The soil crumbled under Sera's fingernails, black and damp from the morning's fog. She had been kneeling for the better part of an hour, pulling tendrils of bindweed from around the feverfew, her knees raw against the cold earth of the herb patch behind the kitchen garden wall. The mist had burned off only an hour past, leaving behind a thin grey light that made the overgrown hedges look like bones picked clean.
She heard him before she saw him.
A sound, soft but wrong. The snap of a stem. The rustle of something moving where nothing should move, this close to the house. The herb patch was hers, had been hers since she was a girl trailing behind her mother with a wooden trug, and in the months since her return, no one had dared set foot in it. Not the neighbors, not the traders who sometimes wandered up from the village. Not even the crows, though a murder of them kept watch from the dead elm at the corner of the property.
Sera rose slowly, brushing dirt from her palms, and listened.
There. A second sound. The wet pull of a plant torn from the ground by the roots.
She moved between the rows of rosemary and sage, keeping low, her breath held in her chest. The stranger was crouched at the far end of the patch where the wild fennel grew thick and tangled, his back to her. He wore a traveling cloak of dark green wool, the hood thrown back to reveal close-cropped dark hair and the kind of lean build that came from years spent walking between towns. His hands were careful, methodical, selecting leaves from a cluster of something she did not at first recognize.
Then she saw what he was harvesting, and the blood went cold in her veins.
Moonlace.
Only a few sprigs of it grew on the property, tucked into a corner where the wall kept the worst of the wind off. Her mother had planted it there years ago, years before the purges, years before the Healers' Order came to Ashford with their questions and their pyres. Moonlace was rare. Moonlace was dangerous. And moonlace, in the wrong hands, in the wrong season, could kill.
"You'll want to wash your hands after that."
The words came out harder than she intended. The stranger's shoulders stiffened, but he did not startle. He turned his head, just enough to look at her from the corner of his eye, and Sera caught a flash of pale grey beneath dark lashes.
"And why is that?" His voice was low, unhurried, touched with something she did not expect. A West Country lilt, soft as smoke.
"Because that particular cutting will blister the skin if you let the sap dry on your palms," she said. She took a step closer, her boots crushing the wild thyme beneath them, releasing a bitter green scent into the air. "Unless you already know that, and you've come for something else."
The stranger rose, unfolding to his full height, and Sera was forced to look up at him. He was taller than she had expected by a hand's breadth, and younger. Closer to her own age than to the weathered wanderers who sometimes passed through on their way north. He held the sprigs of moonlace between two fingers, careful, the way a clerk might hold a page he had not yet decided whether to read or burn.
"Forgive the trespass." He inclined his head, a gesture that looked learned rather than natural. "The gate was open. I took that as an invitation."
"The gate was unlatched," Sera said. "There's a difference."
A small smile crossed his mouth, there and gone. "So there is."
He stepped past her, moving toward the low stone wall that marked the boundary between the herb patch and the lane beyond. Sera watched him go, counting the paces. At the third, he stopped and turned back.
"You're Voss's daughter."
It was not a question. Sera's jaw tightened.
"The younger one, I think," he continued, studying her face with an attention that made her want to step backward. "There was a likeness. The same brow, the same way of standing. She trained under your mother, did she not?"
"You knew my mother."
Again, not a question. Sera's hands curled at her sides, the dirt beneath her nails pressing into the creases of her palms.
"I knew of her," the stranger said. "A long time ago."
Sera did not move. The fog had begun to creep back across the lower fields, thin and grey, muffling the sound of the village below. A blackbird sang once from the elm and fell silent.
"Who are you?"
He considered the question. She watched him weigh it, saw the calculation behind those grey eyes, the same way she had watched her mother weigh dried herbs in the palm of her hand, deciding their worth.
"My name is Caelum." He said it simply, as though offering only a fraction of the truth. "Caelum Ashford."
The name landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water.
Ashford.
She remembered the name, though she had not heard it spoken in years. The Ashfords had kept the keep on the western ridge, a family of minor lords whose fortunes had risen and fallen with each generation. The last lord of Ashford had been a physician, a healer of some renown in the northern counties. There had been stories, when Sera was a girl. Her mother had spoken of him with something Sera had taken at the time for respect, though in hindsight it might have been fear.
The Healer's Order had come for him seven winters past. Sera had been sixteen, already apprenticed to a midwife in the next town over, already beginning to forget the shape of her own home. She remembered only fragments: the clamor of horses in the market square, the sound of her mother's voice raised in a way she had never heard before, the smell of smoke drifting across the valley for three days running.
The physician had been executed for heresy. That was the word the Order had used. Heresy against the Order itself, against its doctrines and its prohibitions, against the long list of remedies and treatments that only licensed Healers were permitted to administer. The specifics had never been made public. The specifics had never mattered to the people who stoked the pyres.
Sera had assumed the entire family had gone with him.
"Caelum Ashford," she repeated. The name felt different in her own mouth, heavier. "The physician's son."
The smile was gone now. What remained was something flatter, older, the kind of expression a man wears when he has been recognized in a place he hoped to pass through unnoticed.
"My father was many things," Caelum said. "A physician among them."
"And a heretic, by the Order's reckoning."
"By the Order's reckoning, yes." He did not look away from her. "I make no claims for or against his doctrine. I am not a theologian. I am a cartographer, and occasionally a physician's assistant, when the work calls for it."
Sera studied him. The traveling cloak, the worn boots, the careful way he held the moonlace. A cartographer. A physician's assistant. The kind of man who moved between towns, who knew the back ways and the border posts, who could read a landscape the way her mother had read a pulse. She did not believe him. She did not, however, believe he was lying either. He was offering her a small truth in the hope that she would not press for a larger one.
"What do you want with moonlace?" she asked. "Genuinely."
Caelum was quiet for a long moment. The fog curled around his ankles, pale and cold.
"There is a woman," he said at last. "Two villages east, in the hollow below the limestone ridge. She has been ill for some months. Wasting. The local midwife says it is the Grey Blight, but I have seen the Blight and this is not the Blight. I am not certain what it is. I have been trying different remedies. Most of them have failed."
He lifted the moonlace a fraction, an inch or so, enough to catch the grey light.
"This is the last of what I need to try," he said. "If it works, she will live. If it does not, I will have lost nothing but an afternoon."
Sera felt something shift in her chest, a quiet rearrangement of old furniture. She did not trust it. She did not trust him. But she had spent the last three months watching her sister fade by inches, and she knew what it looked like when a physician ran out of ideas.
"You came all this way for a sprig of moonlace," she said. "There are easier places to find it."
"There are." Caelum's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "But yours is the only patch within a day's walk that I knew of without asking. My father kept a journal, when he was alive. Some of his notes survived the burning. Most did not. But the location of this garden, and what grew here, was in one of them. I thought it was worth the walk."
Sera looked at the herb patch, at the rows of rosemary and sage, at the feverfew she had been weeding when he arrived. She thought of her mother's hands in the soil. She thought of her mother's hands, folded, still, in the box at the bottom of the wardrobe in the room she could not bring herself to enter.
"If you take that moonlace," she said slowly, "you take it with my leave or not at all. And you tell me who the woman is. A name. A face. Something I can hold in my mind and weigh against my better judgment."
Caelum regarded her for a long moment, and something in his expression shifted, almost imperceptibly, the way a door left ajar moves when a draft finds it.
"Her name is Annet," he said. "She tends the inn at the crossroads. She has a daughter of five who sleeps in the same room and has not been touched by the illness. I have been treating her for six weeks. I have tried twelve different combinations. This is the thirteenth."
"Thirteen is an unlucky number in some traditions."
"It is," he agreed. "But my father did not believe in luck. He believed in careful observation and a willingness to be wrong."
Sera exhaled. The mist had reached the herb patch now, threading between the plants, turning the rosemary into something silver and ghostly.
"Take your sprigs," she said. "And go. But if I see you on this property again without my invitation, I will not be so generous."
Caelum inclined his head. This time, the gesture looked more natural, or at least more practiced at appearing so. He moved past her toward the gate, the moonlace held carefully in one hand, and stopped when he reached the low stone wall.
"Your sister," he said, without turning. "The one who trained under your mother. Is she well?"
Sera's hands, still curled at her sides, tightened until the nails bit crescents into her palms.
"Go," she said.
He went. The sound of his boots faded down the lane, swallowed by the fog, until there was nothing left but the blackbird calling once more from the elm and the soft drip of moisture from the rosemary onto the dark earth below.
Sera stood in the herb patch for a long time after he had gone, her eyes on the place where the moonlace had been pulled, the soil disturbed in a small, precise square. She did not go back to the bindweed. She did not finish her work.
She went inside instead, to sit with her sister, and to decide whether the name Caelum Ashford was a thing to fear or a thing to use.
Sera woke before the dawn, though she could not say what had called her from sleep. The cottage was cold, Margot's breathing slow and shallow from the other room, and the smell of tallow and damp stone that had become, over the past weeks, the smell of home.
She rose. She dressed. She put water on to heat and checked the little clay pot of willowbark and valerian that sat on the shelf above the hearth, then took it down and measured a dose into a cup. She carried the cup into Margot's room and set it on the table beside the bed, where her sister lay curled beneath three blankets, her face the color of old parchment in the guttering candlelight.
Margot did not wake. Sera watched her breathe for a long moment, then turned away and went out.
The lane was empty in the grey pre-dawn. Sera walked it without hurry, her boots heavy with the night's rain, the hem of her skirt dark where it dragged through the puddles. She did not go toward the herb beds. She did not go toward the lane that led to the village. She went, instead, down the hill past the old stone cross, past the boundary where the common land gave way to the scrub and thorn, to the place that the village did not speak of and could not avoid.
The pit.
It had not always been a pit. Once, the villagers said, it had been a quarry, and before that a dell where children gathered mayflowers in the spring. Now it was a wound in the earth, roughly oval, perhaps thirty paces across, ringed with a low wall of loose stones that the rain was slowly washing back into the mud. The smell rose from it in a slow, thick column, sweet and foul and unmistakable, the smell of things that had ceased to be things and had become, instead, a kind of weather.
Sera stopped at the wall. She set down the basket she had carried from the cottage: a bundle of dried rosemary, a jar of rendered fat, a twist of linen. Offerings. She had been taught, by her mother, that the dead should not be left untended, even the dead who had died of the Grey Blight, even the dead who had been thrown into a common pit like offal. She had been taught, also, that the living should not come here often, and never alone.
She was alone.
She knelt at the wall and began to arrange the rosemary in small bundles, tucking them into the crevices between the stones, where the wind could not take them. The fat she would smear upon the linen and lay across the lip of the pit, a kind of slow anointing, a way of telling the dead that someone had remembered them. Her mother had done this. Her grandmother. The women of her line, back through the generations no one could count, had done this, and had taught their daughters to do it, and the daughters had taught their daughters, and so the custom had survived the plagues and the wars and the councils and the heretics, down to a woman kneeling alone in the grey dawn with cold hands and a sister dying in a cold bed a quarter mile away.
She did not hear him approach. That was the trouble of it. The mist had come down again in the night, thick as wool, and it muffled everything; she heard only the drip of moisture from the rosemary, and the distant, broken cry of a crow, and then a voice behind her, low and even.
"You should not be here alone."
Sera did not startle. She had learned, in the years she had spent away from this place, not to startle at unexpected voices; she had learned, also, to be very still when she was afraid. She finished tucking the rosemary into its crevice. She set down the jar of fat. She rose, slowly, and turned.
Caelum Ashford stood at the edge of the low wall, six paces from her, his hands at his sides, his face unreadable in the grey light. He was dressed for travel: a long coat, mud-spattered at the hem, a satchel across his chest, his dark hair tied back from his face. He looked, she thought, like a man who had not slept.
"You followed me," she said.
"I did not," he said. "I was here already."
She looked past him. His horse, a small grey mare, stood further up the slope, cropping at the thin grass, its bridle loose. A bedroll was strapped behind the saddle. He had been here some time, then, waiting. She did not know for what.
"You should not be here at all," she said. "I told you last night."
"You did," he agreed. "And yet I find myself here. A failing of which I am not proud, and for which I would make amends."
He reached into the satchel and brought out a small leather purse, heavy and worn, tied at the neck with a bit of red string. He held it out to her, not quite at arm's length, the way one holds out a thing one does not wish to be forced to touch.
"Twelve silver," he said. "The weight is correct. I weighed it myself last winter in Thornbury, against a measure I trust."
Sera looked at the purse. She did not take it.
"What is this?" she said.
"A payment," he said. "For a service. The service being that you forget you ever saw me. That you saw a stranger in the mist, and he went on his way, and you thought nothing more of it. That you do not mention my name to the council, or to the priest, or to anyone who might repeat it to them."
"I see," Sera said. Her voice was very calm.
"I am not," he said, "asking you to lie. I am asking you to forget. There is a difference. A lie is a thing said with intent. A forgetting is a thing that happens, or does not, in its own time."
"And if I do not forget?"
He was silent. He looked, she realized, very much like a man who had expected the question and had not prepared an answer for it.
"Then I will be in some difficulty," he said, at last.
Sera looked at him for a long moment. The mist drifted between them. The smell of the pit rose behind her, sweet and thick, and beneath it the smell of the rosemary she had just tucked into the stones, sharp and clean. She thought of her mother, kneeling here in younger years, anointing the linen. She thought of her sister, curled in the cold bed. She thought of the purse in his hand, the red string, the silver she could feel the weight of even at a distance, twelve coins, twelve small bright weights that could buy a great deal in a village where most people had nothing.
She took the purse.
She did not, then, do what he expected.
She turned, and she threw the purse, in a single overhand motion, out over the low wall and into the pit. The leather split on a stone as it fell. The coins rang out, one, two, three, a bright clatter that echoed for a moment off the walls of the pit and then was swallowed, and there was only the soft sound of the red string falling after them, drifting down like a thing with no weight at all.
Sera turned back to him.
Caelum's face had not changed. That was the worst of it. He stood as he had stood, his hands at his sides, his expression closed, and looked at her as if she had confirmed something he had suspected but had not wished to.
"Now," Sera said, "listen to me carefully."
He listened.
"The council pays five silver coins," she said, "for every heretic reported. Five. Not twelve. Five. I have seen the notices posted in the square, with the seal and the signature, and I have seen what happens to the man who is named, and to his children, and to the children of his children. I have seen his name cut from the church roll. I have seen his goods divided. I have seen his body put into this pit, with the rest, and no rosemary, and no linen, and no one to remember him."
She took a step toward him. He did not move.
"Twelve coins," she said. "You thought twelve coins would buy my forgetting. But I am not a woman who forgets, and you are not a man who can afford to be remembered, and this pit is not a place you should have brought me to, or followed me to, or waited for me at, whatever your purpose."
"My purpose," he said, "is my own."
"Your purpose," she said, "is now a thing the mist has seen, and the mist talks, in this country, more than the people do. If you are seen with me here, twice, I will be named alongside you. If I am named alongside you, my sister dies alone, in that bed, with no one to sit with her. If my sister dies alone, in that bed, with no one to sit with her, then I will go to the council, and I will tell them everything I know of you, and I will take their five coins, and I will buy her a proper shroud."
She stopped. She was breathing hard. She had not meant to say so much.
Caelum looked at her for a long moment. The mist moved between them, slow and patient.
"Your sister," he said, at last. "You said she was ill. You did not say she was dying."
"I did not say it," she said. "But you are a physician's assistant. You do not need to be told."
He inclined his head. The gesture was the same one he had given her the night before, in the herb patch, but it looked different here, in the grey light, with the pit at his shoulder. It looked like an admission.
"I can look at her," he said. "If you will permit it. I cannot promise anything. I am not, as I said, a physician. But I have seen the Grey Blight, and I have seen other things that look like it and are not, and I can tell you, at least, which it is."
Sera did not answer.
"There is a woman," he said, "in a village two days east of here. She mixes a tincture. I do not know what is in it. I do not know if it works. But I have seen her give it to a child who was as grey as your sister is grey, and I have seen the child, six months later, pulling weeds in her father's garden."
"And what," Sera said, "would you have me do? Invite you into my home? Sit you at my sister's bedside? Trust you with her?"
"I would have you do," he said, "what you already know to do. You are a stubborn woman. I have known you one night and one morning, and I can see it. You will not let her die. You will not let her die alone. You will not let her die without trying every herb in the garden and every tincture in the village and every charm your mother taught you and every charm your grandmother taught your mother. You will do this whether I help you or not. I am only offering to help you do it a little faster."
Sera looked at him. The mist had reached the pit now, drifting low across the lip, and the smell of it was different, somehow, with him standing in it. Cleaner. Colder. Like the smell of a thing that has been put away for a long time and brought out into the air.
"You knew," she said, slowly. "Last night. In the herb patch. You knew what I was pulling."
"I suspected," he said.
"And you said nothing."
"I said what I could," he said. "The moonlace. The rosemary. The things you already knew. I did not think it was my place to say more."
"And yet here you are," she said, "offering to say more."
"Yes," he said.
She looked at him a long time. The crow called again, further off now, and the mist began to thin at the edges of the pit, where the first pale suggestion of the sun was reaching down through the clouds.
"Tomorrow," she said, at last. "At dusk. You will come to the lane, not to the gate, and you will wait until I come to you. You will not come onto the property. You will not speak to my sister until I have spoken to you first. And if I decide, when I have spoken to you, that you are a thing to fear, you will leave, and you will not come back, and you will not wait for me at pits or at lanes or at any other place where a woman might be alone with her grief."
"And if I decide," he said, "that you are a thing to trust?"
"Then you will come inside," she said, "and you will sit with my sister, and you will tell me what you see. And you will not lie to me. About anything. Ever. For any reason."
He inclined his head a third time. This time, the gesture looked, to her eyes, like something closer to a promise.
"Tomorrow at dusk," he said.
"Tomorrow at dusk," she said.
He turned and walked back up the slope to his horse. She watched him go. She did not watch him mount; she turned, instead, back to the pit, and knelt at the wall, and took up the jar of fat, and began, with slow hands, to anoint the linen.
The mist thinned. The sun, pale and water-coloured, rose over the ridge. The smell of the pit rose with it, sweet and thick, and the rosemary she had tucked into the stones gave back its sharpness to the air, and somewhere in the village below, a bell began to ring, slow and steady, for the dead.
She worked until the sun was high enough to warm the stones at the pit's edge, and the mist had drawn back into the seams of the rocks like a breath returned. The linen took the fat slowly, drinking it in the way dry soil drinks rain, and the smell of rosemary grew thin as the heat drew the oil out of the leaves. She sang, as she always did when the work was hard. The song was one her mother had taught her, about a woman who walked into the sea and came out wearing a crown of pearl, and whose footprints filled with salt so that no one could follow her. She sang it through twice, and then a third time, softer, until the words were more breath than sound, and the four small bodies in the pit seemed to her, in the warmth, to be only sleeping.
When the wrappings were ready, she lifted each body in turn, and laid them in the linen, and folded the cloth over them, and tied it with cord she had wound with her own hands the night before. The cord was waxed, so it would hold, so the damp could not rot it through before the season turned. The smallest child she wrapped twice, because there was enough linen, and because she could not bear to think of the cold finding a way through, and because, she thought, a child deserves the warmth of two layers, even in the ground.
She did not weep. She had wept the first year, when she had come back to help her father with the pits, and she had learned, since then, that weeping made the hands slow, and slow hands made mistakes, and mistakes, in this work, were a cruelty she could not afford to any of them, least of all the dead. So she kept her breath even, and her eyes clear, and she did not think of the child's name, because the child had had no name that anyone in the village knew, and she would not invent one, even in her own mind.
When the last cord was tied, she sat back on her heels, and looked at the four small mounds of white cloth, and she said the words her father had taught her to say, the words for the dead who had no one to mourn them, who had come into the world unnamed and who would go out of it unwitnessed if it were not for her. She said them in the old language, the language of the valley, the language the herbalists had used when they were still trusted, and she did not stumble, though her throat was dry, and though her heart was a stone in her chest, and though the words, in the old language, were heavy on the tongue.
Then she stood, and gathered her jar, and her remaining linen, and her bundle of rosemary, and she climbed the ladder out of the pit, and pulled the ladder up after her, and set the flat stone back over the opening, and pressed the earth down around it with her boot, the way her father had taught her, so that no rain would pool there, and no small creature would fall in.
The sun was past its height. The bell in the village had stopped, as bells do, when the priest had said enough. The air smelled of thyme, and of the distant sea, and of the clean, sharp scent of the rosemary that clung to her hands and her sleeves and the hem of her dress. She flexed her fingers. They were stiff. The fat had dried in the whorls of her thumbs.
She walked to the edge of the cliff, where the path began its winding descent to the lane. And there, sitting on a flat stone with his back to her, his dark coat draped over one knee, his hands loose between his knees, was the cartographer.
She stopped. He did not turn. He seemed to be looking out at the sea, though the sea was only a grey suggestion beyond the rim of the cliffs, a paler line beneath the paler sky.
"I thought you would have gone," she said.
He turned then. He looked up at her, and his face was different. The wariness was still there, and the grief, but there was something else too, something that had not been there an hour ago, or that she had not been able to see, because she had been too intent on her own guarding.
"I am going," he said. "I only waited to see you come up."
"Why?"
He considered the question. She watched him weigh it, as he had weighed her questions the night before, and she had the sense, again, that he was a man who paid for every word he spoke, and who could not afford to spend them carelessly, and who had learned, somewhere, that an answer given in haste was a kind of theft.
"Because I have never seen anyone do what you just did," he said, at last. "And I wanted to see the end of it. I wanted to see that you were not harmed by it. I wanted to see that you could walk out of that pit and still stand straight."
She was silent for a moment. The wind moved the grass at the cliff's edge, and a seabird cried somewhere below, a long, falling note that the rocks threw back at them in pieces.
"I am not harmed by it," she said.
"No," he said. "You are not. That is what I saw."
He rose from the stone, and he brushed the dust from the back of his coat, and he did something she did not expect. He laughed.
It was not a loud laugh, and it was not a happy one, but it was a laugh, and it came from somewhere deep in his chest, and it changed his face entirely. The lines of grief and of caution eased, and for a moment he looked younger, and less careful, and as though he had been, once, a man who knew how to be easy in the world, before the world had taught him otherwise.
"Brave corpse-handler," he said. "That is what my father would have called you. He had a word for it. The old word. But the old word is gone now, and the new word is not adequate, and the people in the village would not say it if they knew it."
She did not smile. But something in her chest, which had been clenched since she first knelt at the wall, loosened a fraction.
"Your father," she said, and then stopped, because she knew who his father was, and she knew what word the village had for his father, and she knew that the old lord of Ashford Keep had been a man of many words, and that none of them had been kind, and that his name, in the market, was spoken only in lowered voices, or not at all. "Your father taught you that?"
"Yes," he said. "My father. He is gone, as your father is gone, and as your sister's strength is going, and as the village is going. But he taught me, before he went, to look for the people who do the work that no one will thank them for. And when I see such a person, I am meant to give them something. That was the teaching. The only teaching, in the end, that I have been able to keep."
He reached into the pocket of his coat, and he took out a sprig of something silver-green, and he stepped toward her, one step only, and he laid it, very gently, on her shoulder, where it rested against the wool of her dress, light as a breath, lighter than a breath, so that she felt it more as a thought than as a thing.
"Silver-leaf," he said. "It will not keep. It will brown by morning, and by tomorrow at this hour it will be only a dry stem. But for tonight, it will smell of the mountains, and it will remind you that someone saw what you did, and that the seeing mattered."
She did not move. She stood very still, and the sprig rested on her shoulder, and the wind did not take it, and her hands, which had been so steady all morning, trembled now at her sides, not with grief, but with something she could not have named if she had been asked.
"Why do you give me this?" she said. "You do not know me. You have no reason to trust me. You have no reason to think I will not take it and throw it into the sea, or leave it on the stone for the birds to peck at."
He looked at her for a long moment. The wind moved his hair across his brow, and he did not push it back, and she saw, in the lines of his face, the echo of a face she had seen in the market once, years ago, when the old lord had come through with his retinue, and the village had drawn its shutters.
"Because," he said, "I have been in many places where the dead were not cared for. And I have seen what becomes of a town that forgets to anoint the linen, and what becomes of the children who grow up walking past pits that no one will empty. And I have learned that the people who do this work are not the ones who are honored, and they are not the ones who are paid, and they are not the ones who are remembered. But they are the ones who keep the world from becoming a pit."
She felt the sprig's weight, or its lack of weight, against her shoulder. The smell of it was clean and sharp, like the rosemary, but colder, more distant, the smell of places where the snow lay long, and where the air was thin, and where the herbs grew close to the ground because they had learned to keep their heads down.
"Tomorrow at dusk," she said.
"Tomorrow at dusk," he said.
He inclined his head, as he had done before, and this time the inclination was deeper, and slower, and it looked, to her eyes, like something closer to a bow than to a nod. Then he turned, and he walked down the cliff path, and she watched him go, and the path curved, and the grey of his coat was lost against the grey of the rocks, and then he was gone, and she was alone with the four small mounds in the pit, and the rosemary, and the silver
The silver in her palm was a small thing, no larger than a thumbnail, and so worn by handling that the image upon it had become a suggestion rather than a statement. She turned it over and found the other side smoother still, and the metal cold against the whorls of her fingers, and she thought of the old woman who had pressed it into her hand an hour ago at the lychgate, with the words: For the children in the pit. You will know what to do.
She had not known what to do. She had stood in the rain with the coin in her fist and felt the fool of herself, and the impostor, and the child who had once believed that the anointing oil in the brown bottles on her father's shelf could mend anything that bled or broke. And then she had walked down the cliff path in the grey of the afternoon, and she had come to the place where the rosemary grew wild against the stones, and she had broken off a sprig, and she had knelt at the lip of the pit, and she had said the words her father had taught her, which were not the words of any prayer she had ever heard spoken in the chapel above the village.
And then Caelum Ashford had come, and she had not heard him come, because her head had been bowed, and the wind had been in her ears, and the sound of the sea below had been the only sound she had been listening for. And when she had looked up he had been standing three paces from her, with his hands empty at his sides, and his face composed into the stillness of a man who had learned to wait without shifting his weight.
And now he was gone.
She looked down at the four small mounds. The cloth that had covered them was sodden and dark, and the smell of it was the smell of earth and lye and something sweeter beneath, which she did not want to name. The rosemary in her hand was beginning to wilt in the salt air. She set it down upon the largest of the mounds, because that was where the others would have wished it, and she smoothed the cloth back over the place where she had laid it, and the cloth was cold under her fingers, colder than the metal of the coin, colder than the air.
She thought of the woman in the pit whose name she had been told but had not been able to keep. She thought of the two children, whose names no one had given her, because no one in the village had known them except as the quiet ones who had stood at the edge of the market and asked for nothing. She thought of the fourth mound, which was smaller than the others, and which she had not been told anything about except that it must be anointed, and that it must not be opened.
She had not opened it.