The first thing he noticed was that the road no longer matched the road in his head.
He had walked this stretch a hundred times, in summer and in mud-season, and he could have drawn the curve of it from memory with his eyes closed. The curve was wrong. Not dramatically — a degree, maybe two — but a cartographer notices a degree the way a musician notices a flat string.
The apprentice noticed too. She walked beside him without speaking, her sketchbook closed under her arm, the pencil he had given her tucked behind her ear like a feather she had not earned. He liked her better for not pretending she hadn’t noticed.
“What was the second line of the summons?” she asked, finally.
“The roads will be different than you remember.”
“Different how?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She thought about that. “And the fourth?”
“Do not look at the river.”
They walked in silence for a while. The wind off the eastern fields smelled like rain that had not yet decided whether to fall. Far ahead, where the road bent down toward the bridge, he could already see the glint of water through the trees.
“Sir,” she said, “I think the river has a sound.”
He listened.
She was right. There was a sound — not the rush of water but a kind of soft attentiveness, the sound of something that had noticed them and was waiting to see what they did about it.
He kept his eyes on the road.
“When we cross the bridge,” he said, quietly, “you walk in front of me. Look at your boots. Count to two hundred. Do not look up. Do not look left. If I stop walking, you keep walking.”
“And if you don’t come across?”
He didn’t answer.
The bridge was longer than he remembered.
He counted with her, under his breath, and somewhere around one hundred and forty he heard the river say his name.