There was one obstacle Rowan had not anticipated. He had known the intake channel. He had known the ledge, the V-shaped wedge, the geometry of the key's extraction. He had planned the return route and managed it.
What he had not planned for was Corin. Corin was a tawny owl who roosted in the upper granary loft of the Millcreek Mill every winter, from approximately the third week of October until early March.
She was not aggressive—she had shared the building with Rowan for two full winters without incident—but she was large, entirely carnivorous, and fundamentally indifferent to whatever Rowan happened to be doing at any given moment in a way that was itself a kind of threat.
An owl who was paying no attention to you was fine. An owl who suddenly noticed a small, wet, exhausted dormouse crossing the open granary floor in the late afternoon was a different proposition.
After Eli had taken the key and run for the yard, Rowan had retreated back up toward the east rafter by his usual route—along the base of the east wall, up the timber bracing brace to the beam level—and found that the brace timber had been moved during the week's maintenance work.
Someone had shifted it two feet to the north, taking it out of reach of his usual wall-corner starting point. That meant the only route back to the high rafter was across the open granary loft floor and up the roof ladder brace on the west wall.
Corin was on the north granary beam, twelve feet up, watching the yard through the ventilation gap with large amber eyes. She wasn't looking at the floor.
She was looking at the yard.
Rowan assessed the situation with professional calm. Twelve feet of open floor, well-lit by the late afternoon sun through the granary window. A tawny owl with a wingspan of thirty-seven inches and eyesight that could resolve a dormouse at forty meters in a quarter of this light level.
The owl was currently looking the other way. He had approximately the time it took Corin to complete one full head rotation to cross the floor before her eyes swept back to the granary interior. He went.
He was fast when he needed to be—faster than his round, compact shape suggested. He crossed twelve feet of granary floor in a low, fluid run that kept his profile as small as possible and reached the ladder brace on the west wall just as Corin's head began its rotation back from the ventilation gap.
He was up the brace and into the roof beam shadow before the owl's eyes reached the floor.
Corin held her head still for a moment, in that unsettling owl way that suggested she had registered something without being certain of it. Then she returned her attention to the yard. In the roof beam above, Rowan tucked himself into his notch and lay still, breathing through his nose, letting his heartrate come down from the sprint.
Owls, in Rowan's experience, were not fundamentally hostile to dormice. They were opportunistic hunters, but they were also capable of a kind of practical indifference: if a prey animal was not moving in a detectable way, and if the owl was not actively hungry, the owl's attention generally went elsewhere.
Corin's current focus on the yard—where the voices of Thomas and Eli were filtering up through the boards—was a form of social curiosity that was not uncommon in tawny owls, who were more observant of human activity than most people assumed.
Rowan settled into his notch and let his breathing slow to the slow, deep pattern of a resting dormouse. He stayed still until the conversation below had finished and the yard had gone quiet. From outside, through the granary ventilation gap, he could hear voices.
Thomas Marsh's voice, thick with something that took Rowan a moment to identify—because Thomas Marsh was not, in his experience, a man who allowed emotion into his voice in any recognisable quantity. But what Rowan could hear now, filtering up through the granary boards and the roof timber, was the sound of an old man trying not to cry, and failing, and not particularly minding that he was failing.
'It was the dormouse,' Eli's voice said. 'I know how it sounds. But it was sitting in the middle of the floor with the key in its mouth. It put it down and stepped back. It looked at me.' A long silence. 'The mill has kept this family for eighty years,' Thomas said finally. 'Maybe it keeps its own as well.'.