Chapter 17: Into the Southern Marsh

The fog came in from the south before dawn, thick enough to muffle the sound of the horses and smelling of something that was not quite water and not quite rot but lived in the country between them.

Arthur noticed it when he woke. He lay still for a moment in the dark of the inn's upper room, listening to the way the fog changed the sound of the village — softening the distance between things, eating the edges off the market square and the mill and the road south, so that Ashford sounded smaller than it was. Closer to itself. The kind of sound a place makes when it's being slowly swallowed.

He got up.