The hen was on the step at ten past five, and it had been there, by the state of the step, for most of the night.
Aurel opened the door onto a morning with no weather in it at all: no wind, the mist off the river lying flat in the bottom of the yard, the smoke from Trewin’s banked fire going up and then giving the matter up about twelve feet above the chimney. It would be warm by nine and it would rain on Friday. He had known that since Sunday and there was nobody in Hollow Ash who wanted to be told.
The bird looked up at him with one eye, entirely at ease, and did not move.
It was brown and disreputable, and it was, unmistakably, the bird that had stood in front of him in the lane on the fourteenth while forty people watched him…
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