Ten days, late in the year, waiting out weather. No enquiry. I was going north and the road shut behind me.

4.11.863 · Arriving

The chiming starts about four miles out. I'd been told it would and I still stopped walking when it happened, which the carter found funny and had plainly been waiting for.

The crystals come down out of the aurora and ring as they fall, thousands at once at slightly different pitches, and the sound arrives from every direction including below. The carter has driven this road nineteen years and doesn't hear it any more. He said that took two winters and that he was sorry when it stopped.

Frosthollow is a hundred and forty people, one long street, a garrison post of eleven, and more livestock than I expected this far up. It sits where the snowline breaks and the ground is workable in a strip about two miles wide. On a map the position looks precarious. Standing in it, it looks obvious.

I've no business here. The ford road shut two days after I came through and won't open for a fortnight, so I'm going to write down what an ordinary place is like, having spent four years documenting extraordinary ones and having lately begun to suspect I have the proportions of this dominion badly wrong.

6.11.863 · What the work is

Fences, mostly. I hadn't appreciated how much of life at the snowline is fences.

The pasture strip is cut into holdings by drystone and post-and-rail. Both need constant attention because the frost lifts everything. A post set in autumn stands proud by a hand's width come spring. Nobody finds this remarkable. There is a rota.

Three practitioners in the village that I know of, all at Awakening, none of whom would use the word about themselves. A woman who keeps the brewhouse and does something to the mash that she learned from her mother and cannot describe. A man who finds water. A girl of about nineteen who can tell whether a ewe is carrying, who says it's just paying attention. I never once saw her get it wrong.

I asked the water-finder whether he thought of himself as a practitioner. He considered it for a while and said he supposed he was, technically, in the way that a man who can whistle is technically a musician. It's the most useful thing anybody has said to me this year.

7.11.863 · The garrison

Eleven Ironvale under a captain who has been here six years and means to stay. They're good at the job and a bit bored, and everyone likes them, which puzzled me until I understood that most of what they do is heavy lifting.

They pull people out of drifts and walk the outer fences in the bad months. Twice a year something comes down off the void-touched edge and they deal with it, and I am given to understand it is usually smaller than the stories.

The captain said a posting here suits a duellist who has stopped wanting to duel. I asked what makes a person stop. She said the job, mostly, and changed the subject in a way I recognised, and I didn't push.

I didn't tell her I'd spent nine days on this same snow earlier in the year, walking with a picking party and finding nothing. She would have asked what I was doing out there and I'd have had to answer.

9.11.863 · The heavy acre

There is a patch of the western pasture, perhaps sixty paces across, that the village does not plough.

It isn't fenced and nothing about it looks different, the same snow and the same grass. I noticed it because I walked across it on my fifth day and had to stop in the middle, the way you stop on a staircase you've misjudged, and couldn't work out why.

They call it the heavy acre. Everyone I asked gave me a version of the same answer, which is that it's always been heavy and it's easier not to plough it.

What I can establish. A dropped object falls correctly and lands harder than it should, which I tested for an embarrassing hour with a wooden cup and am satisfied is real. Horses will cross it and do not like to, and drovers take the long way without appearing to decide to. Snow settles denser there, so it thaws later, so the grass comes up a fortnight behind the rest of the strip.

Nobody here thinks this is strange. It is a feature of the ground, like a wet corner or a stony bit. The brewhouse woman told me every village has something, then named what the other villages she's lived in had, and I've written those down too.

I don't think it's Deepening, which doesn't sit quietly in a pasture for decades being mildly inconvenient to horses.

I've no explanation and no category to file it under. I'm recording it because I couldn't walk across it properly and would like somebody, one day, to tell me why.

10.11.863 · The story they tell

There is a dragon story. Every settlement at the snowline has a dragon story and most are the same story with the names changed, so I didn't take it seriously at first.

The Frosthollow version has a stranger in it. Someone quiet who lived here a while and mended things. One night they stood between the beast and a girl, would not move, and drove it off. They left before morning without taking anything.

The tellers disagree on nearly every detail. The stranger is variously a man, a woman, an Ironvale deserter, a Registry agent, and in one telling an aspect of Bran, which got the teller laughed at by his own children. The girl is Marta in every version, which is also the commonest name in the village and therefore establishes nothing.

It is a good story, told well. The line that survives in all of them is that the stranger would not move, and I suspect that is what has kept the tale alive, because a story about somebody standing still ought to be dull and this one isn't.

I have written it down as folklore. There will be a real incident under it somewhere, thirty or fifty years back, most likely a large predator and a brave person, with the rest being the ordinary accretion of retelling. I didn't ask anybody to date it. I hadn't come for that, and I found I didn't want to turn the evening into work.

11.11.863 · Small things

The inn's east room has a door hung better than anything else in the building. Perfectly plumb, opens and closes on one finger, no drop and no drag. The innkeeper doesn't know who did it. It was like that when her mother had the place.

There is a woman at the north end of the street whom everyone calls Marta and who did not come out once in the ten days I was here. I'm told she's well. Two people also told me she doesn't care for the story. That's not my business, and I'm only recording it because of how carefully they both said it.

A man named Gregor, who I believe is the third of that name in a row and who keeps a horse he is sentimental about, told me the stranger version and included a detail nobody else did. He said the stranger had helped his father's horse, and that his family have never let anyone forget it. I asked what the help was. He said the horse was lame and the stranger made it lighter for the walk down to the farrier.

I've written that down because it's a peculiar thing for a story to pick up. Dragon tales attract dramatic additions. Nobody embellishes a story with a lame horse. Details of that shape usually mean something true got carried along in the telling, though of what I couldn't say.

14.11.863 · Leaving

The road opened on the eleventh morning.

I liked it here, which isn't a sentence I often get to write. A small, cold, extremely competent place where very little happens and the people are content about that. The bread is good. The garrison plays cards badly and knows it. On my eighth evening the whole street turned out because a calf was coming awkwardly, and it came, and there was drinking about it.

Four years documenting the exceptional, and I've got to the point where an ordinary village strikes me as evidence. I'm not sure of what. Probably that the dominion is mostly like this and my files aren't.

The chiming stops about four miles south. I turned to listen for the end of it and could not tell you the moment it went.

I made no enquiries here and asked nobody anything beyond conversation. These are only observations.

If I'm ever in this district again I'd like a proper season with the ewe-girl, the water-finder and the brewhouse woman, and to write up what a life at Awakening actually consists of, which as far as I can tell nobody has ever bothered to do.

I'd also like to walk the heavy acre again. I've been turning it over since and got no further, except that I remember it as the only place in ten days where I felt like a visitor.