They were spotted at the top of the lane by Mabel Ruck, which Arthur said afterward was the single worst possible outcome and which Elsie said afterward was so obviously going to happen that she had not bothered to warn anyone. Mabel Ruck was sixty-one and had a gate that faced up the western approach and had, by common agreement across three generations, never once missed anything. She was at the gate. She had presumably been at the gate for some time. She saw four people come down off the rise, identified two of them at a distance of about two hundred yards, and produced a noise that carried the entire length of Hollowell.
MAB: ARTHUR LYERM.
ART: Oh no.
MAB: ARTHUR LYERM AND ELSIE TANNER.
ELS: Hello, Mrs Ruck.
MAB: TEN MONTHS.
ELS: Ten months, yes.
MAB: NOT A WORD.
ART: I've written every week.
MAB: To your MOTHER.
By the time they had reached the gate itself Mabel Ruck had come out of it, which Arthur explained in an undertone to Yseult was an event of some significance, and had taken Elsie's face in both hands and turned it left and right in a manner Elsie tolerated with the air of someone who had been enduring it since she was four. Then she looked past both of them at the other two, and Arthur braced, and Mabel Ruck's entire face did something complicated and settled on delight.
MAB: And who's this?
ART: This is Yseult and this is Mira. They're at the academy with us. They're staying the summer.
MAB: Staying the SUMMER.
YSE: If that's alright.
MAB: If that's- oh, she's polite! Listen to her. Is he feeding you properly up there? He's not, look at the pair of you. Come here.
What followed, over the next quarter mile, was the most bewildering twenty minutes of Mira Doyle's life. She had spent four days on a road constructing, refining, and stress-testing a model of what arriving in Hollowell would be like, and the model had been built almost entirely out of eleven years of accurate experience, and the model was wrong. People stared. That part was correct. Mabel Ruck stared, and Gregor at the bakehouse stared, and three children who had been sent to see what the shouting was about stopped dead in the road and stared with the total shamelessness of the very young. But the staring did not do the thing it had always previously done. It arrived and it went straight past her and it came out the other side as an entirely unrelated activity, which was that these people wanted to give her things.
GRE: You'll want something.
MRA: I'm sorry?
GRE: Four days on the road, you'll want something. Hold that.
MRA: This is a loaf.
GRE: It is.
MRA: You've given me a loaf.
GRE: I've given you half of Tuesday's, which was a bad batch, so don't go telling anyone I've given you a good one.
MRA: I don't have any-
GRE: If you finish that sentence I'll be offended and I'm sixty-eight and I've a bad hip and you'll feel terrible about it.
Mira turned round with the loaf in both hands and looked at Arthur with an expression he had never seen on her before and privately hoped to see again.
MRA: Arthur.
ART: Yes.
MRA: What is happening..?
ART: That's Gregor. He does that.
MRA: He gave me bread. He has known me for eleven seconds and he has given me bread and then insulted his own bread so that I would take it.
ART: That's the technique, yes.
MRA: Nobody has ever done that.
YSE: Given you bread?
MRA: Been kind at me without any of it being about what I am. Everyone is either uncomfortable or determinedly not-uncomfortable and both of those are the same thing wearing different coats, and this man simply established that I had been on a road and gave me a loaf.
ELS: He'll do it again tomorrow.
MRA: He can't.
ELS: He'll do it every day for eight weeks and by week three you'll be trying to get past the bakehouse without being seen and you will never once succeed.
It went on like that the whole way down. Ned Halloway leaned out of a window to ask after Arthur's arm and did not believe the answer. Old Bess Tanner, no relation to Elsie's people despite forty years of the village finding this hilarious, wanted to know whether it was true that the academy had eight hundred students in it and then declined to accept that it did. Two more children joined the first three. Somebody's dog attached itself to Yseult and could not be dislodged. By the time they were halfway down the lane the news had comprehensively outrun them, which Arthur understood was happening and could do nothing whatsoever about, and he could see people coming out of doors ahead of him in a rolling wave that was moving at approximately walking pace and arriving about ninety seconds before he did.
YSE: Arthur.
ART: Yes.
YSE: I spent four days worrying about whether your mother would like me.
ART: I remember.
YSE: I had not accounted for the village.
ART: No.
YSE: I had not accounted for the village AT ALL, Arthur, I have been asked my name nine times and I have been given a jar of something.
ART: What's in it?
YSE: I don't know. She said it was for my chest.
ART: Is there something wrong with your chest?
YSE: There is nothing wrong with my chest. She looked at me and decided there was.
Elsie peeled off at the Tanner gate, which Arthur had expected and which still landed oddly, because they had walked four days and ten months and an entire year together and she simply stopped at a gate and that was that. She stood there for a second with her hand on the post.
ELS: I'll come over after.
ART: You don't have to.
ELS: Arthur, your father is about to open that door. I am absolutely going to be there and I'm annoyed I'll miss the beginning.
She went in. Somebody inside the Tanner house made a sound Arthur could hear from the road. The Lyerm house sat at the low end, past the barn everybody called a mill, with the plot behind it and the fence Arthur had helped rebuild at eleven and which had visibly been rebuilt again since. There was smoke going up. There were beans in. The gate had a new latch on it, and Arthur stood with his hand on a latch he did not recognise on a gate he had opened ten thousand times, and Yseult and Mira stood behind him not saying anything, and he understood that he had been walking toward this specific moment for four days and had somehow not once rehearsed a single word of it. He went up the path and knocked on his own front door. There was a pause, and then footsteps that he recognised in his chest before he recognised them anywhere else, and the door opened, and Calder Lyerm stood in it with a cloth over one shoulder and a knife in his hand from whatever he had been doing, and looked at his son.
ART: It's me, Dad. I'm home.
Calder did not say anything. That was, Arthur thought later, entirely reasonable. His father had received a letter four weeks earlier saying one boy was coming home about the fifteenth and not to fuss. What his father had opened the door onto was one boy, arm in a sling, considerably taller than in September, standing at the front of a small procession which included two girls neither of whom he had ever seen before, one of them holding a loaf and a jar, one of them visibly not human in a way that would take some explaining, and, behind them at a respectful distance, approximately eleven villagers who had followed them down the lane and were now standing in the road pretending to have business there. Calder's eyes went to Arthur. Then to Yseult. Then to Mira. Then back to Arthur. Then he turned his head and shouted into the house at a volume that Arthur had previously only heard him use across open ground.
CAL: WREN.
ART: Dad-
CAL: WREN. COME HERE.
ART: Dad, it's not-
CAL: OUR BOY'S COME HOME A WOMANIZER.
ART: DAD.
CAL: TWO OF THEM, WREN. HE'S BROUGHT TWO OF THEM.
There was a clatter from inside the house that suggested something had been put down with insufficient care.
ART: They're my FRIENDS.
CAL: That's what they all say.
ART: WHO says that? WHO is they? Nobody says that, you've made that up on the doorstep!
But Calder Lyerm had already gone back into the house, still shouting, and Arthur went after him, which meant that Yseult Marchant and Mira Doyle were left standing on a garden path in a village of ninety-one people, alone, with a loaf, a jar, an unexplained dog, and eleven spectators in the road behind them, listening to a man they had not yet been introduced to bellowing the word womanizer through his own kitchen while the boy they had walked four days with attempted to conduct a rebuttal at equal volume.
YSE: Mira.
MRA: Yes.
YSE: Is this what a functioning family is?
MRA: I have no data. My assumption had been no.
From inside the house came a woman's voice, considerably quieter than Calder's and somehow entirely audible over it, saying Calder, put the knife down before you meet them, and then, after a pause, and much closer to the door, oh, Calder, they can HEAR you.