I am Happy to Publish Another Chapter of The Wandless Archmage
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The hospital wing was quiet enough that Cho could hear the herbs drying above Madam Pomfrey's office. They made a small papery sound when the wind moved through the high window, like pages turning in a book no one was reading.
She lay on her side because lying on her back made the bandage at her temple press against the pillow in a way that throbbed. The bandage itself was small. Madam Pomfrey had said the cut was already closing, that by tomorrow it would be a thin pink line and by next week it would be nothing at all. Cho had nodded and said thank you and waited for Madam Pomfrey to leave, because what she wanted, more than anything, was to be alone with what had happened.
She had been replaying it since she woke.
The first thing her mind kept circling back to was the third-floor corridor, three nights before, when Harry had slowed his steps without seeming to notice he was doing it. She had felt it the way you feel someone leaning closer to you in a crowd. His whole body had angled toward that door. Toward whatever was behind it. And she had said one word, don't, and he had stopped.
She wondered now if she had stopped him because she was afraid for him, or because she was afraid of what he might find. She was not sure those were different things.
The troll came after that. The troll was simpler in some ways and worse in others. The simpler part was the moment itself, the club coming down, Harry on the ground with his glasses gone, the certainty in her stomach that he could not move fast enough. Her body had decided before her mind did. She remembered her hands going flat against his chest and the surprising solidity of him under her palms, and then nothing for a moment, and then the wall.
The blurry part was after. Stone going sideways. A shape that might have been Terry. A sound that might have been someone shouting her name. The taste of copper and the cold floor and the strange thought, very clear, that her hair was going to be ruined. Then dark.
She turned her face into the pillow. The bandage tugged.
The harder question, the one she had been avoiding, sat at the end of every loop her thoughts ran. Would she have done it for anyone? Would she have done it for Terry, for Michael, for a Hufflepuff girl she barely knew? She thought she would have. She wanted to think she would have. But there was a part of her that knew, with a small uncomfortable honesty, that the speed with which her hands had moved was a speed reserved for certain people, and Harry Potter, who she had known for two months, had somehow become one of them.
The door of the hospital wing opened.
She heard it before she saw anything, because she was still facing the wall, and for a moment she thought it was Pomfrey returning with another potion. Then a voice said, very quietly, "Cho?"
She turned her head.
Harry was standing just inside the door, holding a bunch of flowers in one hand and a book pressed flat against his chest with the other. He looked, she thought, like someone who had rehearsed a sentence on the way over and forgotten it at the threshold.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," she said back.
Neither of them moved for a second. Then he took a step forward and remembered the flowers, and held them out a little, the way someone offers a plate of biscuits at a party they are not sure they were invited to.
"These are for you."
She pushed herself up onto her elbow, slowly, because Pomfrey had been firm about not sitting up too fast. The flowers were not the kind you bought. She could see that immediately. They were the kind you picked, one at a time, from different places, by someone who had stopped each time and looked at the flower properly before taking it. Bluebells. A few small white ones she did not know the name of. A stem of something with tiny pale purple bells on it. A single yellow one, larger than the rest, in the middle.
"You picked these," she said.
"I tried to get good ones."
"You did."
She reached for them, and he came the rest of the way to the bed and put them gently into her hands. She brought them up to her face and breathed in. Pollen and green and the faint cold smell of grass that had been in shadow that morning. She breathed in again, all the way, until her ribs reminded her about the wall.
"Thank you," she said into the flowers.
Harry was still standing beside the bed. He had put the book on the small table without her seeing him do it, but his hand was resting on top of it, as if he was not sure yet whether he was going to give it to her.
"I wanted to say I'm sorry," he said.
She lowered the flowers. "For what?"
"That you're here. Because of me."
Cho looked at him for a long moment. He was not making it easy on himself. He was holding his shoulders the way he held them in Snape's classroom, when he was trying to keep something in.
"Harry," she said. "Sit down."
He sat, on the very edge of the chair beside the bed, like a boy who expected to be told to leave at any moment.
"I'm not here because of you," she said. "I'm here because I made a choice."
"You wouldn't have had to make it if I hadn't been there."
"That isn't how choices work." She set the flowers down carefully on her lap. "If you say you're sorry I'm here, then you're saying I shouldn't have done it. And I would have done it again. So you're going to have to find something else to apologise for, because I'm not letting you have that one."
Harry opened his mouth, and then closed it, and looked at his hands.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay."
The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. It was the kind of silence that came after something had been settled, and both people were standing in the room the settling had made.
After a moment he picked up the book from the table.
"I got you this too," he said. He turned it in his hands, looked at it, and then held it out to her. "I was on my way over with just the flowers, and then I thought, those are going to wilt in three days, and you're going to be in here for a week. So I went back."
She took the book from him.
It was not new. She could see that from the softness of the cloth on the spine and the way the corners had been worn round by a hand that had carried it often. She turned it over and read the title and then read it again, because she had not expected him to choose this one, and because choosing it meant he had thought about her for longer than the time it took to walk to a shelf.
"Where did you get this?"
"Library. Madam Pince looked at me like I was stealing it. I think she might have been right."
"You can't take books out of the library on a Tuesday morning without a slip."
"I know."
"Harry."
"I'll bring it back."
She laughed, which made the cut at her temple twinge, made her wince, and Harry half rose from his chair as if he were going to call for Pomfrey. She waved him down.
"I'm fine. I'm fine. You stole me a book."
"I borrowed you a book."
"You stole me a book."
He smiled, small and crooked, and sat back down. "I thought you might want something to do. Pomfrey said a week, and I know what a week is like when there's nothing to do."
She wanted to ask him how he knew. She did not ask him.
She held the book in her lap, on top of the flowers, and looked down at both of them.
"Thank you," she said. "Really."
"You don't have to thank me."
"I do."
They sat for another minute. She could see him deciding when to leave. He was not the sort of person who overstayed, which she liked about him and sometimes wished he wouldn't.
"I should go," he said. "Pomfrey said not to tire you."
"I'm not tired."
"You look tired."
"That's the bandage."
"It isn't."
She smiled and let him go. He stood, adjusted his sleeve where it had ridden up his wrist, and looked at her once more before he turned.
"Get better," he said.
"I will."
The door closed behind him, softly, the way a door closes when someone doesn't want to be heard leaving.
Cho looked down at the flowers on her lap, the book on top of them, then at the door. The questions were still there. But the loudest one, the one that had been turning in her chest since she woke, had answered itself while she wasn't looking.
It had been worth it.
Harry was halfway down the third-floor corridor, books in one arm and his Defense notes in the other, when Professor McGonagall stepped out of nowhere and said, "Potter."
He stopped. He had learned, in his short time at Hogwarts, that when McGonagall said your name like that, you stopped.
"The Headmaster would like to see you. Now, please. And he asks that you dress warmly before you come up."
Harry blinked at her. "Warmly?"
"Warmly. A long-sleeved shirt at minimum. Quickly, Potter."
She turned and was gone before he could ask anything else. Harry watched the corner she'd disappeared around, then turned the other way and ran.
Quirrell was going to be furious. He was always either furious or terrified, and it was sometimes hard to tell which, but a missed lesson would tip him into the angry kind. Harry had seen it happen to a Hufflepuff boy who'd come in five minutes late and stood at the back of the classroom for a full hour, sweating into his collar while Quirrell stuttered at him about discipline.
Harry decided he'd worry about Quirrell later.
Ravenclaw Tower was on the other side of the castle, and by the time he reached the eagle knocker he was out of breath. The eagle considered him with the patience of something that had all day.
"What walks the same path twice but never grows weary?"
"A river," Harry said, because he'd heard this one yesterday from Terry.
"A river is one answer. There are others."
"A river," Harry said again, because he didn't have time.
The door swung open, which Harry chose to take as approval.
Inside the dormitory, Terry sat on his bed reading something too thick to be a textbook. He looked up when Harry came in, watched him pull off his jumper and dig through his trunk, and said, "Are you running away from school?"
"Dumbledore wants me. He said to dress warmly."
Terry sat up. "Dress warmly?"
"That's what McGonagall said."
"Warmly means outside. Outside means somewhere. Where are you going?"
"I don't know yet."
Terry watched him pull a long-sleeved shirt over his head and shrug his robe on top. "If you come back with frostbite I want to be in the room when Pomfrey shouts at you."
"Noted."
"And bring me something."
"From where?"
"Wherever you're going. Anywhere's interesting if you don't live there."
Harry was already at the door.
The walk to the gargoyle was faster than usual. He gave the password. The spiral staircase carried him up.
Dumbledore was already standing when Harry came in, wearing a traveling cloak in a blue Harry hadn't seen before. His hat was tucked under one arm. Fawkes watched from the perch, his eyes catching the morning light and turning it gold.
"Ah, Harry. Good. You found a long sleeve."
"Yes, sir."
"And you ran, I see."
"A bit, sir."
"Excellent. We have about four hours before lunch becomes unforgivable to miss, and I'd rather not make Professor Snape any harder to live with than he already is. Come along."
He swept past Harry toward the door. Harry followed a beat behind. The staircase carried them down. The gargoyle let them out into a corridor emptier than usual. Dumbledore had timed this. Of course he had.
"Sir, where are we going?"
"To see a man about the wand," Dumbledore said.
"Today?"
"Today we begin. There will be more days after this one."
They walked through the entrance hall and out into the grounds. The morning had a thin wind in it, and the long-sleeved shirt was already justifying itself. The lake was the colour of old iron. Dumbledore did not seem to be in a hurry to fill the walk with talk, and Harry was glad of it. There were too many things in his head to make sentences out of.
At the gates, Dumbledore stopped and turned to him.
"Harry, have you ever Apparated?"
"No, sir."
"Then I should warn you. It is unpleasant the first time. Most people describe it as being squeezed through a very small tube. Most people are correct. It will be over in less than a second, and the unpleasantness afterwards lasts only slightly longer. You will hold my arm. You will not let go. You will close your eyes if you find that helps."
"Yes, sir."
"Excellent."
Dumbledore offered his arm. Harry took it. The wool of the cloak was soft and warm under his fingers.
"On three," Dumbledore said. "One, two."
The world folded.
Harry had been told about the tube. The tube was real. It was also wrong about how bad it was, because the description left out the part where his ears felt pulled toward each other through the inside of his skull, and the part where he forgot, briefly, what air was. He kept hold of Dumbledore's arm because that was the only instruction he was sure he remembered.
Then the world unfolded.
He stumbled. Dumbledore's hand was on his shoulder before he could fall, and the old wizard waited while Harry's stomach decided whether to do anything about its situation. It decided not to.
"There," Dumbledore said. "You did rather better than I did, my first time."
"How bad were you?"
"I left a shoe behind."
Harry laughed, because it was either that or sit down.
He looked up.
They stood at the foot of a low green hill, in a country he had never seen. The grass came up to his ankles and the air smelled of woodsmoke and wet stone. Somewhere a sheep was complaining about something. A dirt track wound up the slope and bent around the shoulder of the hill. At the top, half hidden by crooked trees, sat a small house with one chimney and a thread of pale smoke rising from it. No road led to it. No fence. No sign.
"Sir," Harry said. "Where are we?"
"Somewhere quiet. That is the most useful thing one can say about most places worth going to." Dumbledore began walking, and Harry fell into step beside him. The track was steep enough that Harry felt it in his calves within a minute. "The man we are visiting prefers his quiet. He has had it a long time, and he does not share it with anyone he has not personally invited up the hill."
"Has he invited us?"
"He has, after my request."
They walked on. The wind pulled at Harry's robe. The house was clearer now, grey walls, dark slate roof, a small balcony jutting from the side with a wooden table on it.
"Sir," Harry said. "Who is he?"
Dumbledore glanced down at him. Something careful crossed his face.
"He is a wandmaker," Dumbledore said.
Harry looked up at the house on the hill and the smoke rising from the chimney, and kept walking.
The door opened before they reached it, and a man stepped onto the threshold with both arms spread, as though he had been listening for their footsteps and had only now let himself look pleased.
"Ooo, welcome, Dumbledore," he said. His voice was warm, an accent Harry couldn't place, soft consonants and round vowels. "Welcome, welcome. And the boy. The boy comes too. Good, good."
The man was not what Harry had expected, though Harry could not have said what he had expected. He was perhaps sixty, perhaps seventy, with the broad shoulders of someone who had spent his life lifting things and the forearms of someone who still did. His hair was iron grey and stuck out in several directions, as if he had slept on it and not consulted a mirror about the result. He wore a leather apron over a faded green shirt, and his hands, which he was now wiping on the apron, were stained at the fingertips with something dark that wasn't quite ink.
His eyes were what Harry noticed last: pale, almost colourless, and very alert.
"Tobias," Dumbledore said, and clasped the offered hand with both of his. "It has been some years."
"Many. Too many. You are old now."
"I was old then."
"Yes, but more old now. It is rude of me to say. I say it anyway."
Dumbledore laughed, and the wandmaker laughed with him, and Harry stood half a step behind and wondered how an old wizard living alone on a hill knew the Headmaster of Hogwarts well enough to insult him at the door.
"Harry," Dumbledore said, turning. "May I introduce Master Tobias Vrek. Tobias, this is Harry Potter."
"Potter, yes. Yes." Tobias looked at him, and the looking went on long enough that Harry felt his shoulders set against it, the way they set in Snape's classroom. But Tobias wasn't looking for something to dislike. He looked at Harry the way Harry had once seen Petunia look at a piece of fabric she was thinking about buying, turning it in the light to see what it would do.
"Hm," he said finally. "Yes. Come, come. Inside is dark. Outside is better. We sit on balcony."
He stepped aside to let them through. A boy appeared in the doorway behind him.
The boy was perhaps twelve, perhaps younger. Hard to tell. He was small the way children who haven't eaten well are small. His trousers were mended at both knees, his shirt too big at the shoulders. His hair was the same iron grey as the wandmaker's, though Harry suspected that was only dust. His feet were bare on the stone.
"And this," Dumbledore said pleasantly, "must be?"
Tobias glanced at the boy and said something in a language Harry didn't recognize. The boy didn't answer. He looked at Dumbledore for a long second, then at Harry for a longer one, then tilted his head down once, not quite a nod, not quite a bow.
"He does not speak," Tobias said. "Not for some time. He hears, he understands, he works. He is good boy. You will excuse him."
"Of course," Dumbledore said.
Harry wasn't sure what his own face was doing. He'd nodded back at the boy without meaning to. The boy had already turned and gone back into the dim of the house, as quiet leaving as he'd been arriving.
"Come, come," Tobias said again, as if nothing had happened, and led them around the side of the house.
The balcony was a wooden platform built out from the slope, so the table on it seemed to float above the long fall of the valley. Harry could see a stream at the bottom, a thin silver curve, and beyond it more hills, and beyond those a line of mountains faint enough to be clouds. The air up here was thinner than it had felt at the foot of the path.
Three chairs stood at the table, arranged for this visit. Harry wondered how Tobias had known Dumbledore would bring him. Then he wondered how Tobias had known they were coming at all.
"Sit, sit. I bring tea. No, you sit, Dumbledore, do not pretend to help. You drop things now. Yes, you do."
Dumbledore sat with the tolerant smile of a man mocked by experts. Harry sat carefully in the third chair, a little too tall for him, and watched Tobias go inside.
"Sir," Harry said quietly. "How do you know him?"
"We met a long time ago. Before either of us was anything that anyone remembers. He has forgotten more about wands than Mr Ollivander has ever known, and he would be very offended if I said this within his hearing, because he does not approve of compliments before lunch."
"Is he English?"
"He is from a country that no longer goes by the name it had when he was born, which is a useful definition of being old."
The boy came back out before Tobias did. He carried a wooden tray with a clay pot and three cups, and set it down with the careful slowness of someone who'd been told once, very firmly, what would happen if he broke any of it. He didn't look up at either of them. When he straightened, he stepped back and stood beside the door with his hands at his sides.
Tobias appeared a moment later with a plate of dense brown bread. He cut it with a knife produced from somewhere on his person and laid two slices on the table in front of them, like placing pieces on a board.
"Eat," he said. "Tea is hot. Bread is good. Now. Talk."
Dumbledore took the bread without comment and broke a corner from it.
"Tobias, the boy was at Ollivander's in August. Garrick brought out every wand he had and a few he should not have had. None chose him. Garrick had not seen the like in fifty years."
"Garrick has seen nothing in fifty years. He sees only his shelves."
"That is unfair."
"Yes. I am unfair sometimes. It is comfort of being old." Tobias took a long sip of his tea. He didn't look at Harry while he drank, but Harry had the strong sense of being looked at anyway. "Tell me the rest."
Dumbledore did. He chose each sentence the way he chose everything, like a stone set in a wall. The night in Godric's Hollow. The curse, the rebound, the imprint left on a child's magic that no one had asked for and no one had removed. Harry's wandless magic, the Lumos in the cupboard and the Lumos in the classroom, the things Harry had done before he had words for them. Dumbledore didn't look at Harry while he spoke, and Harry was grateful for it. He wasn't sure he wanted to be looked at while his life was being summarised.
Tobias listened with his eyes half-closed, cup held between both hands, the way someone listens to music they already know.
When Dumbledore stopped, Tobias didn't speak for some time. He set his cup down. He looked at Harry.
"Hand," he said.
Harry held out his hand.
"Other one. Wand hand. You do not know which yet, eh? The right one. Yes. Closer."
Harry leaned across and put his hand, palm up, into the wandmaker's. Tobias's fingers were warm and rough, calluses on the pads like leather. He didn't grip.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
Then something did. Not pain, not pressure. A feeling Harry had no word for, like someone turning a key in a lock he hadn't known existed, behind his sternum, listening to the sound the tumblers made. It lasted perhaps three seconds. It withdrew before Harry could decide whether he disliked it.
Tobias opened his eyes. He let go of Harry's hand and sat back, and for the first time since they'd arrived, he wasn't smiling.
"Yes," he said. "Yes. He told you correctly, the old man on Diagon Alley. No wand on a shelf will choose this boy. I will tell you why. The shelf wand is made to recognise a shape. Every wizard has shape. The shape is your magic, how it sits, how it moves, how it falls when no one is watching. The wand is matched to this shape. It is craft. It is good craft. But it is craft for shapes that are usual."
He picked up his cup, looked at it, didn't drink.
"This boy. His shape is not usual. The shape was made usual once. Then the shape was hit by something. Now the shape is the shape, plus a mark. The mark is not large. But it is there. And every wand on every shelf, when it reaches for this boy, it finds the mark first, and does not know what to do with it. Wand is a simple thing, in the end. It wants what it knows. The mark is something it does not know."
Harry sat very still.
"So I cannot have a wand," he said.
"No, no. You can have a wand. You cannot have a wand from a shelf. Different thing."
"What is the difference?"
Tobias smiled, and the smile reached his eyes for the first time since he'd taken Harry's hand.
"The difference is me," he said.
He set his cup down and stood, with a small grunt that said standing up wasn't what it used to be, and waved them to follow. The boy in the doorway moved out of the way without being told.
The inside of the house was darker than the balcony, but Harry's eyes adjusted as Tobias led them through a low room with a stove, a long table, and drying herbs hanging from the rafters. They went through a second door and down two stone steps into a workshop.
The workshop was the kind of room Harry had read about in books and never quite believed in. Wood lay everywhere, in lengths and slabs and small careful blocks, sorted by some system Harry couldn't read. The walls were hung with tools whose purposes he could only guess at. A long bench ran the length of one wall, and on it sat dozens of small drawers, each labelled in a hand that wasn't quite English.
"Materials," Tobias said, and waved a hand at the drawers. "Cores. We do not touch these today. Today is wood. Wood is first. Without wood, core is just a thing in a drawer. Come."
He led Harry to the bench and pulled out a long flat tray. It held perhaps twenty pieces of wood, each about the length of a wand, each unfinished, each different. Some were pale. Some were nearly black. One was the colour of honey. One had a streak of red running through it like a vein.
"Hand over them," Tobias said. "Slow. Do not touch yet. Just hand over. Tell me what you feel."
Harry held his hand above the first piece. It felt like nothing. He moved on. The second was the same. The third was cold, the way the floor of the cupboard had been cold in winter. He pulled his hand back without meaning to.
"Good," Tobias murmured. "That one says no. Move on."
Harry moved on. Most of the woods said nothing. Three said no, in different ways, one so sharply that Harry felt it as a small sting at his fingertips. Two gave a kind of neutral hum, like a string plucked far away.
Then he passed his hand over a piece near the end of the tray, and his hand didn't want to move on.
It was the smallest thing. The piece was soft silver-grey, fine-grained, running straight along its length, and his palm warmed over it the way it warms over a candle too far away to burn. The warmth didn't grow, and it didn't fade. It just was.
"Ah," Tobias said, very softly. "There."
Harry looked at him. "What is it?"
"It is rowan. From a tree on this hill. The hill is old, and the rowan on it is old. This piece is from a tree I cut twenty years ago, after it had stood for two hundred. Rowan is a good wood. It is a wood that does not like dark things. It does not run from them. It stands up to them. It is good wood for a boy with a mark."
Harry didn't know what to say to that, so he said nothing.
"But," Tobias said, holding up a finger, "we do not take this piece. This piece is dead wood. Cut and dried. A wand from this would be a wand. It would work. For this boy, it would not be enough. For this boy, we need something still alive when we begin. Come. Outside."
He led them back out, through the kitchen and the front door, around the side of the house to a small flat shoulder of land Harry hadn't seen on the way up. A grove of young trees grew there, perhaps thirty of them, none taller than Harry. They stood in rows, but none pruned to behave, and several leaned at angles that suggested opinions about where they wanted to grow.
"My saplings," Tobias said. "Each one will be a wand. Maybe. Some will be cut and not chosen. Some will be chosen and not cut. They are young. They have time."
He turned to Harry.
"Walk among them. Slowly. Do not touch. Let them see you. If one wishes to speak to you, you will know."
Harry stepped onto the grass.
He'd thought it would feel foolish, walking among trees as though they could see. It didn't. The grove was quiet, even with the wind moving through it, and the leaves turned and whispered in a way that Harry, after a moment, realised wasn't the sound a normal tree makes in a normal wind.
He walked between the rows without touching. Most of the saplings bent only as the wind chose. One near the centre leaned slightly toward him as he passed, but when he stopped beside it, it didn't lean further, and he moved on, uncertain.
He was near the end of the third row when it happened.
The sapling was neither the largest nor the smallest. It had three slim trunks rising from a single base, the way young rowans sometimes do, its leaves the soft silver-green of new growth. As Harry came level with it, every leaf turned to face him at once.
Harry stopped.
The tree didn't move again. It watched him, the way Harry had imagined Fawkes watching him in Dumbledore's office, and through the soles of his shoes he felt a faint warm thrum, as though the ground beneath the sapling had a heartbeat just introducing itself.
"Sir," Harry said quietly.
Tobias and Dumbledore had come to the edge of the grove. They stood very still.
"Yes," Tobias said. "Yes, I see. Step back, boy. Slowly. Do not turn your back to it. That is rude."
Harry stepped back. The leaves didn't turn away. They watched him until he reached the edge of the grove, and when he finally turned, he had the strong, ridiculous sense that the sapling was still watching him.
Tobias nodded to himself.
"Good. Yes. Good tree. Strong. Young. It chose well, I think. Or you did. It is hard to say which way the choosing goes, with rowan." He clapped his hands together once, loud in the quiet of the grove. "Enough for today. We have work to do, the tree and I. You go back to your school. You come back in four days. Then we begin the second part."
"What is the second part?" Harry asked.
"Bonding," Tobias said. "You and the tree learn each other. It is slow. It is a little uncomfortable. You will live. Four days. You come at the same hour. You wear the same warm shirt. You bring nothing but yourself."
Dumbledore inclined his head. "Thank you, Tobias."
"Thank me when the wand is in his hand and not before. Thanks before are bad luck. Go, go. The boy has school."
Harry looked back once at the sapling. Its leaves were still turned toward him. He raised a hand without quite meaning to, the way he might raise it to a friend across a corridor, then flushed, dropped it, and turned to follow Dumbledore around the house.
The track down was easier than the track up. Harry didn't speak, and Dumbledore, sensing it, didn't press. The wind had shifted, and Harry could smell the woodsmoke from the chimney behind them, mixed now with something faint and dry, like an old room opened after a long time closed.
They were perhaps fifty yards down the path, near a bend where a low stone wall ran alongside the track, when Harry heard the wandmaker's voice from the balcony above. It wasn't loud. The wind only carried it because the wind happened, in that moment, to want to.
"Boy," Tobias was saying. "Bring me the ground bone."
Harry's foot paused between one step and the next. Then he took the next step, because Dumbledore had taken his, and because there were a great many things an old wandmaker on a hill might call a ground bone, and Harry didn't yet know which one he'd heard.
The path bent. The house disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill.
They walked on toward the road they'd come in by.
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