The bell struck three times in quick succession, a brass sound that cut through the grey morning and sent sparrows wheeling from the chestnut eaves.
Sera Voss paused at the window, her hand still resting on the latch. The glass was old, warped, throwing the autumn garden into a wavering blur of russet and bare branch. Beyond the boundary wall, past the orchard where the last of the apples hung shriveled and forgotten, the rooftops of the town climbed toward the cathedral spire. From somewhere down in the market square, a voice rose, thin and carrying, the particular cadence of a crier's cry.
She knew the rhythm before she knew the words. Three bells meant news. Three bells meant someone had run to the crier's post with news worth shouting.
"Sera."
Margot's voice came from the bed, flat and stripped of inflection, as though naming her sister cost her something she could not afford.
"I am here." Sera did not turn. She watched the distant square, where a small knot of figures had gathered around the raised platform. "Can you hear the bells?"
A pause. The sound of linen shifting against a thin frame.
"I hear everything. That is the problem with being half a room away from the window." The words arrived clipped, each one placed with the precision of someone rationing breath. "What is it?"
Sera pressed her forehead against the cold glass. The crier had begun to speak, and even at this distance, with the wind carrying the sound in broken snatches, she caught the shape of the announcement. A name. A place. Veren.
Her fingers tightened on the latch.
"Stay there," she said, and knew even as she said it how foolish the instruction was. Margot stayed everywhere. Margot could not do otherwise.
Sera crossed the room in four strides, pulled the heavy curtain half-closed to cut the draught, and then went back to the bed. She knelt, the floorboards groaning under her knees, and took her sister's hand. The bones felt like the scaffolding of a bird's nest beneath the skin.
"I need to go down," she said. "I need to hear what he is saying."
"Then go." Margot's fingers did not close around hers. They lay limp, accepting. "I have been listening to things I cannot change for longer than you have been alive."
Sera did not rise. She held her sister's hand and listened to the crier's voice rising and falling in the square below, the words arriving like stones thrown across water.
"Lord Maren Crestwood... Sunward Zealots... the river-port of Veren... burned to the waterline... no survivors of the garrison... marching north..."
The word north landed in Sera's chest like a fist.
Veren was three days by river. Three days by road, less if the roads were good and the weather held. The river-port had been the southern anchor of the trade routes, the place where the salt barges unloaded before the long pull inland. Without Veren, the southern reaches were open. The road north wound through the hill country, through the towns that clung to the river's edge, and then here, to this city, to the cathedral spire and the market square and the crumbling estate where her sister was dying.
"How many days?" Margot asked. Her eyes were closed. She had heard.
"Four," Sera said. "Five, if they camp."
"They will not camp." A dry sound that might have been a laugh. "Crestwood does not camp. Crestwood purifies."
Sera stood. She smoothed the front of her coat, though there was nothing to smooth. The wool was mended at the elbows, patched at the hem, and she had worn it through two winters in the low country before she had come home. Coming home had not been a choice. Coming home had been the only direction left.
She went to the door. The hinges protested, a high thin note that joined the crier's distant cry.
"If the bells ring again," she said without turning, "bar the lower door."
"I cannot reach the lower door."
"Then I will be quick."
She descended the stairs, her boots loud on the worn treads, and let herself out through the kitchen passage. The garden beyond was overgrown, the herb beds choked with creeping thistle and the remains of last year's rosemary. She did not look at the herb beds. She had looked at them enough.
The path to the gate ran between two rows of apple trees whose fruit no one had picked. The apples lay in the grass, brown and spotted, and the air carried their fermentation, a sweetness gone sharp and accusatory. Sera's boots crushed them as she walked. Underfoot, the ground was soft, and somewhere a wood pigeon called, its voice a slow repeating note that belonged to a gentler world.
She reached the gate and unlatched it. The metal was cold in her fingers, colder than the morning warranted, and the latch stuck as it always did. She wrenched it free and stepped through into the lane.
The lane was empty. Every other door along the row was shut. The neighbors had heard the bells and chosen, as they always did, to hear from inside their walls. Sera walked faster.
By the time she reached the market square, a crowd had gathered. Perhaps forty people, perhaps more, pressed close around the raised platform where the crier stood with his brass bell at his hip and his scroll half-unrolled in his hand. He was a thin man, weather-reddened, with the look of someone who had run to the post rather than walked. His breath still came in visible gusts.
"By order of the Council," he was saying, his voice hoarse but carrying, "a rationing is imposed upon the city and the surrounding hamlets as of this day. Salt, grain, and salted fish shall be apportioned per household at the weigh-house. No more than two portions per week per adult, one per child below the age of twelve. Any hoarding shall be punished by fine and, at the Council's discretion, imprisonment."
A murmur went through the crowd. Sera felt it move through her like a wave.
"And further," the crier continued, unrolling the scroll another hand's width, "a curfew is imposed from the first hour after sunset until the first hour before sunrise. No person shall be abroad in any street, lane, or public way within the city walls during these hours. Any person found abroad shall be detained and questioned."
The murmur grew louder. A woman near the front of the crowd called out, her voice sharp with something that was not quite fear.
"What of the farms? What of the outlying holdings?"
"The Council addresses the outlying holdings by separate dispatch," the crier replied.
Sera pushed through the crowd, her shoulder catching against a fishwife's basket, the reek of brine and old rope filling her nostrils. She muttered an apology without slowing. The crier's words chased her: rationing, curfew, detention. Her mind was already ahead of her, halfway down the lane that led to the family estate, halfway up the stairs to Margot's room, halfway into the garden where the rosemary had not been pruned in two seasons because there had been no one to prune it.
Until now. Until Tobias.
She had not seen her brother in three years. She had not written to him in two. The last letter had come from him, a single folded page tucked inside a sack of dried elderflowers Margot had begged for from the village healer. Tobias's handwriting had been cramped and impatient, the loops of his letters pressed close together as though he resented the ink.
Sera: Come home. M is worse. The walls need mending. I cannot do it alone.
She had come. Of course she had come. And now, standing in the market square with the weight of the crier's words settling into her bones, she understood that she had come too late for the rationing to mean anything to them. They grew most of what they ate. They kept bees. They had a smokehouse and a root cellar and a stand of hazel on the far boundary that fruited heavy in autumn. The Council's rationing was for the town, for the poor huddled in their garrets, for the families who bought their bread by the loaf. The Voss estate would endure.
But the curfew. The curfew was another matter.
She turned down the lane that ran behind the tanner's yard, the smell of urine and lye so familiar it almost made her smile. Almost. Her boots were thin, worn through at the sole where the right toe pressed against the leather. She would need new boots before winter. Another thing Tobias could not afford.
The path narrowed between two stone walls, the mortar crumbling where blackthorn had forced its roots through. Above her, rooks called from the ruined chimney of what had once been a chandler's shop. The lane opened onto the common field, and beyond the common field, the track that led to the estate. She knew every rut of that track. She had walked it barefoot in summer, her hem gathered up, the mud cool between her toes. She had walked it in winter with her cloak pulled over her head and her breath a white veil. She had walked it the morning she left, three years ago, with Margot standing at the gate and not saying a word to stop her.
She had told herself she was going to find work. She had told herself she was going to send money home. She had told herself that Margot would understand, that Tobias would understand, that the distance was only geography and not a kind of slow betrayal.
She had lied.
The estate gate was open. One hinge had given way entirely and lay in the grass, rusted orange. The other groaned when she pushed it. Inside the yard, a hen scratched at the gravel near the well, and a cat Sera did not recognize sat on the mounting block, watching her with the grave attention cats give to people who are about to be disappointed.
"Tobias," she called. Her voice sounded thin in the yard. She tried again, louder. "Tobias. It's Sera."
A window shutter banged open on the upper floor. A face appeared, broad and weathered, the beard thicker than she remembered, the eyes the same flat grey as their father's had been.
"You took your time," Tobias said.
"I came as soon as I could."
"You could have come sooner."
She did not answer that. There was no answer that would not be a lie, and she was tired of lying to him. She crossed the yard and stood below the window, looking up. The light was already going, the sun caught in the branches of the old apple tree beyond the byre.
"Is she awake?"
"She's always awake." Tobias leaned on the sill. A muscle jumped in his jaw. "You should eat something before you go up. There's bread and there's cheese and there's not much else."
"I will. But first tell me. Truly. How bad is she?"
Tobias was silent for a long moment. A rook flew low across the yard, its shadow passing over them both like a hand.
"She's thinner than she was at midsummer," he said at last. "The cough is worse. She won't eat the broth unless I make it myself, and even then she only takes a few spoonfuls. The rash, Sera."
"The rash?"
He looked away. His hand came up and rubbed at the back of his neck, a gesture she remembered from their childhood, from the times he had been afraid and would not say so.
"It's on her arms. It's on her throat. She tries to cover it with her sleeves but I see it. Grey, like ash, like something has been poured under her skin. She says it doesn't hurt. She says a lot of things that aren't true."
Sera felt the ground tilt under her. She put her hand against the wall to steady herself. The stone was cold and rough against her palm.
"Is it the Blight?"
"I don't know. The healer said it might be. The healer's an old fool who drinks more than he cures, but he said it might be." Tobias's voice had dropped. "He said if it spreads to her chest, we should prepare."
"Prepare for what?"
"For what comes after."
The sky was the color of a bruise, purple and yellow at the edges, the first stars pricking through above the chimney. Sera went inside. The kitchen was exactly as she remembered it, only smaller. The same flagged floor, the same iron hooks above the hearth, the same dresser with its row of chipped plates. On the table a loaf of bread sat on a board, and beside it a wedge of cheese wrapped in cloth, and beside that a knife with a bone handle that had been their mother's.
She did not eat. She climbed the stairs.
Margot's door was closed. Sera knocked, three times, the rhythm they had used as children.
"Go away."
"It's me."
Silence. Then, very softly: "I know who it is."
Sera opened the door. The room smelled of camphor and something else, something faintly metallic that she could not place. Margot was propped against the pillows, a blanket pulled up to her chin. Her hair, which had been black as crow's wing the last time Sera saw her, was streaked now with grey, though she was only twenty-three. Her face was a mask of bones. Her eyes were too bright.
"You look terrible," Margot said.
"You look worse."
"I always looked worse. You just never noticed." Margot's mouth twitched. It might have been a smile. "There's broth on the table. I didn't touch it. You're welcome to it."
Sera crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. She did not reach for Margot's hand. Margot did not extend it. They sat for a moment in the kind of silence that only sisters can sit in, the silence that has history in it, that has fights and reconciliations and long afternoons of shared secrets.
"I heard the crier," Sera said. "There's rationing. A curfew."
"I heard him too. The window was open. He has a very loud voice for such a small man." Margot paused. "Tobias says you were at the market."
"I was."
"Buying what?"
"I didn't buy anything. I was listening."
"Ah." Margot's eyes moved to the window. Outside, the last of the light was bleeding out of the sky. "Tobias is angry with you."
"I know."
"He's been angry for three years. He thinks you left because you wanted to."
"I left because I had to."
"You left because you couldn't stand to watch me die." Margot said it flatly, without accusation, the way one might state the weather. "There's a difference. He doesn't see it. I do."
Sera's throat tightened. She looked at her sister's hands where they lay on the blanket. The rash was there, climbing up the left wrist in a tracery of fine grey lines, like frost on a window, like the veins of a leaf.
"Margot."
"Don't. Don't say you're sorry. Don't say you should have stayed. Don't say you'll make it right. Just tell me what you brought from the market."
"I didn't bring anything."
"Then go to bed. The room at the end of the hall is made up. It has a draft and the mattress is thin, but it's yours."
"Margot."
"Sera." Margot closed her eyes. "I'm tired. I'm always tired now. We'll talk in the morning."
Sera stayed where she was until Margot's breathing evened out into the shallow rhythm of sleep. Then she rose, pulled the blanket higher around her sister's shoulders, and left the room. The hallway was dark. The boards creaked under her feet.
She did not go to the room at the end of the hall. She went instead to the window seat at the landing and sat there, her knees drawn up, watching the moon rise over the orchard. The curfew would begin in an hour. The rationing would tighten. Somewhere in the village, the healer's door was closed, and inside, the old fool was perhaps already drunk.
She must have slept. She did not remember closing her eyes, but when she opened them the window was full of grey pre-dawn light and someone was coughing downstairs.
Not Margot's cough. Deeper. Rougher. The cough of a man who had swallowed smoke.
She was on her feet before she was fully awake. The stairs groaned under her. She found Tobias in the kitchen, bent over the table, his shoulders heaving, one hand pressed flat against the wood.
"Tobias."
He did not turn. Another cough tore out of him, and this time she heard the wetness in it, the rattle. He spat into his hand.
She saw it in the grey half-light. The sputum was the color of ash. Grey. Silver-tinged. And threaded through it, something that caught the weak light from the window and threw it back. Something that glittered.
"Tobias." Her voice was a whisper now. "Show me your chest."
"Sera, it's nothing. I breathed smoke from the kiln, I was burning off the old hives, I, "
"Show me your chest."
He straightened slowly. His face was the color of tallow. He pulled his shirt open with hands that shook.
The rash was there. Across his chest, from collarbone to sternum, a flowering of grey crystalline patterns, like frost on a window, like the veins of a leaf, like something that had been poured under his skin and had set there. It did not look like a rash. It looked like a map of somewhere Sera had never been.
She heard Margot's door open upstairs. Heard the slow shuffle of feet on the boards.
"Is that him?" Margot's voice came down the stairwell, thin and sharp. "Is that Tobias?"
Sera could not answer. She was looking at her brother's chest, at the grey glitter of the Blight taking root in him, at the dawn coming up over the orchard like a slow bruise, like the end of something, like the beginning of something worse.
Margot appeared at the top of the stairs. Her hands were pressed against the doorframe. Her eyes, in the grey light, were the eyes of someone who had been expecting this news for a long time.
"Well," she said softly. "So it begins."
The silence lasted only a moment. Then Margot was moving, descending the stairs with a hand trailing along the banister as though she needed it to keep her balance, though she did not. She had always hated being helped. She reached the bottom stair and looked at her brother.
Tobias had not moved. His shirt hung open. The grey on his chest caught the dawn light and held it, the way a glass holds water, and his face was the face of a man watching his own house burn.
"Get that shirt fastened," Margot said. "You'll catch your death."
"Sister," he said. The word came out thick. "What do we do?"
"We do nothing that costs coin." Margot's voice was paper-thin and final. "I've had three Sister-Healers look at me. Each one took the silver and left me with a tincture that did nothing. Each one wanted more. I won't have this house sold for the sake of a stranger in grey wool who will tell you to rest and drink broth and take a poultice of marigold."
"Margot," Sera said.
"Don't." Margot turned to her. The light from the window was behind her and her face was in shadow, only the line of her jaw visible, the sharp almost-translucent edge of her cheekbone, the wet dark of her eyes. "Don't you dare tell me I'm being foolish. I have counted the coin in this house. I have counted it twice. I have counted it three times."
"Margot."
"There are four of us left. The orchard is going to blight. The boundary walls are falling. There is enough for one winter of flour and salt, perhaps two if Tobias eats like a sparrow, which he will not do because he is a Voss and Vosses eat like horses. There is not enough for a Sister-Healer."
"So we let him die?" Sera's voice rose. She hadn't meant it to.
"I'm not suggesting that." Margot's tone did not change. Cold as creek-water, and twice as clear. "I am suggesting that we do not beggar ourselves on the chance of a cure that has never, in three visitations, done a thing for me."
Tobias was looking at the floor.
"If it comes to it," Margot said, "I have my medicines. What is left of them. Whatever ails him, it cannot be so different from what ails me."
Sera opened her mouth. Closed it.
She thought of the cartographer. Caelum Ashford. He had been a physician's assistant, once. He might still be. He might have things in his satchel. He would not charge a fee. He would not charge anything, perhaps. Or he would charge something she could trade.
"You go to him." Margot had read her face. "Don't deny it."
"I didn't say anything."
"Sera. You've had that look since you came home. That look like a dog who knows where the rabbit is. Where is he?"
Sera did not lie to her sister. She had tried it once, years ago, and had not been able to do it since. "There is a ruined chapel," she said. "A cliff. Beneath the roots of a fallen oak. He goes there sometimes, to draw."
"The disgraced lord's son." Margot's mouth made a shape that was almost a smile. "Drawing chapels in his spare time."
"He's a cartographer. And a physician's assistant. He might, "
"He might. He might not." Margot shrugged. The movement was small and cost her something. "Go. Find him. But you will not promise him anything you cannot pay. And you will not bring him into this house. Not tonight. He will look at me and see what I am. I will not have a stranger looking at me."
"Margot."
"Go, Sister."
Sera went.
The cliff path was a thing her father had cut into the rock when she was small, a single-file track that ran along the seaward face of the headland from the Voss orchard to the place where the headland fell away into the sea. The sea was below her all the way. She could hear it, and smell it, the iodine and the rot of weed, and the air coming up off the cliffs was colder than the air at the house.
She walked because she did not dare to run. The path was narrow. Stones slipped under her boots. Once she pressed her shoulder against the cliff face and felt the rock wet through her coat, and the cold went through to her ribs, and she thought of her father's hands cutting the path, his breathing heavy in the dark before dawn, his lantern swinging. He had been gone four years. The orchard had been his. The path had been his. He had cut it because his own father, in his last year, had wanted to see the sea again from somewhere high. Sera had been small. She had walked behind him with a smaller lantern.
She remembered the swing of the lantern. She remembered the salt smell, even then.
She reached the headland. The oak was there, fallen, half its roots pulled out of the earth and holding the cliff together the way a hand holds a door shut. The chapel was under it. She had not known about it, years ago. She had known about it three days after she came home, when she had seen Caelum walking from that direction, and had gone to look for herself, and had found the entrance under the roots, narrow, hidden by bracken.
She went in.
Below the roots, the chapel opened. It was small. It had no roof any more. Stars were above her, and the smell of damp stone and old peat. There was an altar at one end, or what was left of it, two stones and a slab between them. There were drawings on the walls. Maps, mostly. Stars. The shape of the headland from above, marked with careful ink.
Caelum was sitting on the slab.
He had a lantern set at his feet. It was burning low. He had a leather folder open on his knee, and he was drawing
He had a leather folder open on his knee, and he was drawing. The nib of his pen moved in small, precise strokes. He did not look up when she came in. He knew she was there. The lantern at his feet threw his shadow long against the wall behind him, and on that wall she could see the faint shapes of older maps, their ink faded to the brown of old tea, the coastline drawn in careful curves.
She stopped at the altar stones. She did not sit. She watched his hand move.
"You left the lantern burning," she said.
"Yes."
"You said you wouldn't."
"I lied."
The pen kept moving. The nib scratched against the paper, a sound like a match struck in a quiet room. Somewhere above them, wind moved through the roots of the fallen oak and made a low, hollow sound, like water in a pipe.
Sera set her own lantern down on the altar slab. She did not light it. The dark was better. The dark let her watch him without being watched back, or so she told herself, which was a kind of lie she was getting too used to.
"What are you drawing?"
"The path up to the headland. The one your father cut." He did not look up. "I'm trying to get the turn right, where it bends east before the last rise. The contour's wrong on the old survey."
"You drew it in daylight."
"The light's wrong in daylight here. Too flat. The shadows tell you where the ground drops." He paused, the nib held above the paper. "Your father knew that. He cut the path so it would catch the morning shadow off the western slope. You'd see the line of the drop before you came to it."
She had not known that. She had walked the path as a child and never thought about why it bent where it bent.
"You shouldn't be up here after dark," he said. "The wall's given again, east of the third post. I marked it this afternoon. Another hard frost and it'll come down."
"I'll tell Tobias."
"Tobias won't come up. He hasn't come up since the spring."
"Then I'll tell him to come up."
"He'll bring the men. He'll fill it with rubble. It'll hold for a season and then it'll go again." The nib touched the paper. The scratch resumed. "I've been thinking about a drain. A shallow cut along the upper side of the path, pitched into the gully. It would take the worst of the runoff off the face before it freezes."
"You've been thinking about it since spring?"
"I've been up here most nights since spring."
She looked at him then. She looked at the line of his shoulders, the way his coat was folded back at the collar because he had been walking hard before he came in. She looked at his hands. They were cold-red at the knuckles. He had not worn gloves, or he had taken them off to draw.
"Why?" she said.
He did not answer for a while. The pen moved. The lantern at his feet guttered, then steadied.
"Because I'm making a record," he said. "Because nobody else is."
"A record of what?"
"Of what was here. The path. The chapel. The orchard wall. The line of the coast before it falls in." He set the pen down, finally, and looked up at her. His face in the low light was thinner than it had been when he came back to the district in the autumn. "Your father kept a record. Ink and paper, in that folder he kept in the cold cupboard under the stairs. I saw it once, when I was a boy. He showed me. He said it was for the people who came after."
Sera remembered the folder. She had not looked at it in years. She had found it when she came back, in the autumn, and she had set it on the shelf and not opened it.
"He didn't show it to me," she said.
"He showed me because I was interested. You were too young." A pause. "I was interested in the wrong way. I wanted to copy the coastline. He wanted me to learn the lines of the land so I would know where not to build, where not to cut, where the water would go in a hard year." He picked the pen up again, turned it in his fingers. "I learned the coastline. I didn't learn the rest."
"And now?"
"Now I'm learning the rest. Too late to use most of it. But the record should be kept."
She sat down on the altar slab across from him. The stone was cold through her skirt. The chapel smelled of damp and old smoke, and under that, the faint salt that came up off the sea even on a still night.
"Margot is worse," she said.
He did not look surprised. He set the pen down again, carefully, in the gutter of the leather folder.
"How much worse?"
"She didn't get up today. Yesterday she sat in the chair by the kitchen fire for an hour. The day before that she sat for two." Sera heard her own voice, flat, reporting. "The cough is different. There's a sound in it now, low down, that wasn't there last week."
"The Blight?"
"That's what Father Briar says. That's what the village says." She looked at her own hands in the dim light. "I don't know what I say."
He was quiet. The wind moved above them. The lantern flame leaned sideways and came back.
"There's a physician in Hartwell," he said. "Old man, trained in the southern universities before they closed the schools. He kept his books. He sees people still, if they can pay, and if they can get to him."
"Hartwell is two days."
"Three, with the river up."
"I can't leave her."
"I know."
"I can't take her either. The road from here to the bridge is washed out below the mill. I checked this morning."
"I know. I walked it last week."
She looked at him. He looked back. In the low light his eyes were dark, and she could not read them.
"Why did you come back?" she said.
He did not answer at once. He picked up the pen, turned it, set it down. He closed the leather folder and buckled it. He leaned forward and trimmed the lantern wick with a small pair of scissors from his breast pocket. The flame steadied and grew a little.
"I came back because my father died," he said. "In the spring. I got the letter in June. I came back in August."
"Your father."
"My father." He sat back. "He was in the workhouse at Marford. He had been there for nine years. I did not visit. I was told, when I left, that if I came back I would be turned away at the gate. So I did not come back."
She had not known this. She had known, in the village way of knowing, that his father had been taken away. She had not known where, or when, or what had happened after.
"I came back to see the house," he said. "Ashford Keep. The orchard. The boundary walls. The coastline. I wanted to see what had held and what had gone. I walked it all in three weeks. I made notes. I thought I would leave after that."
"But you didn't."
"No."
"Why?"
He was quiet for a long time. The wind above them rose and fell. The oak roots creaked. Somewhere down the slope a sheep coughed in the dark.
"Because the orchard wall is falling in," he said, "and the path your father cut is washing out, and the chapel under this tree was not on any of my maps when I was a boy, and someone should be making a record of what is here before it is not here." He looked down at his hands. "And because your sister is ill and you came home for her and you should not have to do it alone. And I cannot help with that. But I can do this."
Sera looked at him across the slab. The lantern at his feet threw his shadow long against the wall behind him, and on the wall she could see the older maps, the coastline drawn in careful brown ink, and on the slab between them the leather folder with its new map inside it, the path bent east before the last rise.
"You can't do this without me knowing," she said.
"I know."
"And you can't do it without telling me what you're drawing."
"I can do that. I'll show you each one, when it's dry."
"And you can't come up here alone in the dark without telling me you've gone."
He looked up at her then, and there was something in his face she had not seen before, or had not let herself see. It was not softness. It was the look of a man who had been holding a weight for a long time and had been told, very quietly, that he could set part of it down.
"No," he said. "I can't do that."
She nodded. She sat for a while longer, and then she stood, and he stood, and they went out together under the fallen oak. The stars were very bright. The sea was a sound below them, not a sight. The path bent east before the last rise, and she saw, for the first time, why it bent there. The shadow of the western slope lay across it like a finger pointing down, and at the end of the shadow the ground fell away into the gully, and the sea breathed below.
He walked her to the gate of the orchard. She took her lantern from him and lit it from his. The flame caught and steadied.
"Tomorrow," she said.
"Tomorrow," he said.
She went down the path. She did not look back. The salt smell came up off the sea and mixed with the smoke from the lantern, and the dark was very kind, and the cold went through to her ribs, and she kept walking.