Sorcha Nic Dhiarmada (Human, Drithane)

Walking the dark-down was the oldest part of the warden's job and the least necessary, which was, if you asked Sorcha, the correct order for those two qualities in any custom worth keeping. Nobody in Gleann na gCaorach needed reminding. The lights went down valley by valley the way they had gone down for eleven generations, and the warden walked the line of them anyway, because a thing kept by everyone should still be seen to be kept by someone.

The delegation's clerk walked a stretch of it with her, asking his careful questions. Why no law, if the custom mattered. She gave him the answer her mother had given a Union census-taker forty years before the survey people came: that a law is what you write when you expect to need one, and the valley had never yet produced the person the law would be for. He wrote that down too. She suspected the writing-down was his version of the custom — a kept thing, necessary or not — and thought better of him for it.

At the Ó Riain holding the shutters were closed with lamplight behind them, and she passed by without knocking, because a vigil kept indoors on a crossing night was one of the observances, and the dark-down's rule was the dark, not the watching. What was watched for behind those shutters was between that household and the sky. The Archive people had asked her about the vigils once, on the first visit, in the way of people fitting a custom into a form with boxes on it. She had told them the truth — that it varied, valley to valley, and that she had never asked — and had watched the form fail to have a box for that, with some satisfaction.

The crossing came up on time. It always did; that was half of what it taught. She stood at the turn of the lane where she had stood for forty crossings and watched the sky spend its sparks the slow way, gold on black, silent as snowfall, and made her usual accounting: the valley dark, the herds settled, the guests behaving, one small red constellation of permitted instrument lights below and the real thing above. The delegation would take away numbers, and the numbers would be true. They would not be what the night was for. She had stopped trying to put what the night was for into words somewhere around her twentieth crossing, on the grounds that the sky managed to say it annually without any.

The rabbit sat at her feet through the whole of it. Sorcha noticed — with an accuracy she would embarrass nobody by mentioning — that everything on Drithane watched the sky on a crossing night, and that she had billeted the one creature on the planet that watched the watchers. Head up, ears at their working angle, cataloguing the dark valley the way Sorcha catalogued her hills.

She found she did not mind. Somebody ought to have the other watch. And whatever the little visitor was — and courtesy animal was not it, any more than warden was a woman who walked a lane — she kept the custom like a native: her own small attention doused and turned outward, spending nothing, missing nothing.

When the lights came back, the rabbit went inside and sat in the wool basket, and Sorcha put the kettle on for the guests, and neither of them said anything about it at all.