Epilogue: Coda | The Path

She took the road out on a morning in the first week of winter, early, with the pack and the good chain, bound east for the season's first commission, which was a boundary matter of no importance to anyone but the two farms it stood between, which is to say, important. The road out of Onner's Bridge runs up between the stubble fields toward the fell, and at the second rise there is a stone at the roadside, a flat gray stone of no particular office, that nobody maintained and nobody neglected, and on the stone, that morning, an old woman sat cracking hazelnuts. She was brown as the year's end and dressed like the country, in wool the color of ploughland, and her hands worked the nuts with the economy of sixty harvests, and she looked up as Genna came level with her, and held out a kernel, and Genna took it, because you take what the road gives you, and ate it, and it was sweet. "Are you ready for the path you were born to walk?" the old woman asked. "Yes," Genna said. It came out plumb. Every plumb thing her hand had ever produced had been produced against the grain of her, signatures her hand disagreed with, names set level on papers she hated; this one came out plumb the whole way through, voice and spine and the ground under her boots, the first entirely agreed-upon word of her adult life, and the old woman heard all of that in the one syllable, you could see her hear it, and nodded, and cracked another nut. "You told them no, over the hill." It was not a question. The old woman said it as the year says frost, and then she smiled, down at her working hands,…