown. He thought I was a tax assessor come to measure his fields, and he came out of his house with a fowling-piece and shot me."

"What did you do?"

"Fell down, mostly." She put the stick in the fire. "He and his sons carried me to the next village in a hay-cart. I was in bed for two months. Then I went back and finished the survey."

"Were you there, Sergeant?" said Pip.

"Before my time," said Bracken. "I've heard about it for eighteen years."

"And the farmer?" said Dorrit.

"He apologized." Iyene looked up. Her eyes gleamed, faintly, in the firelight. "He wrote to me. He still writes, every midwinter. He's very sorry. He sends a ham."

"Did you forgive him?"

"I moved his boundary stone three feet in his favor," said Iyene. "It seemed only fair."

Pip whooped. Even Alder laughed, a dry creak from the corner where he sat against the wall with his staff across his knees. Iyene looked back down at the fire, but she was less stiff than she had been, and when Ash began to sing his song about the sailor again, she did not tell him to stop.

Later, when the others were settling, Pip crawled over to Wren with his blanket round him.

"Sir says you're to teach me a tune," he said. "So I'll stop asking her things."

"Did she."

"She did. She says I ask too many questions. I don't think I do. Do you think I do?"

He grinned his gap-toothed grin at her, and Wren sighed and whistled him the first bar of the Old Reel, low, under the wind. He whistled it back wrong, and she whistled it again, and he got it wrong again, and then right, and after that he was quick, for he had a good ear. By the time the fire had burned down he had most of it, and he whistled it to the end of what there was, and stopped where she stopped, and looked at her.

"Go on," he said.

"That's it."

"That's not it. It's not finished. It goes up and then there's nothing."

"That's how it goes. It's always gone like that. It hasn't got a second half."

"Who'd write a tune with no end?" said Pip, outraged. "That's just bad planning."

"You said that about the road."

"Well, it was true about the road, too." He lay down, whistling it under his breath, the first half over and over, stopping each time at the top. The last thing Wren heard before she slept was Bracken's voice from the dark, saying, "Sandover, if you whistle that one more time I'll put you in the snow."

Wren woke in the dark, and did not know what had woken her. The fire had burned down to a red glow, and around her the others were dark heaps under blankets, one of them snoring, and that was Bracken. The wind had dropped. Fenn was on watch at the doorway, a black shape against the stars, with a torch unlit beside him and his sword across his knees.

It was very cold, and her breath smoked. She pulled the blanket up and felt the Waybook in its satchel against her ribs, and the iron ring cold on her finger, and lay listening.

Then she heard it.

It came from high up the mountain above them, beyond the switchbacks, from the snow and the dark, a sound she knew, and did not know. At first she thought it was dogs. It rose and fell, a long wavering cry, many voices together, one taking it up as another let it go. It was dogs. It was hounds, a pack of them, baying on a scent, and it carried down the mountain on the still air as clearly as if they were a mile off.

They could not be a mile off. There was nothing a mile off but snow.

The baying went on, swelling and fading and swelling, and around her Wren heard the others waking. Pip said, "What's that?" in a high voice, and somebody hushed him. Barrow was on his feet in the roofless half, stamping, and Nettle was braying, harsh and frightened.

Then the baying stopped, and in the silence after it a horn blew.

It was one long call. It began low and rose, and held, and fell away down the scale in a long falling cry, and ended. It was clear and cold and very beautiful. It echoed off the cliffs above them, once and again, fainter each time, until it was gone.

Iyene was sitting up. Wren could see her by the last of the firelight, upright in her blanket with her sabre already in her hand, and her face turned up toward the roof, toward the mountain, with her eyes wide.

"That's a hunting horn," Iyene said.

From the dark by the fire, Bracken's voice came, low and wide awake. "Whose?"

Nobody answered. Up on the mountain, the echoes died away into the snow.