He was at the stone at first light with a pack and a stick and nothing else.
She had built something out of nineteen years of a story: a big man, a scarred man, a man who did not speak.
He was a tall, thin, tired man of one and thirty with grey already coming in at the sides and a coat that had been mended four times, and when he saw her coming up the track he came down to meet her and took one of her cases without being asked.
Nobody in Vennow had ever done that.
"Ivar," he said.
"Tamsin Reed."
"I know. I asked."
"You are the one who came back."
"Aye."
"You were twelve."
"I was twelve," said Ivar, "and there were six of us and one came out, and it was nineteen years ago in the April, and you will have heard four versions of it and none of them are right.
"I will tell you the true one on the second night if you still want it then."
"Why the second night?"
"Because on the first night nobody wants anything," said Ivar. "You will not sleep, and you will be frightened, and you will want to talk about your work.
"I have learned that in nineteen years and one and thirty surveyors and I have stopped fighting it."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"One and thirty."
"One and thirty."
"And how many came out?"
"None of them," said Ivar. "That is the number and I am not going to soften it on a hill at first light, because you have taken eleven hundred marks and paid it to an old woman at Cowl Street, and you know exactly what that money is."
Tamsin Reed put her pack on her shoulders.
"Then why do you keep walking it?" she said.
"Because I am sworn to it," said Ivar, "and I cannot stop.
"And because I have tried four times."
She did not tell him about her father for eleven days.
That is a thing she has thought about a great deal since, and the honest answer is not that she was hiding it. It is that she looked at a man on a hill at first light who had taken one and thirty people down that road and buried none of them, and thought:
He will have carried thirty-one of these. He is not carrying mine.