The road west out of Solmere ran along the river for the first six miles and then left it, and by the time they stopped to eat Yseult had raised eleven distinct concerns about the visit, which Elsie had begun counting somewhere around the fourth without telling anyone. They were not unreasonable concerns. That was the thing Arthur kept noticing. Every single one of them was a thing a considerate person would think about, and the trouble was that Yseult Marchant had thought about all of them, sequentially, out loud, in the space of two hours, and had arrived at the far end of the list only to start again at the top with refinements.
YSE: What do they eat?
ART: Food.
YSE: Arthur.
ART: Bread. Eggs. Whatever my father's brought back. Vegetables out of the plot. It's a village, Yseult, we eat what's there.
YSE: And if I don't like something?
ART: Then you eat it anyway and say it was very good, the same as anybody staying in anybody's house.
YSE: That's what I thought. I wanted it confirmed.
MRA: That was the ninth question.
YSE: I'm aware.
MRA: I'm not criticising. I'm keeping a record. It seems useful to know the shape of it.
It was on the second afternoon, somewhere past a village whose name Arthur did not catch, that the actual problem emerged, and it emerged because Elsie asked a straightforward question about sleeping arrangements and Arthur answered it and then kept walking for about eleven steps before he understood what he had just said.
ELS: Where are they going, though? There's the back room and there's your room.
ART: The back room's got the two beds in it. From when my grandmother was there.
ELS: Is it made up?
ART: It will be. My mother's had four weeks' notice.
ELS: Four weeks?
ART: I wrote at the end of term. The usual letter. Coming home, arriving about the fifteenth, don't fuss.
Elsie stopped walking.
ELS: Arthur.
ART: What?
ELS: When did you invite them?
There was a pause of exactly the length required.
ART: Two days ago.
YSE: You wrote four weeks ago.
ART: Yes.
YSE: And you invited us two days ago.
ART: Yes.
MRA: So the letter your mother received four weeks ago says one person is coming home.
ART: ...Yes.
YSE: ARTHUR.
ART: The post west goes twice a month and I'd have missed it by two days and we'd have arrived before the letter did. There was no version of this where I could have told her.
YSE: There was a version where you told US that you hadn't told HER.
ART: I've told you now.
ELS: You've told us on a road, two days out, with no way of doing anything about it.
ART: I'd like it noted that the moment I actually understood the problem was about ninety seconds ago and I've disclosed it immediately.
Mira had stopped as well and had gone very still in a manner Arthur associated with her doing arithmetic she disliked.
MRA: I want to turn round.
ART: ..Mira!
MRA: I am entirely serious. I have spent two days constructing a version of this where I am an expected guest in a house that has prepared for me, and it transpires I am an unannounced person arriving at a farmhouse in a village of ninety with a woman who has cooked for one son.
ART: My mother has been asking me to bring somebody home since September. In eleven letters. I have counted them, because she numbers her requests, and the most recent one said, and I'm quoting, any of them, I don't mind which, I would simply like to see with my own eyes that you have made a single friend.
MRA: That is not the same as two of us arriving without notice.
ART: No. It's better. She gets to tell the entire village that her son came home with two friends and no warning, which is a story she will be dining out on until I am forty.
Mira did not turn round, but she walked the next two miles in a silence that Arthur elected not to interrupt. The inn at Weald Cross on the first night had cost them four coppers each and a shared room, and the second night was a barn near a place called Ainsley that a farmer let them have for nothing after Elsie asked and Arthur stood behind her looking as harmless as a boy in a sling can look, and it was in the barn, in the dark, that Mira said the thing she had been not-saying since Solmere.
MRA: How many people in the village have seen a hybrid.
Nobody answered for a moment. Arthur, lying on his back in the straw with his arm across his chest, made himself take the question seriously rather than reassuringly, because Mira Doyle had never once in a year wanted the reassuring version of anything.
ART: None of them.
MRA: You're certain.
ART: Hollowell has ninety-one people in it. There's monsterkind in Astoria, there's a family two villages over that runs the smithy, but they're not hybrids and I don't think anyone in Hollowell has met one. My father's seen them. He was an adventurer, he's been all over the world. Everybody else, no.
MRA: Then they will look at me.
ART: Yes.
MRA: For the whole eight weeks.
ART: Less than you're imagining, but yes. The first four days will be bad. After that you'll be the girl staying at the Lyerms', because a village of ninety cannot sustain novelty for eight weeks, it hasn't got the resources.
MRA: That is a considerably more useful answer than I was braced for.
ART: I'm not going to tell you nobody will notice. They'll notice. My mother will be mortified about it and will over-correct by feeding you constantly.
YSE: Is that the correction?
ART: That's the correction for everything. My father's is worse, he asks questions. He'll ask you about the eastern coastal lineages and he won't know what he's asking and he'll listen to the whole answer.
Mira was quiet for a while in the dark.
MRA: Nobody has ever asked me about it who wasn't already uncomfortable.
ART: He'll be uncomfortable. He'll do it anyway. That's rather his entire method.
The third day was twenty-two miles and the longest of the four, and it was the day Yseult stopped being funny about it. Arthur did not notice the change happening. He noticed the result, which was that at some point in the middle of the afternoon she had gone quiet, and had stayed quiet through the whole business of stopping and eating and starting again, and was walking about six feet off to the side of the three of them in a way that was not accidental. He dropped back.
ART: You've stopped asking questions.
YSE: I've run out.
ART: You had eleven by lunch on the first day. You haven't run out.
YSE: I've run out of the ones that are actually about food.
She walked for a while.
YSE: I've never done this.
ART: Hmm?
YSE: Stayed in a family's house. As a guest, with the family in it, where the family is a functioning one. I've stayed in houses. I stayed in my stepmother's house for eleven years, which is not the same thing, and I've stayed with a school friend in Drennick for two nights when I was twelve and her parents shouted at each other for the whole of the second one and I remember being extremely relieved because it was familiar.
ART: Yseult.
YSE: I'm not asking for anything. I want to be clear about that, because I can hear how it sounds. I'm telling you because you asked me a direct question three days ago and it turned out that being asked directly was worth a considerable amount, so I'm attempting to reciprocate before you have to.
Arthur walked beside her and did not say anything for a while, because he had learned in a mill yard and on a stone by a stream that there was almost always a version of a response that was worse than not answering yet.
ART: They're going to be very ordinary at you.
YSE: What does that mean?
ART: My mother will ask what you'd like for breakfast and then give you what she was going to give you anyway. My father will be awkward for a day and then start telling you things at length. They'll go to bed at nine. Nobody will shout. Nobody will do anything, Yseult, that's the whole of what I'm promising you. It's going to be extremely boring and it's going to keep being extremely boring for eight weeks.
YSE: That sounds unbearable.
ART: I know.
YSE: I mean it sounds genuinely unbearable and I don't know what I'll do with myself.
ART: You'll be alright by the second week.
YSE: You don't know that.
ART: No. But I've watched you build a device in an academy workshop for four months with a boy who'd previously refused your help out of pride, so I've decided I'm not especially worried about your capacity to occupy yourself in a village with a beck and a barn.
Yseult laughed, and it came out slightly wrong, and she did not apologise for it. The fourth day was the shortest and Arthur and Elsie both went strange on it, which Yseult noticed and Mira catalogued. It started about nine miles out with the ground beginning to be ground they knew: a particular stand of trees, a wall with a gap in it, a milestone Elsie had apparently sat on at eleven years old during an argument about something neither of them could now reconstruct. By six miles they had stopped talking to the other two almost entirely and were conducting a conversation in place names and half-sentences.
ELS: The Farrow gate's gone.
ART: When?
ELS: I don't know. It was there.
ART: It's been ten months.
ELS: I know how long it's been, Arthur.
MRA: Are they always like this?
YSE: I've never seen it. It's fascinating and I want it to stop.
They came over the last rise at four in the afternoon and Hollowell was underneath them. Arthur had thought about this a considerable amount on the road and had prepared himself for it to be smaller, because Beckwith had been smaller and Solmere had made everything smaller, and the preparation turned out to be entirely useless. It was not smaller. It was exactly the size it had always been, ninety-one people and one mill and a barn everybody called a mill, laid out along the road in the late afternoon with the smoke going up straight in the still air, and the thing that undid him was not scale at all. It was that he could see his own house from here and had been able to see it from here his entire life and had not, in ten months, once thought about the fact that the view existed.
ELS: There it is.
ART: Yes.
ELS: Say something clever about it.
ART: I haven't got anything.
ELS: Good. Neither have I. I've been trying for a mile.
Behind them Yseult had gone entirely silent, and Mira had stopped a few feet back and was looking down at a village of ninety-one people who had never seen anyone like her, and neither of them said a word, and Arthur stood at the top of the rise with his arm in a sling and understood that in about twenty minutes his mother was going to open a door expecting one person.