"When did he leave for good," I asked, though some cold, certain part of me had already started guessing.
"Better than seventeen years back now," Ilse said. "One winter he simply wasn't in town anymore, and the claim got sold not long after, and by the time the ground thawed the next spring there wasn't a Marrow left in Highhollow to ask about it, and the company that bought the claim wasn't the kind of company that answered questions from people who weren't paying it coin to be answered." She looked at me directly then, something gentle and sorry moving behind her tired eyes. "I'm guessing, from the age you're standing in front of me at, that you'd have been born right around then, or close enough to it that the timing isn't a coincidence I need to spell out for you."
"It's not," I said, quiet.
"I'm sorry, boy," Ilse said. "Whatever you came up here hoping to find, I don't think it's still the man you're picturing. I don't think it's been him in a long while, if it's still anyone at all."
The fire popped and settled, throwing a fresh spray of orange light across the low ceiling, and none of us said anything for a stretch of time that felt considerably longer than it probably was.
"The company that bought the claim," Namey said, finally, gentle but not willing to let the thread drop even in the middle of my own quiet. "Was it Threnody, back then. Or did they buy in later, after somebody else had already done the first purchase."
"Threnody's the third name it's worn since I've been paying attention to it," Ilse said. "Different letterhead, same men behind the letterhead, if you ask anyone up here who's bothered to notice. The face on the paperwork changes every few years. The coin doesn't."
"Do you remember any of the earlier names," Namey pressed, careful.
Ilse thought about it a long moment, brow furrowed with the effort of reaching back through years she'd clearly rather not have kept as clearly as she apparently had.
"Ashwright Concern, it called itself, the very first time," she said. "Years and years back now, before Threnody, before whatever came between the two. I remember the name specific because the man who came around signing the deeds had a look about him I've never forgotten, even with everything else about those years gone soft and blurred at the edges. Grey hair, though he wasn't old, not really. Voice quiet enough you had to lean in to catch it, and once you had leaned in, you found yourself wishing you hadn't, on account of what leaning in that close to him felt like." She shivered, an old, involuntary motion. "Corvin, I think his given name was. Corvin Ashwright, or Ashe, something along those lines. Signed the papers himself, personal, which company men of that stature almost never bothered doing even back then. I always thought that was strange. A man that important, coming all this way up a mountain just to put his own hand to a single mining deed."
The name landed in the room like a stone dropped down one of those same dark shafts, and I felt every one of my companions go still around me at nearly the same instant, Savage's hand drifting half an inch toward her sword before she caught herself and stilled it, Luxy's breath going careful and controlled, Namey's face draining of what little color it had left after the last several minutes of this conversation.
"That's the man," I said, and it wasn't a question.
"I couldn't say for certain, this many years on," Ilse said, misreading the stillness that had come over the room as simple attentiveness rather than the recognition it actually was. "But it's the name that's sat in my memory longest out of all of them, and not for any reason I've ever been able to properly explain to myself."
"Thank you," I managed, once I'd found my voice again. "For all of it. I know it wasn't an easy thing to hand over."
"Wasn't easy to sit on this long either," Ilse said, standing, some of the old brisk practicality returning to her posture now that the worst of the telling was behind her. "You want supper, it's four coppers, same as I said at the door. You want my honest advice on top of it, free of charge, you'll think hard before you go poking around that mine any further than asking an old woman questions in her own front room. Whatever's up there now isn't interested in old family business. It's interested in whatever it's interested in, and I've buried enough neighbors over the years who went looking to find out what that was to have a firm opinion on the subject."
We took the supper. Nobody had much appetite left to enjoy it, but four coppers seemed a small enough price against everything else the evening had already cost, and we ate mostly in silence, the fire burning low and steady beside us, each of us turning our own private version of the same handful of new facts over and over without finding a shape to any of them that sat easy.
We went up to the mine a little after midnight, once the last lit window in Highhollow's main street had finally gone dark and Ilse's own snoring had settled into a steady, reliable rhythm through the boarding house's thin walls that told us plainly she'd sleep through whatever we did next without waking to notice it.
The road up out of town climbed steep and switchback, the tailings stream running parallel to it the whole way, its cloudy grey water catching what little moonlight made it down through a sky gone thick and low with cloud. Aki flew ahead of us in wide silent loops, scouting, and dropped low twice to bump his head gently against my shoulder in the particular way that meant clear for now rather than any kind of alarm.