Chapter 163

I told my father first, because he had asked first.

It was the last night in Ellisar, on the walkway outside my mother’s rooms, with the songbook wrapped in oilcloth in my satchel and Merrit’s rubbing of the endpaper folded inside it, signed across the corner in his spidery hand and Rowan’s round one: Seen by lamp and by low sun, the twelfth of April. No ink. Pressed. I told my father I would take it. The name and the step and whatever came after the step, when it came. And that I would not live under it.

He did not look surprised. He looked, for a moment, as though someone had walked into the room behind me whom only he could see.

“She said almost the same,” he said. “On this walkway. She said Ellisar was a fine place to be from.” He put his hand on the rail. “I wanted to keep her here, and I didn’t, and I have spent twenty-four years being glad and sorry for it in about equal parts. I won’t start again with you.” Then, carefully: “Will you let me ride back