The candle had burned down to a stub by the time the sky outside the shutter-crack turned from black to the grey of a bruise healing.
Walter sat on the edge of the narrow bed with his stockinged feet flat on stone that hadn’t held a scrap of warmth all night, elbows on his knees, and watched his own right forearm the way another man might watch a kettle he didn’t quite trust.
The blue thread had been surfacing and fading for the better part of an hour now, longer each time, brighter, until it held there under the skin like a vein lit from inside and simply stayed.
Right, he thought.
So this is happening.
Good morning, said a voice that was not his own, and was not, strictly, a sound at all.
I apologize for the delay.
There is a great deal I preferred not to explain while you were standing at an open stone circle in full daylight.
Walter’s hand went still on his knee.
The voice landed somewhere behind his sternum rather than in his ears clipped, precise, a woman’s voice with an accent that belonged to lecture halls and wireless broadcasts from a decade that predated him by sixty years and change.
He didn’t jump.
He’d have liked to say that was composure.
Mostly it was that some animal part of him had already known, for three days, that this was coming.
“You could’ve said something at the stones,” he said, low, barely above breath, mindful of the wattle wall six inches from his shoulder and the priest asleep on the other side of it.
I could have.
A pause that felt, oddly, like someone deciding how much honesty the moment could bear.
One learns not to speak to a man before he has decided whether he is dreaming.
You needed the walk.
I needed you off that hill before anyone with a memory of your face passed by it.
“Fair,” Walter said, and something loosened half a turn in his chest at the word his own word, in his own mouth, aimed at something that had answered back for the first time in three days.
My name is Margaret Davenant.
I was an anthropologist Cambridge, before the war.
I died in 1939.
He sat with that a moment.
Three questions had been building behind his teeth since the moment the hum first started who are you, why me, what happened to you and he’d rehearsed them enough times on the road south that they’d worn smooth as river stones.
He led with the smallest one, the one he thought might actually get answered.
“How.”
That, Margaret said, and her voice didn’t harden so much as close, the way a door closes without slamming, is not part of this morning’s instruction.
Ask me again when you’ve earned it.
For now you have perhaps eighteen minutes before the priest wakes for Lauds, and there is a great deal you need before that clock runs out.
He let it go.
Filed it no.
He set it down the way he set most things down now, and picked up the next question instead, because a woman’s ghost telling him no was still, on balance, more information than he’d had at dawn yesterday.
“Why me, then.”
A question for another morning as well.
A beat, and the register shifted not warmer, but more exact, as if she were choosing each word for weight.
What you can use today is this: you carry seven stones, and each buys a different door.
The garnet in your purse will carry you fifty years, easily, and no further a short jump, cheap, reliable.
The rubies reach further, two or three centuries, at greater cost.
The citrine and the sapphire chip are lesser stones useful for small, exact work, not for crossing years.
The opal is decorative and portal-worthless; I don’t know why it was included, and I don’t love not knowing that.
A pause, dry as chalk.
The emerald is your reserve.
Do not spend it carelessly.
And if you are ever handed a diamond, Walter save it for last.
It is the only stone with no ceiling, and the only one this Charter cannot fully account for.
Walter found himself nodding at the dark, which was a stupid thing to do at a voice with no eyes to see it, and did it anyway.
“Charter,” he said.
“That’s what this is called.”
The Beltane Charter.
You are, for the moment, its only operator, and its rank for you is Wanderer the beginning.
The Stone-Pact and the small pocket you’ll have already discovered in your boot leather are the whole of what you can do today.
More will come.
Not today.
He thought of the leather cache, the coins that had come up out of nowhere at the crofter’s fence line, and felt something settle a half-degree further toward real.
Somewhere past the wall, a floorboard shifted Father Niall turning in his sleep, most likely, but Walter’s whole body went still around the sound until it didn’t repeat.
You are afraid, Margaret said, not unkindly, into the stillness that followed.
I would think less of you if you weren’t.
He almost laughed caught it before it could carry through the wall because afraid wasn’t quite the word and yet it wasn’t wrong either.
It sat lower than fear.
It sat somewhere closer to the ten minutes on the phone with Emma, the birthday call, the love you, talk soon that had turned out to be a door closing behind him without either of them knowing it.
He didn’t say any of that.
He said, instead, the only piece of it small enough to fit through his teeth without breaking on the way out:
“I had a sister.
I didn’t get to tell her anything.”
I know, Margaret said, and for one unguarded half-second the Cambridge precision softened into something almost gentle.
Then it closed again, professional, brisk, a door shutting on a room she’d decided not to linger in.
Grief is not part of this morning’s work either.
We have twelve minutes.
He let her have the retreat.
It cost him nothing, and it seemed, in some way he didn’t have language for yet, to cost her something to have opened the door at all.
“Last question,” he said.
“What do you want from me.
Really.”
The pause this time ran longer than the others.
There is a woman, Margaret said at last, each word set down like a stone on a scale, who will come through these hills before the year turns through these stones, or others like them.
I will not give you her name.
You are not to seek her out, not to warn her of anything, not to alter one hour of the road she is walking.
That is not a request.
It is the whole of the order this Charter was built to keep, and it is the only order I will not renegotiate with you, now or later.
Walter opened his mouth to ask who the shape of the question already forming, a woman, what woman, when and the wattle wall gave a long, dry creak on the far side, followed by the unmistakable scrape of a chair leg against stone.
He pinched the candle out between two fingers without a flinch, three days of cold Highland mornings having taught his skin that much already, and sat in the dark with his heart going hard and even against his ribs, listening to Father Niall’s slow, unhurried footsteps cross the floor toward Lauds and to the silence Margaret had left behind her, which said, more clearly than any answer could have, that the question wasn’t finished.
It had only been postponed.