Chapter 5: Five | The Door

The third night he sealed the door. He did not tell her. He did not tell himself, precisely, why he was doing it, although the reasons he assembled for the purpose were practical and orderly and had nothing to do with the fact that the road ahead crossed two days of empty country where the markers ran close to the broken land and the leak-sign had been dark in his palm all week. It was for her protection. Children should not walk roads where the dark leaked upward through stone and the rain came down blackened and the things in the ditches moved wrong. He was being responsible. He was being, if anything, kind. She was asleep by the fire, curled on the downwind stones in the too-big coat with her boots pointed at the embers. The shelter tonight was a sheep-fold on a shelf above the broken land, the drop on the south side sheer enough that a tossed stone would not be heard to land, and a stunted rowan grew sideways out of the lip, its roots in the crack, alive for no reason a sensible tree would accept. He waited until her breathing was steady and even and then he rose and went to the gap in the wall where they had come through and he laid the seal. It was not a large working. A word, a breath, a line of intention drawn from post to lintel with two fingers. The gap did not change. The stones did not glow. Nothing happened that anyone could see, which was the entire point of the craft: a sealed door looked like a door and felt like a door and was, in every particular that mattered, a wall. He pressed the binding flat with his thumb and checked the…