No one speaks of the night before. Evangeline's fingers pleat her apron into a grey ruin. James's eyes are on the table. He follows the grain of the wood with a stare that does not blink.

  Then the knock comes.

  We all freeze. It is not the sound we were expecting. It is soft. Almost gentle. A sound that has wiped its feet on the mat before entering.

  James rises. His chair leg scrapes the floor, a single, tearing sound. Evangeline flinches. A nerve in my jaw ignites.

  He walks to the door. He opens it.

  The morning light spills in, pale and thin. The doorstep is empty.

  No. Not empty.

  A small, dead wren lies on the stone. A single silver pin, the kind Ursula uses for her hair, is pushed neatly through its heart. The pin gleams.

  James closes the door, his hand trembling on the wood. He holds it there for a moment, his knuckles against the dark grain.

  A pause. He opens the door again. Just a crack.

  His hand disappears into the pale morning light.

  A moment passes.

  His hand returns, now holding a small, grey shape.

  The door clicks shut. He turns. He opens his hand.

  The wren is a small ruin in his palm. A splintered wing bone, white and sharp, pokes through the feathers. With his thumb, he gently closes its open eye.

  He swallows once, hard, before the words come out. "This," he says, his voice flat. "This ends now." He closes his hand around the bird.

  "I'll get my jerkin."

  Evangeline moves to block his path. Her hands come up, palms out.

  James looks through her, his eyes fixed on the door. He steps around her body. He pulls on his jerkin. The leather creaks.

  He pauses, his hand on the latch. He turns his head just enough for his eyes to find mine. He does not nod.

  The door clicks shut.

  He did not take his carving knife.

  The hollow thud of his steps fades down the lane. He goes, armed only with a bone to throw at a giant.

  I look at Evangeline. Her eyes are fixed on the window. Her breath fogs a small patch of the cold glass. Her finger lifts, tracing a line through the condensation. A long, downward path. Her finger follows it to the bottom of the pane, then stops. Her hand falls. We stand in the silence.

  The need to act is a sudden, sharp pressure. This skin I wear resists. It is the skin of a woman who chose books over people. It will have to be broken.

  My head snaps toward the window. To the market square. My eyes scan the mass, hunting for a hand to guide his. A shield to stand beside him.

  I sift through the locked jaws and the hard stares aimed at the dirt until I find her.

  She is by the grain stall, standing with her back to the square. She isn't buying. She is watching, a monument to Ursula's new order. The villagers give her a wide berth, and the small pocket of silence around her expands to include me as I advance.

  "Vera."

  She turns her head just enough to show me the scarred side of her face. "Go home, old woman."

  "The poison in our water is not an accident of nature, Vera. How long have you known about the hand that pours it?"

  Vera turns. She seizes an apple from a nearby stall. The sound of her bite is a crack, like a bone breaking. Her stare nails me to the spot as she spits the mangled piece of fruit. The arc is slow, lazy. It lands inches from my boot.

  "The things a woman imagines, alone in her cottage," she says, her voice flat.

  She glances past me. The noise of the market is gone. A prickling damp crawls up the back of my neck. The press of every eye. A farmer, his hand halfway to his mouth with a piece of bread, freezes. A woman at the next stall pulls her shawl up, covering her face as if from a harsh wind.

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  Vera's stare finds mine again, her voice low. "The Council told me to watch you. To listen to your stories." A smile pulls at her lips, stretching the scar tissue on her cheek. "So tell me a story, Nora. Make it a good one."

  "You want a story? I'll give you three."

  I reach down to the grain stall beside us and pick up a kernel of wheat. I place it on the rough wood of the stall.

  "Elder Reginald knows exactly how to handle Ward," I say, tapping the kernel. "He tells him holding on to grief isn't the northern way. Says the posters are a southern weakness we shouldn't put on display."

  I pick up a second kernel. "Elder Gwendolyn found the crack in Grace's heart." I place it beside the first kernel. "Whispered some sweet nonsense about setting her daughter's soul free. Says the posters are the chains holding it here."

  "And then there's you." I pick up a third kernel, placing it in a neat line with the others. My eyes lock on hers. "Elder Ursula gave you the logic of the abattoir. Says the posters are just broken tools. As if they weren't fathers. Sons."

  My hand hovers over the three kernels. My eyes never leave hers.

  I close my hand over them. The dry rasp of them turning to dust is the only sound. I open my hand. A fine, gritty powder is all that remains.

  "You were told to watch me. Are you still watching? Or are you starting to see?"

  The hard line of her mouth goes slack.

  An opening.

  "Forget the stories, Vera. Let's talk about the sickness."

  She scoffs, a rough, ugly sound. "What sickness? A madwoman's ramblings?"

  My voice lowers, a quiet thing meant only for her ear. "How is Billy's cough, Vera?"

  Her jaw tightens, but the real tell is in her eyes. They lose focus for a heartbeat.

  "His is not the only cough, is it, Vera?"

  I see a muscle twitch under her scar.

  I take another step, closing the final space between us. "They are not sick, Vera. They are being poisoned. I have proof. Give me ten minutes of your time. Not for me. For them. For the children who are drinking it while we stand here and do nothing."

  "If I am wrong, you have a fine story of my madness for Ursula. If I am right," my eyes find hers, "then your loyalty is to a poisoner."

  She stares at me for a long time. The market is silent around us.

  The muscle under her scar jumps. "Gods damn you, Nora," she grits out. The words are stones she tears from her throat. "Ten minutes. And if you are wasting my time, I will gut you with my own two hands."

  We leave the market square behind. The alleys narrow, funnelling us toward the well. The sun touches only the peaks of the rooftops, leaving the alleys in deep, cold wells of darkness. The stone walls on either side seem to lean in, amplifying every footstep. Hers, a sharp crack on the stone. Mine, a soft tread.

  Vera's boots punish the gravel. Each step is a barely contained explosion. Her back is a plank of wood. Her arms, a knot of muscle over her chest.

  I keep my pace steady. I let her storm ahead. I give the words to her back. "This is hard for you."

  The laugh she gives is a terrible, broken thing. It has no humour in it. Only splinters. It is the sound of dry leaves crushed under a boot. "You have no idea."

  She stops dead. I catch myself a step from her back.

  She pivots on her heel, her chin up.

  For the first time, she looks me full in the face. Her eyes are blue like the heart of a glacier. The grey light of the alley seems to die at the edges of them.

  "You want to know why I'm here?" The heat of her anger radiates across the small space between us. "Ursula came to me with an offer. A place on her little list."

  Her mouth twists around the word, as if it tastes foul. "My loyalty. For my family's safety."

  "They have clean water," she says, the muscle in her jaw pulsing with every word. "Untainted food. Real medicine. She offered me a taste of it. For Billy."

  Her hands, which had been fists at her side, uncurl. She opens her mouth, but the first sound is a dry click. Then, the words, a raw, shredded rasp.

  "I said yes, Nora. I took it." She looks down at her open, empty hands. "I watch them get sick. I watch their children cough. And I say nothing."

  Her head falls into her hands.

  A moment passes.

  Then one hand lifts. She drags her nails across her scar, leaving thin red lines on the pale tissue. "I can still feel the medicine in my hand. The warmth of it. Knowing it was just for him. Only for him."

  She scrubs a hand across her mouth, a rough gesture, as if trying to wipe the confession away. She says nothing more.

  The fight leaves her boots. Her walk is a slow drag of leather on stone, her shoulders slumped.

  A fallen log, its bark peeling in long, brittle strips, offers a place to rest. She sits, her body folding in on itself. I join her, leaving a hand's breadth of space between our hips.

  I watch her hands. They lie limp in her lap, the fingers curled. No longer fists.

  I reach out.

  My fingers, all dry paper and bone, touch the back of her hand.

  Her skin is hard. Cold as river stone.

  I close my hand around hers.

  The stillness lasts until a tremor starts in her thumb. A small, caged thing. It does not stop.

  We sit. We do not speak.

  She does not pull away.

  My other hand finds my satchel. I pull out a small herb bundle. The scent of dried yarrow and willow bark cuts through the damp air.

  I press it into her hand. "For Billy. So you have a choice."

  Her fingers curl around the small, rough bundle. Her thumb traces the twine that binds it, once, twice. When she looks up at me, her fierce blue eyes are wet.

  "Why? After all this, why do you still fight?"

  My mouth opens. Nora's answer is on my tongue. A simple, tired truth. But a deeper imperative, the root of me, seizes my jaw. It has its own answer to give.

  "Because of a boy," I say. "A boy who believed he could become someone new to save a friend."

  "His name was—"

  A high, thin whine starts behind my teeth, the sound of a nerve fraying.

  Heresy.

  I force the name past it.

  "Eli."

  Vera stops. Her body goes rigid. She turns. She looks at me like I am a ghost in someone else's coat.

  "What did you just say?" she asks, her voice thick, as if she is afraid of the answer.

  "Eli," I repeat. The alley seems to tilt, the lines of the stone blurring at the edges. "I heard his name. In the village."

  "Oh, Nora," she breathes. "Gods. You really don't remember any of it, do you?"

  The tea I drank this morning thickens to tar, coating the walls of my throat.

  Vera shakes her head. "Nora, listen to me. Eli wasn't just some boy from a story you heard. He wasn't just a memory."

  She waits, unblinking, until I look up.

  She takes a half-step closer, her voice lowering, forcing me to lean in.

  "You need to be careful with that name around her. Around Evangeline. And James."

  A horrifying shape with three points forms. Eli. Evangeline. James.

  "He was Pip's father."

  Vera turns and walks towards the well, leaving me frozen in the middle of the path.

  My bones feel hollow now.

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