Chapter 2: 2 | The Parcel Under Review

The fell was dry. She crossed it in a day, as promised by a man who had not been certain which side of the promise he was standing on, and the promise held anyway, which she noted and did not enjoy. The path over the top ran between old waymark cairns, and one of them stood a stride and a half off its true bearing, polite as a guest who has moved his chair. The Cracking's small housekeeping, still going on, quiet as settling timber. She noted that too, and did not correct it, having no capacity in which to correct anything, and the noting went into the field book, which had no such scruples. Low Wether was wool and smoke and one long street with its back to the fell. She had passed through it once before, southbound under escort, and the town had entered something in her file for the privilege. What she had not marked then, and marked now, was the bell. It rang the hour as she came down off the last pitch, one plain note, and the street below adjusted itself around the note without looking up, carts and dogs and a man closing a hurdle, all of them keeping an appointment none of them thought of as one. You could have set a survey by that bell. Somebody plainly had, once, and the town had grown along the reading. The chapter house stood at the street's elbow, and it was the kind of building nobody remembers being built. Not grand. Old past the point where age is an ornament. Stone gone the color of weather, a door of black oak, and over the door a dedication so worn that only the depth of the cutting still argued something had been said there once, and…