The Woman on the Path

There is a milestone on the eastern bank of Lip Ford, a quarter-mile past the crossing where the two banks mirror each other into something the locals swear looks like a mouth caught mid-word, and if you walk the Greenway Road in your very first hour you will find a woman sitting on it. She does not ask you for anything. This is the first thing to understand about her, and very nearly the last thing anyone learns for certain.

She has the dust of Uttermost Rest on her coat — the oldest village in the vale, and a long enough walk that most travelers would mention it. She doesn't. Her boots are mended with three different kinds of twine, a wooden staff leans against the stone beside her, and she sits with the careful, upright posture of someone who has come farther than she will admit and has decided, firmly, not to make it your problem. She watches you approach with the patient expression of a person who has seen a great many travelers reach exactly this milestone and make exactly the wrong choice — who has stopped being surprised by it, and has not, quite, stopped hoping.

What happens next is entirely up to you, and everything she does answers it precisely. Set a coin on the milestone beside her and she'll take it, and look at it, and look at you with something that falls between gratitude and mild disappointment — the face of a person who wanted company and got commerce instead. She gives you an apple from her coat pocket. It is, for the record, a good apple. It will not make you feel the way you had hoped it would, and you will not be entirely able to say why. Turn and keep walking and she won't call after you; she never does. But somewhere past the rise, with Sounding Hill lifting over the treeline ahead, you'll realize you have picked up a low, quiet guilt that is worse than being cold and has a way of following a person clear into the kingdoms beyond this one.

Share your bread, though — half a stale travelling loaf, handed over without ceremony, which is the only way she will accept it — and she gives you something stranger than an apple and worth a great deal more. She reaches into her coat and produces a small brass key on a loop of cord. "Found it on the path," she says, "between here and The Hearthmark. Two days back. Didn't know what to do with it. Maybe you'll figure it out." The key is cold and unmarked but for a single notch near the bow — the hallmark, if you happened to know locks, of a maker who cut them in Calligrapher's Green back when that place still had guilds to cut them in. "A key is just an argument someone hasn't finished yet," she murmurs, and rises, and is around the bend before it occurs to you to ask her name.

She is right about the key, as it happens. Carry it another mile up the road and you'll meet Tomas, a large and methodical man locked out of his own stable and far too proud about it, waiting on precisely the argument that small brass key was made to finish. She could not have known that. She simply handed the thing along and trusted the road to sort out where it belonged — which is, more or less, how she seems to handle everything, herself included.

Try to work out what she is and you will not get far, and this is by design rather than mystery for its own sake. She keeps no ledger of who has helped her and who has not; she doesn't need one. She trades in kind and settles up on the spot — bread for a key, a coin for an apple, a turned back for a guilt you'll carry yourself — and then she is gone up the road, staff in hand, leaving you holding whatever you earned and the growing suspicion that the first choice you made on the Greenway Road told her rather more about you than it told you about her. You will not see her again. You will think about her for a good while yet.