The Village at the River

The village was called Fallow and it was wonderful.

Not wonderful in a grand or dramatic way. Wonderful in the way of a place that had been exactly right for a very long time and knew it. The buildings were low and made of pale stone, their rooftops covered in something that looked like thick green moss but glowed faintly in the strange golden light. The streets were narrow and wound around each other without any obvious plan. There were flowers growing out of walls and window boxes and gaps in the paving stones.

People went about their business in the streets but their business was not quite the same as business at home. A man was carefully painting something onto the side of a building using a brush made of what looked like moonlight, the strokes leaving trails of faint silver that faded slowly. Two women were having a conversation in which every few words they swapped languages, not any language Milo recognised, and occasionally one of them would say something and a small shower of sparks would fall from her hands and she would brush them off impatiently the way you would brush off dust.

"Magic," Milo said quietly, to himself, not meaning Senna to hear.

She heard anyway. "Yes," she said. "Not unusual here." She said it the way you would say something like yes, it rains a lot, perfectly ordinary.

The guesthouse was run by a large cheerful man called Dort who had a beard that changed colour slightly depending on his mood, which was currently a warm amber that Senna told Milo meant he was pleased about something. He sat Milo down at a table and put food in front of him without asking what he wanted, and the food turned out to be exactly what Milo would have chosen if he had been asked, which was slightly unnerving but also very good.

Dort sat across from him while he ate and asked him questions. Not nosy questions, just interested ones. Where he was from. What the weather was like there today. What he had been doing before he found the door. Milo answered all of them and Dort listened carefully and nodded.

"And what is the thing," Dort asked eventually, "that you have been trying not to think about?"

Milo looked up from his food.

"Everyone who comes through the door," Dort said, "has something like that. Something sitting in the back of their head that they are keeping very quiet." He said it kindly, not as if he were trying to pry.

Milo put down his fork. He looked at the table for a moment.

"My dad is moving out," he said. "At the end of the month. He and my mum have been talking about it for ages and they finally decided." He said it quickly, the way you say something when you have been not saying it for a long time and it finally comes out. "I knew it was coming. It is still."

He stopped.

Dort nodded slowly. He did not say anything right away, which Milo appreciated. He just nodded.

Then he said: "The door does not choose by accident."

Milo looked at him. "What does that mean?"

"It means," Dort said, "that whatever you needed to find today, it is here." He stood up and picked up the empty plate. "The question is whether you are paying attention."