Chapter 6: Six | Leak Country

The markers came closer together after the fork at Dunmore's Cross, and she noticed, because she noticed everything, and because noticing was the thing she did instead of being quiet. "They're more frequent here," she said. He said nothing. "The stones. They were a mile apart near the hamlet. Now they're every quarter-mile. That means whatever you're doing to them, it needs doing more often here. Which means whatever's underneath is worse here. Or closer. Or both." He said nothing, in a tone that suggested she was not wrong and that being not wrong was not the same as being invited to continue. "Also noted," she said. The road ran along the spine of a ridge that had been, at some point in the old geography, a proper ridge, and was now a series of slumped shelves leaning into each other like drunks at a fence. The heather had thinned and then stopped, replaced by a grey moss that grew in patches like lichen on a sick tree, and the stone walls that had marked every field since Carden were gone. Nothing was farmed here. Nothing was built. The broken land opened below them on both sides, and the rain that fell into it did not come back as sound, and the air smelled of cold iron, and the cord in his satchel was going faster than he had budgeted. He stopped at each marker. She watched. She had learned, over five days, not to touch the stones while he worked, which was the only instruction he had given her directly and which she had accepted without argument, which was so uncharacteristic that he had briefly suspected illness. At each stone the work was the same: old cord off, wax read, grooves cleared, new cord laid, seven and one, a…