The Tollhouse at Hobble Weir

About this book

In the river town of Callowbridge, the university lodges the students no college wanted in a crooked toll cottage on Hobble Weir. There Morwenna Tull, fifty-two, last teacher of Hearthcraft, mends kettles by humming to them and walks to the sluice every evening to pay the toll: one true thing, said aloud to the vast creature that sleeps beneath the weir and keeps the river in its banks. This autumn she has five frightened first-years and a new Chancellor, her oldest friend Ottilie Brack, who means to sell the house and replace the toll with stone. Wenna has one year to prove that a home can be worth more than its usefulness, and to make five strangers into a household. But the river remembers the winter it froze thirty-four years ago, and so does Wenna, who has never told the water everything.