The Winter Toll

The road over Whinnet Pass was kept by three wardens, none of them human and no two of them alike, and in a whole year not one of them had crossed Netta's threshold.

The first cart came down off the mountain side of the pass a little after seven, when the light was still lying flat and blue along the road and the frost had not yet let go of the ruts. Netta heard it before she saw it, the iron tyres knocking on the stone where the road came round the bend, and she had her gloves on and her hand on the counterweight chain before the driver had finished hauling on his brake.

She had dressed for the wind out of habit, though there was none: the dark russet wool coat-dress buttoned close from her throat to her waist, the broad belt with the purse and the keys cinched over it, the skirt swinging at mid-calf above her boots, and her long black box braids wound up into a high knot at her crown so that nothing could whip loose and catch in the chain. The cold found the back of her neck anyway, the deep brown skin there bare under the knot. It always did.

She liked the gate best at this hour. The bar was a single trunk of larch, squared and tarred, as long as the road was wide, and it pivoted on an iron post set into rock so old that nobody knew who had cut the socket. A box of stones on the short end did most of the work. All the keeper had to do was lean, and the long end rose off its rest with a groan that she felt in her palms, and stood up against the sky like a pointing arm. In a year she had lifted it for drovers and peddlers, for carriers and wedding parties, for a whole household of hart-kind going down to the lowland fairs with their antlers wrapped in linen against the frost, and for one old human woman on foot with a goose under each arm, who had paid in eggs and been entered in the book as such.

This driver was human, red in the face, wrapped in two coats, with a load of wool bales roped under a tarpaulin and a pony that blew steam like a kettle.

"Morning, keeper. What's the toll on a single horse and a part load now?"

"Same as it was in the summer," Netta said. "Two pennies for the cart, one for the beast. Where are you bound?"

"Down. Anywhere down." He counted the coins into her glove, and she saw him glance up past her at the ridge, where there was nothing at all to see but blue. "You'll have heard."

"Heard what?"

He looked at her as if she had asked him which way the river ran, then shrugged and shook the reins. "Nothing, maybe. They were all leaving up at the high farms. That's all."

She dropped the bar behind him and went in to the toll window to write him down. The book lived on the shelf beside the window, a long ledger bound in calf that had gone soft at the corners from a year of her thumbs, and she kept it as she kept everything at the gate: in a plain hand, one line to one passage, nothing left blank and nothing added. Wool, one cart, one pony, human, going down. Three pennies. She blotted it. Through the glass the road was empty again, and the stove behind her was ticking as it ate the morning's first wood.

By nine there had been four more carts, all going down, and not one coming up.

It was not unknown for the lowland traffic to dry up at the start of winter, and she told herself so. But the carters did not stop to talk as they usually did, and they did not let their horses drink at the trough by the gate, and two of them paid without asking the toll at all, which no carter born had ever done. She lifted the bar and let it down, lifted and let it down, and wrote each one in its line, and the sky stayed as clear and still as a held breath.

She had been aware of Avel for some time before she let herself look at him properly.

He was standing at the side of the road a little way up from the gate, where the verge widened beside the milestone, and he had been standing there since before the first cart. That in itself was nothing. The wardens kept the pass between them, and Avel's part of it was the sky; he would stand for an hour together on the shoulder of the road with his face turned up, and then go and tell the others something in four words that sent them out with ropes or kept them in. She had grown used to the sight of him there the way she had grown used to the milestone. He was the broadest creature she had ever seen walk on two feet: shoulders like a yoke, a chest that strained the lacing of his pale wool jerkin, heavy bare arms that were the colour of sand with the sun on it. His hair was straw-gold and pushed back off his face as if a wind had done it, though there was no wind.

That was what she noticed, when she did look. There was no wind at all. The smoke from her own chimney was going straight up in a grey thread, and the dry heads of the grasses on the verge were perfectly still. But the mantle along Avel's nape and shoulders, the fine cream plumage that lay smooth against his skin on most days she had known him, was lifted. Not ruffled. Lifted, all of it, each feather standing a little off the next, so that the line of his shoulders looked softer and wider than it was, and the low sun came through the edges of it like light through a dandelion clock.

She looked at it for longer than was polite. Then she looked down at the book.

It was not her business. That was the rule she had made for herself in her first week, standing at this same window with the keys of a stranger's gatehouse on her belt and three wardens of three kinds she had never met coming down the road to introduce themselves. Kinds kept to their own valleys. When they had to share a road, they shared it by being careful, and the careful thing for a human keeper to do with a cloud-kind warden's feathers was not to stare at them, and certainly not to ask what they meant. She would not have liked a stranger asking why her own hands shook when she was tired. So she wrote down the next cart, and when she looked up again Avel had turned his head and was watching her through the glass, his amber eyes steady, as if he were waiting for something. She nodded to him. After a moment he nodded back, and turned his face up to the empty sky again.

Thole came down the road at half past ten.

She knew it was half past ten because she knew it would be. On a cold morning he never came earlier, and she had long ago stopped expecting him to. The rockfall above the bend had come down three nights back, nothing much, a spill of loose scree and two boulders the size of barrels across the inside of the curve, and she had seen him look at it on the evening it fell and go away again without touching it. Stone-kin, she had decided, were not early risers. It suited him. Everything about Thole suggested a creature that did not hurry because hurrying would have been beneath the weight of him.

He was not the tallest of the three, but he was the heaviest by a long way, and the road knew it. She could hear him coming by the way the gravel settled under his boots. He was about seven feet of dense, warm-grey body, his skin grained with a darker fleck like a hearthstone, his rust-red hair cropped so close it was nearly a shadow on his skull, and a short red beard trimmed square. He wore a sleeveless dark tunic open at the collar, and at his collarbones and down the length of both forearms the quartz in him showed through the grey in clean white seams, like ice set in a wall. When the sun caught it, it flashed.

He stopped at the toll window, which he did every morning, and put two fingers to his brow, which he also did every morning.

"Keeper."

"Thole. You're going up to the fall?"

"Sun's on it now." He looked at the sky, then at her. "Road will be clear by noon."

"There's nobody coming up to need it clear," she said. "They're all going down."

"Then they won't need it either," he said, and went on up the road, and she found herself almost smiling at the window.

She watched him work, between carts. It was something to watch. He went at the scree with his bare hands, shovelling it off the road and over the edge in great armfuls, and when he came to the two boulders he did not lever them; he crouched, put his arms round the first one as if it were a sack of meal, straightened his back, and walked it to the drop. The stone went over and she heard it, a long time later, crack against something far below. He stood for a moment afterwards with his hands open, flexing them slowly, and then he went for the second. He moved more stiffly than she was used to seeing him. She put it down to the cold and the stone.

Severin rode down from the wardens' hut a little before noon.

She heard the mare first, the neat quick strike of shod hooves, and then he came round the bend at a walk, past Thole, past Avel, who did not look away from the sky, and drew up at the toll window. He was the tallest creature on the pass by some distance even before the antlers, and on the mare he was a figure out of an old print: the long dark green riding coat cut close to his body, the cream shirt beneath it, his chestnut hair in its single long plait down his back, and above his head the spread of his antlers, dark and branching and furred with velvet that took the light softly, like moss. His skin was a warm fawn brown, darker along the line of his jaw. He swung down from the saddle, which brought his face no nearer to hers, and bowed. Not the nod he usually gave her across the bar. A bow, from the waist, with his hand to his chest.

"Keeper Kittow. Good day to you. I hope I don't disturb your work."

Netta looked at him. In a year he had called her keeper, and nothing else. He had never once used her family name.

"Good day," she said. "You don't disturb anything. As you can see, I'm run off my feet."

He smiled at that, but briefly. "I came to ask whether you're provisioned. For the winter. Whether you have all you need in the house, and whether there's anything the wardens might fetch you from the hut before—" He stopped, and she watched him choose a different end for the sentence. "Before the season turns."

"I'm stocked for the winter," she said. "The valley sent the last cart in autumn. Thole and I laid the wood in." She heard how short that sounded and added, because it was true, "Thank you for asking."

"Not at all." He held the mare's reins in both hands, which she had never seen him do. "I would ask your leave to say one more thing, keeper, if I may."

"You may say anything you like on a public road, Severin."

"Then I'll say this," he said. "If at any time you should want the wardens, for any reason at all, you have only to send. Any one of us. All of us. You need only ask."

There was something in his face she could not read. She thought perhaps it was the hart-kind way of saying a thing that the human way would have said with less ceremony, and she thought that if she asked him what he meant he would explain it to her at length, kindly, and both of them would be embarrassed. So she said, "I know that. You've all been very good," and he bowed again, and that was that.

It was past one when she put the kettle on. She did it every day at about that hour, and every day they came, and every day it went the same way. She brewed the tea strong in the big brown pot, set four cups on the sill inside the toll window, and opened the window. Severin, who had tied the mare to the trough rail and stayed, stooped and took his cup through it. Thole came down from the cleared bend, stone dust grey on his forearms where it had settled into the grain, and took his. Avel came last, from the milestone, and closed his broad hand round his cup so completely that she could see only the steam coming out of the top of his fist.

They stood on the road to drink it. They always stood on the road. In a year of tea at this window, of storms and mud and the harvest traffic and the night a carter's horse broke its leg on the gate and Thole had carried it off the road, none of them had once set foot over the step of her door. She had never asked them in. They had never shown any sign of wanting to come. It seemed to her the right arrangement between a keeper and the wardens of the road: a window, and a sill, and the four of them on either side of it, warm hands, polite.

She leaned on her elbows on the sill with her cup and looked out at them, and noticed for the first time that day that the light had changed.

It had gone flat. The blue had drained out of the sky while she was not watching, and in its place was a high, even whiteness, like the inside of a bowl, with no edge to it anywhere. The thread of smoke from her chimney was still rising straight up. But the far side of the valley, which had been sharp as a cut all morning, was gone. Not hidden. Simply gone, as if someone had lifted it out of the world.

"Oh," she said.

None of them said anything. Avel was looking at the ridge. His mantle was standing fully up now, every feather on end, and his amber eyes had gone narrow. Thole had set his cup down on the sill and was flexing his hands again, slowly, the quartz along his forearms gone dull in the flat light. Severin was looking not at the sky but at her.

The first flake came down past the window, fat and slow, and landed on the sill between her cup and Thole's, and did not melt.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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