Chapter 2: Two | The Road East

He had been walking for perhaps another mile when she fell into step beside him as though it had been arranged. She did not announce herself. She was simply there, at his left, matching his stride with two of her own, the blue coat dark with rain and the braids plastered flat and the boots squelching in the mud with a sound like a small enthusiastic animal. She smelled of meat pie and wet wool and a life conducted largely outdoors. He did not look at her. He had outlived whole dynasties by not looking at things. "You are walking east," he said. "I know." "Lankshyre is behind you." "I know that too." He said nothing for a mile, on the theory that it had worked on kings. It did not work on her. She filled the silence the way weather fills a valley, not aggressively but completely, a gentle saturation that left no corner dry. She commented on the road, which had narrowed past the Ashburn crossing to a single cart-track of packed mud and hopeful gravel. She commented on the colour of the mud, which she considered superior to the mud near Lankshyre, which was apparently grey rather than brown and it smelled of tanneries. She asked what the marker stones were for. She asked why the birds here flew in pairs. She asked whether it was true that the rain east of the spine never properly stopped or whether that was something people said because they had not been east of the spine. He answered none of it. After the seventh question she said, "Noted," and after the twelfth she said, "Also noted," and the road went on. The light was almost gone and the rain had settled into the steady, impersonal downpour that this country considered…