Rowan was three days down from the north post, and the post book held the road plain. Silas had come up the two days from the village for the cairn, his knee bound double for the road.
They left Rowan's cabin at first light, with the melt running under a skin of night ice in every dip of the road.
Silas wrapped his knee at the door, sitting on the woodpile, the way he had done it ten thousand times. Two cloths, not one. The first bound snug below the joint. The second over it, crossed and tucked, the way a man binds a thing he means to use all day and pay for all evening. Double-wrapped. Then he stood, and tested it, and nodded once, at nobody.
Pip had taken the heavier share of the loads at the packing, without a word about it. Rowan had seen the boy's hands do it and had let the hands stand. Some arrangements a relief party makes without a word. Nobody named this one either.
Silas walked first, out of the clearing, and the road took his pace.
That was the whole law of the three days, and nobody spoke it. The relief walked at the pace of the man in front. When Silas slowed on the rises, they slowed. When he stopped, they stopped, and the stopping was for water, or for the view, or for nothing that needed a name. When he went on, they went on. Three days from the cabin to the north post. It had always been three days. This time the three days were measured in an old man's stride, and the road did not care, and neither, in the end, did the count. A road is a road. It takes what the walker brings.
The first day was mud and high water.
The creeks ran brown and loud with the melt, and the crossings were work. Pip went first at the second creek with the rope, as Rowan had taught him. Silas crossed with the rope in his fist and his jaw set. At the far bank he sat on a stone a while, the water still talking under him. Nobody called it a rest. The rope had to be coiled. The packs had to be checked. A man sitting to coil a rope is a man working.
At the camp that night Silas ate half of what Pip put in front of him. He slept like a felled thing, with his stick across his knees inside the shelter. It was the way old men sleep on a road, when they do not entirely trust their bodies on it. Rowan took the first watch and let the boy take none of it. That too was the relief walking at somebody's pace. It cut both ways, and fair was fair.
The second day the road climbed into country where the snow still lay in the shade of the spruces, white and rotten, punching through under the boot. Silas's stride shortened by the hour. He did not complain. He had not complained, so far as anyone in the valley had ever heard, in sixty years of weather, and he was not going to begin for an audience of two. He saved his breath for the road, and the road took it, step by step, and gave back distance at the rate it always gives it back. Slowly. Honestly. A pace at a time.
"Your grandfather walked this road with a pack twice your boy's," Silas said once, at a halt, not to either of them in particular. "Carried a stove up it. A stove. Men were fools about heavier things in those days."
Rowan wrote nothing down about the day. Some days the book gets the counts and some days it gets the weather, and a day whose whole news was that an old man kept walking got the weather. North wind. Snow in the shade. Two men and a boy, going up.
The third day, Pip counted the rests. He counted them aloud, the way he counted everything now.
The first rest came at the creek below the long rise, where Silas sat on the bank stone and drank and let the knee have the cold off the water. The second came on a flat rock halfway up the rise, sat, with the pack still on, breathing through his nose like a man spending coins one at a time. The third was the midday halt, by the split log, where they ate cold. Silas sat with his back against the log and his eyes shut for the length of the meal. He opened them when the food was gone. He got up in one motion that cost him something he did not show them the price of.
The fourth and fifth came close together on the last climb, two sits on two stumps a stone's throw apart, and Silas cursed the second stump, mildly, the way a man curses a tool. "Road's got more sitting places than it used to," he said. "Funny, that."
"Road's the same," Pip said.
"Then write that down too," Silas said, "and we'll see which of us the book believes." But he was almost smiling, and he got up off the stump like a man who had decided the stump had had enough of him.
The sixth rest was on the flat below the north cabin, in sight of the roof. He sat on the old chopping block by the woodpile there, with the whole post in front of him — the cabin, the shed, the line of the stations going up into the trees. He sat a long while. Nobody filled the quiet with talk about the road being nearly done. Then he stood, and walked the last of it upright, at his own pace, which had been the pace of the whole road, and which had brought all three of them up it in the three days the road asks of anyone.
Six rests, the last day, all of them sat, all of them counted. Rowan wrote the number in the book that night without a comment beside it. The number was the comment.
The cairn stood where it had always stood, by the cabin, stone on stone in ground too hard for digging.
It was the root-keeper's grave. The old man who had kept the ring before Alba, and taught her, and died in his last winter with the snow coming down. Alba had buried him herself, under this cairn, with a pry-bar and patience, and then stood his winter alone. Silas had told all of that in its turn, and paid for the telling. Rowan had written none of it twice, and forgotten none of it.
Silas stood in front of the cairn a long time, with his stick in both hands and his hat off, though the wind off the high ground was not kind to a bare head.
Pip, settling the packs inside the cabin door, said the thing quietly, the way a boy says a thing he has carried a while without knowing where to set it down. "Her book was never found. Alba's book. In all the years since."
"No," Silas said. "It wasn't."
"Where do you think it is?"
"Where she is," Silas said. "That's my answer. It's been my answer forty years, and it stays my answer." He stood a moment longer. "A man could spend the rest of his own years turning over this hillside looking. I'm not going to. Some things you leave where they lie, boy, because leaving them is the last part of keeping them."
He put his hat back on. He did not search the cabin shelves. He did not turn one stone of the cairn, or add one. What he had come up the road to do at this pile of stones was stand in front of it, and he had done it, and the doing was the whole of it.
Inside, his eyes went once to the beam over the door, where forty notches stood cut, one to a year of a dead man's keeping, the last one deeper than the rest. He looked at them a while. He cut no new notch. The beam was not his to write on, and some counts close where they close.
They took the seventh tree at dusk, because the roster said the seventh at dusk, and the roster did not bend for a tired road.
Rowan gave his stretches, counted aloud, and sat back, hands resting. Pip held the presence at the roots and counted aloud, so the number had two voices. The breath ran and did not hole. A hundred and twenty beats, held in turns, when Rowan lifted his hands at last.
Silas stood apart with his stick through all of it, where he had stood in the autumn. At the end he stepped up, the way he had in the autumn, and set his palm flat to the bark, over the place where the count had run.
He stood there a moment with his eyes open on the dark coming down.
"Bark," he said. "Cold. Nothing under it that was ever for me." He took his hand down, slow, and his voice held no disappointment in it, and no surprise either. It was a count he had taken before, coming back the same, the way true counts do. "A hundred and twenty, though. I heard it counted. I'll carry that home with the rest of my numbers."
"The rest of your numbers," Pip said.
"Six rests," Silas said, dry as old kindling, "and a hundred and twenty beats, and three days up a road at my own pace. A man my age travels in numbers now, boy. They're lighter than packs."
He went in to his sleep then, in the north cabin, on his last turn at the post. His knee was bound for the night in a single cloth. It was like a man setting something down at the end of its day — gently, and because it had earned it.