The stairwell carried the smell of ash and something older, a sweetness that had curdled three days past. Sera Voss counted the steps as she climbed. Fourteen to the second floor. Nineteen to the third. The banister had lost its middle rail sometime in the autumn, and she kept her palm flat against the wall where the plaster had gone soft as rotten wool. Grey dust came away on her fingers. She did not wipe them on her apron. There was no point.
A quarantine notice hung crooked from a nail on the landing. The ink had bled down the paper in long brown tears, and someone had scratched a small cross into the wood beneath it. Sera had made that mark yesterday. She had made the one on the next landing up this morning. The collection cart waited at the foot of the stairs, and she could not afford another hour of carrying what the cart could take. But the cart could not climb. The cart had no knees, no back, no steady hand to lift what needed lifting.
The third-floor corridor was empty. Every door stood shut. She could hear the rain beginning against the slates above, a thin persistent sound, and beneath it the deeper silence of households holding their breath. Three days ago this landing had been full of voices, of children called in from the street, of a man arguing with his wife about whether the bread would rise. Now there was only the rain and Sera's own footsteps, which she tried to make soft. It did not matter. There was no one left to wake.
The baker's wife had occupied the corner room at the end. Sera remembered the name, though she tried not to. The woman had been broad and warm and given to standing in her doorway with flour on her sleeves, dispensing opinions about every marriage and miscarriage in the parish. She had known which girls had been ruined before their wedding nights, and which men drank, and which farms were failing. She had once pressed a meat pie into Sera's hands and told her she looked half-starved, which Sera had been. The pie had been good. Sera had eaten it walking home in the dark, and the grease had run down her wrist, and she had not minded.
The door was ajar. Sera pushed it open with her elbow.
Inside, the room held the grey light of a wet afternoon. The window had been shut for days, and the air sat heavy and still, carrying the particular scent of the Ash Plague in its late stages. Not the dry mineral smell of the first crust, but something softer, almost floral, that gathered at the back of the throat. Sera breathed through her mouth. She had learned that on the second body.
The woman lay on the narrow bed as though she had simply lain down for a nap. Her arms were folded over her chest in the manner Sera had seen her use at the table, waiting for her husband to bring the tea. Her eyes were closed. The skin of her face and neck had gone the color of river clay, and across her cheeks and brow the crystalline scales had begun to set, each one no larger than a fingernail, overlapping like the shingles on a church spire. They caught the light when Sera moved and gave it back as a faint, cold glitter. The woman had been dead at least a day. Perhaps longer. No one had come to look for her.
Sera set down the bundle she carried. She unrolled it on the floor with the care of someone laying out linen for a christening, smoothing each fold flat. Inside were the cloths she used, lengths of undyed linen soaked in a vinegar and chamomile solution her mother had taught her to make. Beside them lay the long swaddling bands, the waxed sheet for the cart, the small jar of rendered tallow for the joints, the packet of pine needles to scatter once the wrapping was done. She laid each item in its place. Order was the only kindness she had left to offer.
She worked in silence. First the cloth over the face, pressed gently against the scales so they would not flake onto the linen and onto her hands. Then the binding of the wrists, the crossing of the arms, the tucking of the shoulders inward to make the body smaller, easier to carry. The baker's wife had been a stout woman in life. In death she felt no heavier than a child, the crystallization having taken something from the flesh itself. Sera thought of the meat pies, of the flour, of the flour-dusted hands that had once weighed out coin for Sera's mother's herbs. She did not let herself think of how the woman's husband would learn what had become of his wife. He was probably already dead in another room of this same building. She did not know. She would not look.
The third body before midday. The first had been a child of perhaps six, curled in a cupboard where his mother had hidden him from the collectors. The second had been a man whose name Sera had not known, still sitting upright in his chair with his pipe across his knee. Neither had been wrapped with this much attention. The child had been too small to need more than a single shroud. The man had been taken by the cart in the rough canvas provided by the parish. But the baker's wife had been known to her. That made a difference, though she could not have said what kind.
She worked the cloth around the legs, folding the ankles together, binding them with a figure of eight. The scales made the skin catch on the linen. She had to work each fold loose with her thumb, and her thumbnail left a pale line across one of the scales, as though she had scored it. She did not look at that either.
It was her sister who had sent her into this work. Margot had lain in the great bed at Voss Hall and explained it to her on the second night after Sera's return, her voice thin but precise as a blade. The parish needed collectors. The parish paid. The parish paid in coin, in meal, in a kind of immunity from the questions neighbors asked about the Voss girls and their quiet house. Sera had refused at first. She had been a herbalist's daughter once, not a body-snatcher. Margot had laughed, a sound like paper tearing. You were never that, she had said. You were always the one who came back with dirt on her hem and someone else's grief in her pocket.
Sera drew the last length of cloth over the wrapped form and smoothed it down. The shape beneath was no longer a woman but a parcel, neat and bound, ready for the cart. She lit one of the small tapers she carried and set it on the windowsill, then began to scatter the pine needles across the boards. The smell cut through the sweetness in the room. She let it.
When she straightened, her back ached, and the rain had thickened against the glass. Down in the street she could hear the slow clop of a horse, the murmur of the cart driver calling to someone, and she knew she must go down and help lift. There was no one else. The cart driver was a thin boy of fourteen whose hands shook, and the bodies were too heavy for him to manage alone, and Sera had not come this far up nineteen steps to leave the parcel on the floor for the rain to reach.
She bent and gathered the wrapped form into her arms. It weighed almost nothing. She carried it toward the door, stepping around the empty chair, the cold grate, the cup still sitting on the table where the baker's wife had set it down and never picked up again. At the threshold she paused, not from reverence but from the simple need to shift the weight in her arms. Below her, the stairwell waited. Nineteen steps. Then fourteen. Then the cart.
Then, by evening, the road home to a sister whose skin had begun to show the faintest silvering at the wrists.
wrapped form was heavier on the stairs than it had been on the boards. Sera took the first step sideways, her shoulder pressed to the wall, the parcel braced against her chest. The wood bowed under her and complained in a low, familiar voice. She had climbed these nineteen steps so many times in the past month that she knew which ones would groan and which would hold their tongue, and she set her feet accordingly, choosing the silent boards, sparing the thin boy below the sound of her approach.
At the landing she stopped. The rain had found its way through the broken gutter and was running down the inside of the stairwell in a thin, steady stream, pooling at the bottom where the flagstones had sunken. She rested her weight against the newel post and breathed. The post was smooth under her palm from generations of hands, and she let herself feel the grain of it for a moment before she moved on.
Fourteen more steps. She took them carefully, the parcel balanced now on her hip, her free hand trailing the rail. The air grew colder as she descended, and she could smell the wet stone and the iron tang of the river that ran somewhere beneath the town. At the bottom she pushed open the door with her back and stepped into the alley.
The cart waited under the awning where the apothecary's boy had drawn it up. The horse stood with its head low, water running from its flanks, and the thin boy stood beside it with a lantern raised, though it was barely past noon. He saw her and came forward at once, his face white and set, and between them they lifted the parcel onto the bed of the cart. The boards there were already dark with rain. Sera straightened the cloth where it had shifted and tucked the edges in.
"Three more," she said.
The boy nodded. He did not speak. He had not spoken the first time either, nor the second. Sera touched his shoulder briefly, a small pressure through his coat, and then turned back toward the door. He would wait. The bodies in the rooms above would keep until she was ready, and she had an errand first.
The funeral house stood at the bottom of the hill, set back from the road behind a low wall of grey stone that the lichens had claimed. It was a square building with no windows on the street side, only a narrow door painted the colour of dried blood, and above it, half hidden by the eaves, the small louvred opening that let the smoke out when the kiln was lit. Behind it, cut into the rise of the hill, the Voss family crypt waited in its turn, the door of black iron shut and bolted against the weather.
Sera crossed the road and let herself in through the side door, the one the mourners used when there were mourners. Today there were none. The room inside was cold and smelled of ash and the dry herbs that Margot kept in bunches along the beams, rosemary and sage and the long dark leaves of something Sera did not recognise. A single candle burned on the counter, and by its light her sister sat with a ledger open in front of her, a quill in her good hand, her head bent so that the fall of her hair hid her face.
Margot did not look up. The quill moved, scratched, paused, moved again. The sound of it was very loud in the empty room.
Sera shut the door and stood for a moment with her back to it. The warmth of the stairwell was still in her shoulders, and she could feel the ache of the parcel's weight settling into the muscles of her arms. Her wrists throbbed faintly where the cloth had pressed. She let the silence hold, because Margot hated to be interrupted when she was writing, and because the truth was that Sera did not yet know what to say.
"You took the long way," Margot said at last. Her voice was thin and carried that particular brittleness it had carried all winter, as though the words might snap if she set them down too hard. "I heard you on the fourteen."
"I took the boards that don't speak."
"You always do. It doesn't matter. The house knows." Margot set the quill down and lifted her head. In the candlelight her face was very pale, and the silvering at her wrists caught the light like fish scales. She was twenty-three and looked, in that moment, like something that had been kept in a drawer too long. "Come here. I want to see your hand."
Sera crossed the room and laid her left hand flat on the counter, palm down. Margot took her wrist and turned it, and the caste-mark stood out in the gloom, a pale ridged scar in the shape of an open eye, the lashes curling toward the heel of the hand. Margot traced it with one finger, lightly, the way she might trace a line on a map.
"It looks angry," she said.
"It always looks angry."
"It looks angrier." Margot released her wrist and reached for the quill again, though she did not write. She held it between her fingers like a small stick. "Sit down. I have to make the entry and I want you to hear it."
Sera pulled the stool from under the counter and sat. The stool was too low and her knees came up near her chin, and she had to fold her arms across them to keep her balance. The candle guttered in some draught she could not feel, and the shadows shifted on the wall behind her sister's head.
Margot dipped the quill and bent to the page. She wrote in the careful round hand she had learned at the apothecary's, before her hands had begun to fail her, and Sera watched the nib move without seeing the words. She had read enough entries in this ledger. She knew the form of them. Name, age, cause, date of receipt, date of release. Beneath those, in a smaller script, the items left upon the body and the disposition of each. She had written such entries herself, in the years when she and Margot had done this work together, before the silvering had come and the customers had stopped coming and the estate had begun to slide.
"You were twelve when they gave you that mark," Margot said, still writing.
"I remember."
"Do you. I want you to remember. I want you to say it back to me."
Sera was quiet for a moment. The candle steadied itself. Outside, she could hear the thin boy leading the cart away, the slow clop of the horse on the wet road, the wheels complaining over the ruts.
"Untouchable," she said. "Grave-tender. Never to be touched by the living."
"Say it again."
"Untouchable. Grave-tender. Never to be touched by the living."
Margot finished the line she was writing and looked up. Her eyes were the same colour as Sera's own, but where Sera's were watchful, Margot's were flat, like stones left in a dry riverbed. She set the quill down with a small click.
"And why do they put that mark on a child of twelve?"
"Because it is the year the gift wakes."
"The gift." Margot's mouth did something that might, in another woman, have been a smile. "They call it that because they are afraid of the word for it. They have always been afraid of it. Before the Guild, before the marks, they feared the women who could hear the dead speak, and so they made a use for them. A use that kept them apart. A use that no one would envy." She lifted her wrist and laid it beside Sera's on the counter. There was no mark on hers. There had never been. "You were twelve. You had just begun to dream the dreams. And they took you to the hall and they held your wrist over the iron and they seared the eye into you so that everyone would know what you were, and what you were not, and they told your mother that it was a kindness, and your mother believed them, and I believed them, until I was old enough to understand that kindness has a different shape than that."
Sera did not move. The candle flame leaned toward her as though listening.
"You left," Margot said. "You left and I did not blame you. I would have left too. But you left while the mark was still fresh, and you learned to live as though it were not there, and now you have come back and the mark is older than the girl who wears it, and you have begun to forget what it costs."
"I have not forgotten."
"You forget a little, every day. You shook the baker's wife's hand this morning."
Sera opened her mouth, and closed it.
"She did not draw back. She has known you since you were small. She touched your palm and you let her, and for a moment you were just two women in a room, and not one of them the woman with the eye on her wrist." Margot's voice had not risen. It remained thin, and level, and very tired. "That is the forgetting. It is not a cruelty. It is only the way of the living. They wish to pretend the marks are not there. They wish to touch us as though we were like them. And if we let them, we begin to believe it ourselves, and then the dreams come harder, and the dead find us less willing, and we suffer for it in ways we cannot name."
Sera looked at her own wrist. The scar was pale in the candlelight, the lashes of the eye curved and fine. She could feel, faintly, the heat that had gone into it, a heat that had never quite left, that lived in the bone beneath the skin and whispered at her in the small hours.
"I did not think she knew," Sera said.
"Everyone knows. They have always known. They pretend they do not, because pretending is easier than the truth, and the truth is that they need us, and they are ashamed of needing us, and so they make a distance, and the distance is the mark." Margot picked up the quill again. "I am writing it down so that you will remember. Untouchable. Grave-tender. Never to be touched by the living. I am writing it in the ledger beside your name, in my own hand, so that when I am gone there will be a record of what was paid, and by whom, and why."
Sera sat very still on the low stool, her arms folded across her knees. The candle burned. The rosemary crackled faintly on its hook above them, dry and sharp. Somewhere in the building, a shutter tapped against its frame in a wind she could not feel.
"You are not gone yet," she said.
"No," said Margot. "Not yet. But the silvering has reached my elbows, and the dreams have begun to come for me as well, and I find that I am making preparations." She bent her head to the page once more. The quill moved. The scratch of it filled the room like the sound of a small, steady animal burrowing. "Close the door behind you when you go up. The wind is in the east tonight, and it will bring the rain sideways through the louvre."
The door closed behind her on the quiet latch, and Sera stood in the narrow corridor with her hand still against the warped wood. The house settled around her, the old timbers ticking as they cooled, a sound she had not heard in years and now could not stop hearing, the way a word repeated too many times loses its meaning and becomes only itself.
She did not go up at once.
She stood there, listening to the rain begin. It came as Margot had said it would, sideways through the louvre, a thin needling that caught the candle on the landing and made it gutter. The smell of wet stone rose through the boards. Somewhere below, in the kitchen, the fire in the range was going out, and she could hear the iron door sigh as the draft pulled at it.
She thought of the ledger. She thought of Margot's handwriting, the small precise letters, the quill held between fingers that were silvering at the knuckles. She thought of the word Untouched, and how it would sit in the book beside her name, and how the ink would not know what it meant.
Then she went up.
The stairs were treacherous in the wet, the runner long since taken up and the bare boards swollen in their grooves. She kept one hand on the wall. At the top, her old room waited with its narrow bed and its window that looked out over the village and, beyond the village, the river, and beyond the river, the long rise of the moor where the plague pits lay in their shallow scarps. She did not look at the bed. She took from the hook by the door the old leather satchel her mother had used for gathering, and she counted into it from the jar on the shelf what remained of the dried horehound and the rowan bark, and she set out.
The lane down to the bridge was empty. The rain had thinned the usual evening traffic; only the baker's boy passed her, his head down, his tray covered with a damp cloth, and he did not look at her, only drew his shoulders in and quickened his step as though she were something he had been warned against. Sera watched him go and felt the familiar small cold at the base of her throat. She had been home four days. In four days she had learned to recognize that cold, and to keep walking.
The bridge was slick. The river ran thick and brown beneath it, and somewhere in the shallows a dog was barking at nothing. She crossed and took the path that climbs between the willows, the one that leads up toward the pits. It was not a path anyone used anymore. The council had fenced the lower approach, but the fencing was rotten and she had long known where the rails had come loose.
The silver-leaf grew in a single patch on the shelf of ground above the third pit, where the wind kept the soil thin and sweet. Her mother had shown it to her when she was a girl, kneeling in the bracken with a thumb across the stem to keep her from cutting too deep. You do not tell anyone, her mother had said. You do not even tell your sister. Some things are only for us.
She had not told anyone. She had come here alone, every season, for as long as she could remember. It was hers, this small bright patch on the dark hill.
The rain stopped as she reached the lip. The cloud thinned to a single long tear and the light came through it, low and copper, the colour of old pennies, throwing the heather into sudden relief. The pits lay below her in their shallow bowls, the recent ones bright with new clay, the older ones already softening back into the turf. Smoke rose from the furthest, a thin grey line that did not lift but crawled along the ground. The smell came up to her, sweet and chalky, the smell of lime over flesh.
She turned toward the shelf.
He was there.
A figure, hooded, dark, crouched at the edge of the silver-leaf patch with one hand flat to the earth and the other lifting a stem to the light. His cloak was the deep green of bog water and his gloves were dark leather, supple, the kind her father had used for the fine prunings. He did not move at her approach. He went on lifting the stem, turning it in his fingers as though counting the leaves.
Sera stopped.
For one breath, neither of them moved. The smoke drifted. A bird called once from the heather and stopped. The light lay along the man's shoulders and the leaves of the herb glowed faintly, almost white, in his hand.
He looked up.
She saw his face only in pieces. The shadow of the hood took the upper half. What she saw was a mouth set in a line that was not unkind, and a chin with a small scar at the jaw, and eyes that were very steady and very pale and did not blink. He was not young. He was not old. He looked at her as though he had known she was coming and had only been waiting for her to arrive.
Then he lowered the stem. He set it, gently, back against the earth, exactly where it had been. He straightened. And he stepped back into the smoke and was gone.
Not quickly. Not in the way a man runs from a thing he fears. He stepped back, and the smoke took him, and the shape of him thinned, and then there was only the smoke.
Sera stood where she was for a long time. The light went on fading. The copper drained out of the heather and left it the colour of ash. She heard, distantly, the bell at the chapel beginning its slow nine strokes, each one hanging in the air a moment before the next.
She did not gather the silver-leaf. She stood there with her hand on the strap of the satchel and she looked at the place where his boot had pressed the turf, and she saw that the impression was wrong. The weight had not been on the toe. The weight had been on the heel, set deep, the way a man sets his weight when he has been standing in one place for a long time, watching.
She looked at the silver-leaf he had replaced. She looked at the smoke. She thought of Margot in the ledger-room with the candle guttering, writing her name. She thought of the word Untouched, and of the small precise letters, and of the silver creeping past her sister's elbows.
Then she turned and began the long way down.
The baker's wife was waiting at her gate when she came back through the village, as though she had known the moment Sera would pass. She stood beneath the propped window of her shop with her arms folded across her apron and her face arranged into the look of concern she kept for difficult news.
"Out late, pet," she said.
"Out late," said Sera.
The woman glanced down the lane as though checking for listeners. She stepped closer, and the smell of her came with her, yeast and mutton fat and the lavender she kept in her pockets to sweeten her hands. "He's come, then," she said. "He's been seen at the south gate. Tall man, dark cloak, no one knows him. He gives nothing away, not his parish nor his trade. My Willie says he spoke to the gatekeeper and the man couldn't afterwards remember what he said. Only that he said it very civil, and that he asked after the Voss house."
Sera stopped walking.
"Did he now," she said.
"Just so. Just the one question. Where might the Voss ladies be found, and is the younger one poorly." The woman made a small motion with her hand as if to brush something away. "Courteous, Willie said. Courteous as anything. Said it was a fair step from anywhere, and he meant to pay his respects in the morning."
"In the morning."
"So he said. Mind you, pet, they say a lot of things. They say it and they go, and you don't see hide nor hair. But this one." She paused and looked at Sera with the bright, measuring look of a woman who has lived long in a small place. "This one, they say, did not come by road. The gatekeeper swears no one came by road. And he was there at dusk, waiting to be let in."
The rain had begun again, a thin persistent thing that would go on until morning. Sera looked past the woman to the dark window of her own house, two streets off, where a single candle burned in the upper room.
"Thank you, Mrs. Wilkin," she said.
"Pet."
Sera went on. Behind her she heard the gate latch click, and then the soft thud of the shop door, and then the silence of a village drawing in upon itself for the night.
She let herself in by the kitchen door. The range had gone quite out. She rebuilt it with the small dry sticks she had laid ready, and she put the kettle on, and she stood with her hands held out to the new flame and thought about a man stepping backwards into smoke, and about a stem set down so carefully on the earth, and about a voice at the gate asking, very civil, after the Voss house.
Upstairs, the candle in Margot's room was still burning. Sera could see the line of light beneath the door.
She hung the satchel on its hook. She did not open it. She did not say anything, not yet. She stood for a moment longer in the dark kitchen with the kettle beginning to whisper, and she thought about what her mother had said, and about the weight on the heel of a boot in the turf, and about the small, precise letters in a ledger in a room that smelled of rosemary.
Then she went up.