# Chapter 1: The Last Mile

The left boot is the problem.

It has been the problem since somewhere around the wheat districts, which was, I try to count, six days ago. Maybe seven. The heel wore through on the inside edge first, then the outside caught up with a kind of enthusiasm I wish I could apply to other areas of my life, and now there is a flap of leather that catches on every third step and makes a sound like a very small, very disappointed duck.

Bramble's ears rotate toward the sound each time. She has opinions about it. She has not shared them verbally, because she does not share things verbally, but the ears are communicative enough.

"I know," I tell her. "I should have gotten them repaired at Millsreach."

She does not respond. She is in the sling across my chest, the one Cob made — the one Cob stitched from old canvas with the toggle clasp at the shoulder that I have replaced twice and he would probably replace better — and she has her front paws hooked over the edge so she can watch the road. Her head swivels in small, precise arcs. Left. Forward. Left again. The Tidemark scar on her ear catches the light when she turns. It is paler than the surrounding fur, a thin crescent, and I have stopped wondering whether it bothers her because she has never once acted like a creature who can be bothered by old scars.

The road is dirt. It has been dirt for the last three hours, since the stone paving ended at the junction where the marker post leans about fifteen degrees east of where it should be. I remember that post. I remember it leaning. That was two years ago, or close enough. It has committed to the lean now. Fully dedicated. I respect the commitment. I do not respect the maintenance schedule of whoever is responsible for marker posts in this district, but that is a separate issue.

The countryside is the color of bread crust. Late-autumn gold across the fields, the kind that happens in the last week before everything goes brown and honest about it. The hedgerows are still holding their leaves, barely, in that way where the wind has to make a decision and the leaves have to pretend they're not ready to let go. Some of them are ready. Some of them went three days ago and are currently in a ditch somewhere being composted by things I do not need to think about.

My knees pop when I shift my weight. Both of them. The left one first, which is tradition at this point, and the right one a half-second later, which is courtesy.

I have been walking for eighteen months.

Not continuously. There were days of rest, weeks in some places, the long stretch at the Hearth where I slept in a real bed and ate food that someone else cooked and did not have to decide which direction to face in the morning because there was only one direction, which was toward Solace's kitchen. But the walking is what my body remembers. My body has become a thing that walks. My shoulders have settled into a forward angle that Thistle will have opinions about when she sees me, and my right hip does something on cold mornings that I have decided not to name, because naming it would make it a condition rather than a quirk, and I am not old enough for conditions.

I am, however, old enough for quirks. My knees have confirmed this.

The light is doing something ahead of me — pooling in the low places between the hills in that way that late afternoon manages in autumn, when the sun is not so much setting as slouching toward the horizon with its hands in its pockets. The shadows are long. Mine stretches out in front of me, thin and ridiculous, the hat making my head look like a mushroom on a stick. The hat has three patches. Petal's sea-thrift patch on the left side, faded now to a color that is not quite lavender and almost grey, catches the light differently than the rest of the brim. I reach up and touch it without thinking about it, the way I have reached up and touched it every day for over a year, and my fingers know the texture before my mind registers that I am doing it. The thread she used was coarser than the rest. I can feel the line where it meets the original fabric. Every time.

Petal would think the slouching-sun image was funny. Or she would think it was obvious, which for Petal was the same thing.

I walk. The duck-boot flaps. Bramble's ears track something in the hedgerow — a bird, probably, or a mouse, or the idea of a mouse, which for Bramble is equally worth tracking. Her weight shifts against my ribs as she leans into the sling, and I adjust my stride without thinking about it. We have been doing this long enough that my body accounts for her the way it accounts for the pack on my back or the dirt under my nails. She is part of the architecture.

The hum is under my feet.

It has been under my feet since Ashfall. Since before Ashfall, really, since the mountain, but after Ashfall it became something you stop noticing. The continental chord. All forty-three Anchors singing through bedrock, through soil, through the root systems of hedgerow plants that have no idea what they are conducting and would not care if they did. It is like the sound of your own breathing. You can find it if you listen. I am not listening. It is there.

Six months ago I would have knelt and put my hands on the ground and felt for it, traced its edges, tried to understand its shape. Six months before that I would have wept at it. Now it is the sound the world makes when it is whole, and I walk on top of it, and my boot goes *flap*, and that is the loudest thing on this road.

I do not reach for the Lattice. I do not check.

There is a tree ahead on the right side of the road — an oak, old, the kind that got old by being stubborn about it rather than by any particular planning. It has a low branch that sticks out over the road at exactly the wrong height for a cart but exactly the right height for a person to think about sitting on and then decide against it because their knees would not forgive the dismount. I recognize this tree. I have walked past it twice before in my life, once heading east with a pack full of seeds that I had no particular plan for, and once heading east with a group of people who had become important to me in ways I had not yet figured out how to describe.

Both times I was leaving. Now I am coming back.

Bramble pokes her head up higher, hooks a paw over the canvas edge of the sling, and makes a small sound, not the hum-that-is-not-a-purr, not a chirp. Something between the two, a comment. A remark. Her nose works the air in quick, sharp inhales.

"We're close," I say.

The ears swivel forward and stay there.

We pass the oak. The shadow of its branch falls across my chest and Bramble flinches from it — not in fear, but in the way she flinches from anything that interrupts her line of sight, which is to say with profound personal offense. I adjust the sling strap. The toggle presses into my collarbone where it has been pressing for three hours, and there will be a mark there tonight that I will examine with the detached interest of long leaving marks on their own body through sheer stubbornness for the better part of two years.

My hands are brown from the road. The lines in my palms have dirt in them that does not wash out anymore, which Thistle told me once means either that I do not wash my hands well enough or that the dirt has decided I belong to it, and either way she was not going to discuss it further. The amber glow has been gone for weeks — months, maybe. It faded after the last Anchor, after the chord, after the beyond-entity's warmth settled into the background like a second heartbeat that slowed to match the first. My hands are just hands now. They have calluses in the right places for a shovel and the wrong places for everything else. There is a small scar across the pad of my left thumb from something I did in the eastern Verge that I cannot fully remember, which probably means it was either very boring or very important and I was too tired to tell the difference.

The road curves left around a stand of birch that was not here two years ago. Or it was here and I do not remember it. Both are possible. I am not going to sort out which. The birches are thin and pale and look like they are in the middle of a conversation I interrupted by walking past. Their leaves are small, bright yellow, and several of them drift down onto the road ahead of me in a pattern that probably means nothing but feels, in this light, in this hour, like the road is showing off.

"Nobody asked for this," I tell the birches. They do not respond. I appreciate this about trees. They do their thing and they do not require my input, which places them above roughly eighty percent of the people I have met in the last eighteen months.

Bramble chirps. Forward. Impatient.

"I know," I say.

My right ankle turns slightly on a stone and I catch myself, and both knees remind me that they are keeping a very detailed record of every insult I have offered them since the eastern Verge, and that this record will be presented in full at a time of their choosing. I pause. Roll the ankle. It is fine. Everything is fine. I have walked six hundred miles on these legs, or however far it actually is — I stopped tracking distance around the wheat districts because the numbers stopped meaning anything and started just being large and vaguely accusatory.

The hills ahead are familiar.

I mean really familiar. Not the familiar where the landscape rhymes with something you've seen before — no. They are the hills I know. I have weeded at the base of those hills. I have dug irrigation channels in the little valley between the second and third rise. I have argued with the soil there, which is clay-heavy and does not drain the way I want it to, and the soil has argued back by killing three successive plantings of root vegetables that did nothing to deserve it.

I stop walking.

Bramble's head comes up. Both ears rotate to face me, which means she is listening for a reason for the stop, and she is not finding one, and she is prepared to be irritated about it.

"Just — give me a minute."

She gives me approximately four seconds, then chirps again.

The air smells like cold dirt and dry grass and, underneath both, the faintest trace of woodsmoke from a direction that could be the settlement or could be a dozen other homesteads scattered through these hills. The smoke smell has always been here. It is the smell of people living in a place and burning things to stay warm, which is one of the oldest and simplest truths about being alive, and I am not going to make it more than that.

I can see, if I look, and I am looking, I am definitely looking, the rise where the eastern fence line sits. The one Cob built. The one that was four posts and a prayer when I left, which means it is probably twelve posts and a conviction by now, because Cob does not leave things as they are when they could be better. The rise is there. The fence line would be on the other side of it, or on it, or just below the crest. I cannot see it yet.

Or, wait.

I squint.

There is a line. Against the gold-brown of the hill, just below where the crest meets the sky, a line that is too straight to be natural and too dark to be shadow. A fence. A proper fence, not the leaning suggestion of a fence that I left behind.

I do not name what I feel.

I walk a little further. Fifty steps. The road rises and the view opens and there, yes. The fence line. Running east to west along the crest of the hill, solid posts, what looks like proper cross-rails, and behind it the suggestion of something green that should not be green this late in autumn but is green anyway because this is my garden and it has always done what it wants regardless of season or reason or my personal feelings about the matter.

Bramble makes the sound. The hum-that-is-not-a-purr, low and steady, vibrating through the sling and into my chest. She knows. She can smell it, probably, or hear it, or feel it in whatever way she feels the things that are connected to her — her kits, her territory, her domain that she has claimed through the ancient right of being small and angry and unwilling to negotiate.

I keep walking. The rise is maybe a quarter mile ahead. Fifteen minutes at this pace. Ten if I push it. My body wants to push it. My legs, which have been conducting a formal protest regarding the state of the left boot for six days, are now interested in covering ground. Even the knees have temporarily suspended their grievance.

But I do not push it.

I find the stone instead.

It is on the right side of the road, flat-topped, about knee height, the stone that exists in this countryside because the glaciers left it here ten thousand years ago and nobody has bothered to move it since. It has a dip in the center from rain collecting over centuries. There is moss on the north side. It is a good stone. A sitting stone.

I sit.

The sling shifts and Bramble adjusts her weight, paws reorganizing against my chest. She looks up at me with an expression that I choose to interpret as confusion but suspect is closer to judgment. Her ears are still pointed forward. Toward the rise. Toward home.

"Just a minute," I say.

She chirps.

"I know."

The stone is cold through my trousers. The cold seeps in immediately, the way it does through fabric that has been washed too many times and patched in three places and should really be replaced but will not be replaced because I have a complicated relationship with replacing things that still technically function. My knees, now that I am sitting, have begun the process of stiffening that will make standing up a production. My lower back is informing me that it has been supportive, literally, for six hours of walking today and would like to register a formal complaint.

I shift on the stone and feel the dip in its center press against me. The moss on the north side is thick and soft and very green for this time of year, the green that moss manages when everything else has given up on the color. I touch it with one finger. It is damp. Cold. Alive in the quiet, stubborn way that moss is alive, which is to say without ambition but with absolute conviction.

From here I can see the fence line clearly. The posts are thick — thicker than what Cob usually uses, which means he chose them for strength, which means the eastern beds are producing enough to need real protection. From deer, probably. Or from that one goat that used to get through the old fence every three days with a persistence that bordered on philosophical commitment. I wonder if the goat is still around. I wonder if Cob built the fence specifically because of the goat. This would be like Cob — to look at a goat-shaped problem and solve it with lumber and determination and probably a hand-drawn diagram.

I cannot see the Garden itself. Just the fence, and the green behind it, and the hill, and the sky going amber above the crest. The smoke smell is stronger now, it could be the settlement. It probably is the settlement. There would be a kitchen fire at this hour, and maybe the workshop stove if Cob is working late, and the clinic hearth if Thistle has someone in for the evening. The smoke would rise and spread and mix with the cold air coming down from the hills, and it would smell exactly like this. Like someone is warm somewhere nearby. Like someone thought ahead enough to stack wood and strike a match before the sun went down.

I reach into my coat pocket. The collection is there — I check it sometimes, not because I think it will have changed but because my hands want the shapes. Petal's bracelet, smooth shell and cord. The wooden scarecrow Husk left me, small enough to close a fist around, warm against my fingers tonight. Cob's toggle from the first sling. Solace's honey scoop, the handle worn dark. And Cob's note, folded into a square so small it has become a permanent crease in the paper. Eight words. I do not unfold it. I know what it says. My thumb runs along the fold line, feeling the ridge where the paper has been doubled and redoubled so many times it is almost soft.

The stone I am sitting on has a crack running through it at an angle that looks like it has been meaning to split for a few hundred years and has not gotten around to it. I understand this stone. I understand the postponement of an inevitable structural event. This is basically my approach to emotions and also to boot repair.

Bramble shifts again. Her nose pushes against the edge of the sling. She is pointed like an arrow at the rise, body taut, the hum-that-is-not-a-purr still going, and I can feel it in my ribs the way I have felt it for years now, that frequency that means she wants to be somewhere and is not there yet and considers this a personal failing on the part of whoever is in charge of transportation.

I am in charge of transportation.

"One more minute," I say.

The light is turning. The amber is going deeper, heading toward that color that autumn sunsets get when the air is dry and the angle is low and the whole world looks like it has been dipped in something warm. The fence line is a dark stripe against it. The green behind the fence is darker still. Somewhere in there is the herb garden, and the eastern beds, and the meditation stone, and the clinic, and Cob's workshop, and whatever else has grown and changed and become itself in the eighteen months I have been gone.

Somewhere in there is home. The word is plain. I let it be plain.

My boot — the left one, the problem — is resting on a small rock, and the flap of leather hangs open like a mouth that has given up mid-sentence. I look at it. It looks at me. We have an understanding, this boot and I. We have made it this far through mutual stubbornness, and we will make it the rest of the way, and then I will take it off and put it by the door and it will sit there being worn-through and that will be fine. It has earned the right to be worn-through. Which is more than I can say for my second-best trowel, which gave up after one season and does not deserve the shelf space it occupies in Cob's workshop, but here we are.

A bird calls from the hedgerow behind me. Something small and bright-voiced. An evensong bird — I should know which kind, but I have been away long enough that the calls have blurred in my memory and I will need to relearn them. This is something to look forward to. Relearning the birds. Relearning which weeds come up first in the eastern beds. Relearning the grudges that the clay soil holds against anyone who tries to grow parsnips in it.

There will be other things to relearn too. The sound the workshop door makes when Cob props it open with that wedge he carved from scrap oak. The way the clinic smells in the evening — dried herbs and something sharp and clean underneath that Thistle has never explained and I have never asked about. The path from the front gate to the meditation stone, which I wore into the grass myself and which has probably filled in by now, or maybe not, maybe someone has been walking it. I do not know. I will find out.

The hum under my feet is steady. I am not listening for it. It is there.

Bramble chirps. One sharp, clear sound.

"I know," I say. I put my hands on my knees. The knees register their objection. I push off the stone.

One more minute. And then home.