Rain arrived before Iris Vant did.
It came down in grey sheets across Hollowmere, drumming the metal awnings of the hardware store and the slanted shingles of the feed shop, turning the single main street into a shallow river of brown water and hoofprints. By the time the bus shuddered to its stop at the corner of Grieve and Lampblack, the town had the sodden look of something half-drowned and uninterested in being saved.
Iris stepped off the lowered step into water that came over her boot tops. The manila envelope under her arm was sealed tight, her name written on the back in her own careful hand, the recipient's name on the front in a stranger's. She had not been told what the envelope contained. She had not been told why she was the one carrying it. She had been told only that it had to be hand-delivered to a woman in Hollowmere, and that if she failed, the envelope should be burned unread.
She adjusted the collar of her coat against the rain and looked up the empty street.
A cordon had been strung across the road fifty yards ahead, a length of yellow tape looped between two sawhorses and the iron post of a lamp. Behind it, three figures stood with their backs to her, wearing the dark green jackets of the Civil Reconciliation Corps. One of them held a rifle across his chest. Another smoked a cigarette, cupping it beneath his hand against the weather. The third was writing in a notebook, his head bent low, the water beading on the brim of his cap.
She had heard of the Corps before this. Everyone had. In the city, the stories traveled under a dozen names, none of them official. She had assumed, the way city people do, that such things happened only elsewhere. Until six weeks ago, when her sister began to cough blood into a handkerchief and did not stop.
Iris pushed the thought down. She was good at that.
She approached the cordon. The man with the notebook looked up first. He had the long face of someone who had once been handsome and was now merely tired. A thin scar ran the length of his jaw, disappearing into his collar.
"Street's closed past this point," he said. His tone was not unkind. It was the tone of a man reciting a thing he had already said forty times that morning. "You got business on this side of the line?"
"I have an address." Iris showed him the envelope, though not the name on the front. "Lampblack Lane. Number seven."
The man glanced at the envelope, then at her. "You from the city?"
"Yes."
He made a small sound in his throat. "You here to see somebody about a relative?"
The cigarette smoker turned. He was younger than the first, with a dusting of freckles across his nose and a shadow of beard he had not bothered to shave that morning. His eyes moved over her face with a particular kind of curiosity, the kind that catalogued her for later discussion. "We get a lot of that lately. People coming up on the buses. Family. Lawyers. Some with letters, some with nothing but questions."
"I have a delivery," Iris said. "Only a delivery."
The third man, the one with the rifle, had not turned around. He kept his back to her, watching the far end of the street where the rain erased the road into a grey wash. His silence had the particular weight of someone who had decided not to be involved.
"Lampblack Lane," the notebook man repeated. He wrote something down without looking at the page. "You're the third this week asking for that address. Lot of interest in a quiet little dead-end road lately."
"Is there a problem with the address?"
"There's a problem with everything past this line, miss." He gestured with his pen at the empty street beyond. "The whole north side of town is under restriction. Quarantine protocols. People getting sick. People dying. The Corps has authority here now, civil and otherwise. You can turn around and go back to the bus. Or you can wait at the station house for a permit, which might be ready by Tuesday."
"It's Thursday."
"It might be Tuesday," he agreed.
The freckled one spoke up again. "What's in the envelope, if you don't mind me asking?"
"I do mind."
A pause. The rain filled it.
"All right," said the notebook man. He tucked his pen behind his ear and gave her the smallest of smiles, the kind that meant nothing. "Stand over by the post office awning, then. Out of the rain. Sergeant Corsa should be along within the hour. If he says you can pass, you pass. If not, you take the evening bus home and try again."
He did not sound as though he expected her to try again. She stepped back from the cordon and walked toward the awning he had indicated. The post office was a low brick building with brass letterboxes along its front and a wooden bench beneath the overhang. She sat. The wood was already soaked through, and the cold of it came up through her coat and her skirt and into her thighs, but she did not move.
Behind her, the rifleman shifted his weight. She heard the creak of his holster strap and the small click of his lighter as he lit a fresh cigarette from the embers of his first. She did not turn to look. She unbuttoned the top of her coat and checked the envelope once more. The paper had begun to warp at the edges from the damp. She smoothed it flat with her palm and tucked it back beneath her arm, against her ribs, where her own body heat would keep it from softening further.
Across the street, a woman had come to the window of a boarding house. She stood behind the glass with her arms folded, watching Iris with the expression of someone trying to decide whether the new arrival was a curiosity or a threat. After a moment, the woman raised two fingers to her lips and then pointed them at Iris. A ward against ill luck. Then she stepped back from the glass and the curtain fell closed.
Iris did not acknowledge her. She watched the street instead. A cat crossed the road without hurry, its fur plastered to its spine. Somewhere down the lane, a shutter banged against a wall in a wind that had stopped blowing two hours ago.
She thought about her sister. She had not allowed herself to do that for almost an hour.
Maren had been three years younger than Iris, and the kind of pretty that made strangers offer her things for no reason, and the kind of sick that took her without warning and without leaving a mark that any physician could name. It had begun with a cough. Then a heaviness in the chest. Then a faintness when she stood. Then the blood. The physicians had called it consumption, then decline, then a wasting sickness without a proper name. They had given her teas and tinctures and the specific mercy of not saying what they suspected. Iris had sat at her bedside for eleven days, holding her hand, watching the light leave her face in increments small enough to deny.
When Maren died, Iris had been the one to close her eyes. She had been the one to choose the shroud. She had been the one to sign the burial permit and stand at the graveside while the priest spoke of better worlds. She had carried all of it with the same smooth composure she carried everything, and she had walked out of the cemetery that afternoon with the understanding that something had followed her home.
The envelope had arrived in the mail three weeks after the funeral. No return address. No postage stamp, only a hand cancellation mark from somewhere far enough north that the ink had smeared. Inside the outer envelope had been this one, sealed, her name on the back in her own handwriting, though she had not written it. The recipient's name on the front had been a woman named Lenna Garrick, of Lampblack Lane.
Iris had never heard of Lenna Garrick. She had never been to Hollowmere. She had not known, until the envelope arrived, that Hollowmere existed.
She had opened the outer envelope and found the inner one sealed, and she had been afraid to break the seal. She had held it to the light, listening to the faint whisper of whatever lay inside shifting against the paper, and she had decided that whoever had sent it had chosen her for a reason and she would deliver it as she had been asked.
The bus ticket had arrived four days later, with a note in the same careful hand: Leave Thursday morning. Bring nothing that cannot be burned.
She had brought nothing that could not be burned.
A sound at the far end of the street drew her attention. A man was walking through the rain toward the cordon, his hat pulled low over his brow, his coat heavy with water. He was tall, and walked with the slow, deliberate gait of someone who had spent his life lifting heavier things than himself. As he drew closer, she saw that he had a carpenter's pencil tucked behind his ear and a smear of pale dust across the knuckles of his right hand.
He stopped at the cordon and spoke quietly with the notebook man. She could not hear what was said, but she saw the notebook man's expression change. The freckled one looked away. The rifleman turned, finally, and the three of them regarded the newcomer with the wary respect of men who knew him and were not entirely sure what to make of him.
After a moment, the notebook man lifted the tape. The tall man ducked under it and crossed to her side of the line. He looked toward the post office awning and saw her sitting there. He did not approach. He stood for a moment in the rain, water streaming from the brim of his hat, studying her the way a man studies a fence post he intends to mend, deciding where to begin.
Then he walked over. He stopped at a polite distance and removed his hat. His hair was dark and plastered to his forehead. His face was long and weathered and not unkind.
"You're the one asking about Lampblack Lane," he said. It was not a question.
"Yes."
He looked at the envelope under her arm. "I'm Eli Garrick," he said. "Lenna is my sister."
"Mae," he said. The word came out rough, like he'd been holding it in his throat for some time. "Mae is what I call her. Maelys is her mother's name for her."
Iris said nothing. She watched him the way one watches a man who has come to tell you something he has carried a long way.
He glanced toward the post office awning, then back to her. "You got somewhere to sit that's not under a dripping roof?"
"Here is fine."
He considered that. Then he nodded, as if she'd passed some test he hadn't told her about, and lowered himself onto the post office step beside her. He kept a careful distance. The wood of the step was dark with rain, and the smell of it rose up between them, wet pine and older rot. He set his hat on his knee. The rain kept falling in that patient, ceaseless way, drumming on the awning above them, filling the gutters, turning the mud at the edge of the road into a slow, brown tongue that crept toward the river.
"She went out eight days ago," he said. "Down to the store for thread. She had a quarter and a needle and a length of blue ribbon she'd been saving. She was going to finish a dress she'd started for the Rivetts' girl. She liked that kind of work." He paused. "She was good at it. Her hands were steady. Whatever it was that was taking her, it hadn't touched her hands yet."
Iris's throat tightened. She thought of Lenna's face in the photograph, the way the eyes had looked past the camera.
"Eight days is a long time," she said.
"Yes."
"Have you searched?"
"Every road. Every hollow. Every she'd between here and the county line. Otis Vrell took his boys out with lanterns the first three nights. Wen Argide posted the notices. Father Bramwell said the prayers." He stopped. His hands, resting on his knees, were large and rough and very still. "We found nothing. No trace. No word."
A wagon passed in the road, its wheels sucking at the mud, the driver hunched beneath a canvas that smelled of wet hemp and old onions. The driver did not look at them. The mule did, briefly, with the long-suffering eye of an animal that has opinions about weather.
"There's something else," Eli said. He did not look at her. "Something I didn't put in the letter. Couldn't. Didn't have the words for it then. I do now." He drew a breath. "The night she disappeared, there was a smell. In the lane. The kind of smell you get when a forge has been burning wrong, when the metal's been overheated and the smoke turns thick and sweet. That was the smell."
Iris felt the cold move through her. She kept her face still.
"That same smell was on her," he said. "On her clothes. On her hair. I was the last one to see her, you understand. She came back to the house to put on a shawl. The blue one with the fringe. I was at the bench, working a joint. She stood in the doorway and asked if I wanted anything from the store. I said no. She said she'd be back before dark." He swallowed. "She wasn't."
"You didn't tell the others."
"No."
"Why?"
He turned to her then. His eyes were the color of river water, pale and unreadable. "Because Wen would have made it political. Otis would have made it military. Father Bramwell would have made it theological." He spoke each name with a care that was not quite affection. "And I didn't want it to be any of those things. Not yet. I wanted it to be hers. Just hers. A girl who went out for thread and didn't come back." He looked down at his hands. "I wanted one more day of that."
The rain had softened. The drumming on the awning had become a hush.
"I should have come to you sooner," he said. "I read what you wrote about the others. The clerk in Brayton. The schoolgirl in Portshade. The boy up at the mining camp. I read it three times." He touched his breast pocket, where she imagined the envelope had lived until he handed it to her. "I hoped you'd say no."
"I almost did."
"I know."
A door opened across the street. The herbalist, Marget Hollis, stepped out onto the porch of her shop with a tin pail in either hand. She was a small woman, sharp-shouldered, with a face like a dried apple and eyes that missed nothing. She set the pails down and looked across the road at the two figures on the post office step. She did not wave. She did not call out. She looked for a long moment, then went back inside and shut the door.
Iris watched the door close. "She knows something," she said.
"She knows everything," Eli said. "That's her trade." He paused. "She also knows I owe her money for medicines she gave Lenna. For the first two weeks. Before." He did not finish.
"Before what?"
He looked at her. "Before Lenna stopped being able to keep them down."
The words landed in her chest like a small, hard stone.
"How long," Iris said. "How long had she been sick when she disappeared?"
"Three weeks. Maybe four." He spoke carefully, the way one speaks when one is trying not to lie and not quite managing to tell the whole truth. "She kept saying it was nothing. A tiredness. A weight. I told her to see Marget. She went. Marget gave her tonics. They didn't take." He paused. "The last week, she couldn't sleep. She'd sit by the window and watch the lane like she was waiting for someone. Or something."
"What did she say she was waiting for?"
"She didn't say. I'd ask, and she'd smile, and tell me I worried too much." His voice had gone thin. "I do. I worry too much. And it didn't save her."
They sat with that for a moment. The rain had nearly stopped. A pale, uncertain light was beginning to work its way through the clouds, turning the underside of the awning from grey to a watery pewter. Somewhere up the street, a shutter banged in a wind that had shifted.
"I need to see her room," Iris said.
He nodded. "I thought you might."
"I need to see the lane."
"I can take you."
"Not yet." She looked toward the herbalist's shop. "I need to see Marget Hollis first."
Eli was quiet for a moment. "Be careful with her," he said. "She's not unkind, but she keeps her own counsel. She'll give you half of what she knows and watch you flounder with the rest." He hesitated. "She was fond of Lenna. More than she'll admit."
Iris stood. The envelope was damp under her arm. She brushed the rain from her coat and looked down at him. He did not rise. He sat on the step with his hat in his hands, looking up at her with the expression of a man who has just set something down that he'd been carrying a very long way and is not yet sure his arms will know what to do without it.
"Thank you," she said.
"Don't thank me yet," he said. "You haven't seen the lane."
She crossed the street. The mud pulled at her boots with a sound like a slow, wet kiss. The shop door was painted a color that had once been green and was now a kind of weary grey-green, peeling in long curls that smelled of linseed and neglect. She knocked.
A bolt slid. The door opened a hand's width. One eye appeared in the gap, sharp and dark, set in a nest of creased skin.
"Iris Vant," Iris said. "I've come about Maelys Garrick."
The eye studied her.
"I know who you are," the voice behind the door said. It was a voice like a knife drawn across a whetstone, dry and precise. "I've read your pamphlets."
"They weren't pamphlets."
"No. They were worse. They were true." The door opened the rest of the way. "Come in. Wipe your feet. I just swept."
She stepped into a room that smelled of dried thyme, lamp oil, and something underneath that was sharper and older, the smell of roots pulled from cold ground. The shop was narrow and deep, the walls lined from floor to ceiling with jars of every size, each labeled in a small, fierce hand. There were bundles of herbs hanging from the rafters, and a counter at the back behind which Marget Hollis stood with her arms folded, watching her with the expression of a woman who has decided to be surprised by nothing and would consider it a personal failing to be proven wrong.
"She was my brother's girl," Marget said. "I raised her when her mother died. I taught her the names of things. The uses of things." She paused. "I could not teach her what was in her."
Iris set the envelope on the counter. "Tell me."
Marget did not touch it. "What do you want me to tell you? That she came to me in the second week with shadows under her eyes and a taste in her mouth like old pennies? That I gave her everything I had and none of it took? That the last time I saw her, she stood in that very spot where you're standing and told me she was leaving and not to follow?" Her voice did not rise. It thinned. "She smiled at me. My brother's girl. My Lenna. Smiled at me and walked out the door and I have not seen her since."
"Did she say where she was going?"
"No."
"Did she say why?"
"No." Marget's hands tightened on her arms. "She said she had to. That there was something she had to find. That it had been calling her for days and she could not bear the sound of it any longer." She paused. "I told her she was fevered. I told her to sit. She sat. For perhaps a minute. Then she stood again and she said, very polite, very gentle, 'Auntie, please,' and she went."
The word "please" hung in the air between them, small and bright and terrible.
"The smell," Iris said. "Did you notice it?"
Marget looked at her for a long moment. "What smell?"
"The forge smell. The overheated metal."
Something moved behind Marget's eyes. Not surprise. Recognition.
"Who told you about that?"
"Eli."
Marget's mouth thinned. "Of course he did." She turned away and began to rearrange a jar that did not need rearranging. "Yes. There was a smell. I thought it was the tanner's. Or the smith's, down by the river. I didn't think much of it then." She stopped. "I think much of it now."
"Did Lenna ever mention the smell?"
"Once." Marget's voice dropped. "The day before she left. She said she'd been dreaming of it. A smoke that tasted like sweet metal. She said it reminded her of something she couldn't name." She turned back. "I have been an herbalist for forty-one years. I have seen fevers and wasting and the slow turning of blood. I have never seen a sickness that makes a person walk out into the rain with a smile."
Iris looked at the jars on the wall. Each one held a small, suspended world of color, amber and rust and a green so dark it was almost black. They looked, in the lamplight, like eyes watching from the other side of glass.
"Marget," she said. "I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer me truly."
"I always answer truly. It's the lies that wear me out."
"Have there been others? In this village. Before Lenna. The same way."
Marget was very still.
"Once," she said. "Twelve years ago. A boy. He walked into the river one night and didn't come back. They found him three days later, a mile downstream. He had been dead for some time. There was that smell on him. The forge smell. I told myself it was the water. The mud. Anything." She paused. "I was a fool. I knew better then. I know better now."
"How old was the boy?"
"Seventeen. Same age as Lenna." She looked at Iris. "Same look in his eyes, the last time I saw him. That far-off, listening look. Like he was hearing something none of us could hear."
The lamp on the counter guttered. Outside, the rain had stopped entirely, and the silence it left behind was the kind of silence that listens back.
Iris picked up the envelope. "I need to see the lane," she said. "Will you tell me where it is?"
Marget looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and reached under the counter for a piece of paper and a pencil that had been sharpened to a point no sensible person would have used. She drew a map. It was quick and precise. She slid it across the counter.
"East end of the village," she said. "Past the old smithy. Past the cooper's. Where the road turns to mud and the mud turns to water." She paused. "Don't go alone."
"I'll have Eli."
"Eli will do," Marget said. "He knows the ground." She hesitated, then added, in a voice so low Iris almost missed it, "He knows it better than he should."
Iris folded the map and tucked it into the envelope. She turned to go.
"Miss Vant," Marget said.
She stopped.
"My brother's girl. Bring her back. Or don't. But bring me an answer." The old woman's eyes were bright and hard. "I have lived a long time with questions. I would like, before the end, to have one less."
Iris stepped out into the street. The clouds had broken in places, and a thin, reluctant sun was making its way through. Eli was still on the post office step, hat in his hands, watching her. He rose when she came near.
"Well?" he said.
"East end of the village," she said. "Past the smithy."
He looked at her. He did not ask what Marget had said. He read it on her face.
"Now?" he said.
"Now," she said.
They walked together toward the east end of the village, where the road turned to mud and the mud turned to water, and the smoke of something no one had lit yet waited, patient as a held breath, to be smelled.
The smithy stood dark and cold, its forge a black mouth in the long shadow of its chimney. Eli paused at the corner of it, one hand lifted, palm flat, the way a man stops another in the dark. Iris stopped behind him. The mud began a few paces on, a slick black tongue that lapped at the edge of the packed road and swallowed the ruts whole.
"Iris," he said, low, not looking back. "When we get there. Stay behind me."
"Eli."
"I mean it." His voice was not unkind. It was the voice of a man who had seen something he did not have words for and had not yet forgiven himself for surviving it. "Whatever we find. You stay behind me."
She did not answer. She stepped past him into the mud.
The road gave under her boots with a soft wet sound, like a throat clearing. The smell rose to meet them before the smoke did, a thick sweetness underlaid with something older and colder, the smell of a thing that had been alive and was no longer bothering to pretend otherwise. Eli walked with his head slightly bowed, his hat in his hand, his shoulders set against whatever was coming. He did not speak. He did not need to. The ground was speaking for him, in the slow speech of water finding its level.
Past the cooper's, where the barrels had been left out in the rain and the iron bands had rusted to a dull orange, the road curved and the village ended. There was a fence here once, low and practical, the kind a man puts up to mark what is his. Half of it was down. The posts leaned at angles that suggested a long, slow argument with the weather. Beyond the fence the land dropped away into a stand of alders, their leaves still dark and damp, their roots in black water. Iris felt the ground change under her feet, from mud to something softer, something that wanted to be left alone.
"There," Eli said.
She saw it.
It was not a house. It had been a house once. The chimney still stood, taller than the trees around it, and the stones of the foundation made a low broken ring that the alders had begun to lean into. The rest was ruin and rot, the timbers gone soft as bread soaked in broth, the roof a memory of a shape that had not been a shape for years. Smoke rose from the center of it, a thin pale thread that did not behave like smoke. It went sideways. It went up. It went wherever it pleased. There was no fire. There was no ember. There was no heat that Iris could feel from where she stood, and yet the smell was stronger here than anywhere else in the village, as if the ruin were a mouth and the air were what it breathed.
Eli stopped at the edge of the foundation. He did not step over. He stood with his hat against his chest and looked at the place where a door had been.
"Father Bramwell used to come here," he said. His voice was low and careful. "When Lenna was bad. When the sickness had her. He would come here and he would pray, and I don't know what he prayed for, but he would come back looking like a man who had been beaten. He would not speak of it. He would sit with her and hold her hand and not speak of it."
Iris looked at him. The afternoon light, what little the clouds allowed through, fell on his face and made him look older than he was.
"Did he help her?" she said.
"He didn't kill her." Eli paused. "I have to believe that's the same thing."
The smoke shifted. It thickened for a moment and then thinned again, and in the thinning Iris saw, for a heartbeat, the shape of something standing among the broken timbers. It was tall. It was thin. It was the shape of a man wearing a coat that hung too long. It did not move. It did not breathe. It only stood, the way a coat stands on a hook when there is no one wearing it.
Then the smoke closed again, and the shape was gone.
"Eli," Iris said.
"I saw."
"What was it?"
"I don't know." He was very still. "I have seen it before. In dreams. In the dark behind my eyes when I can't sleep. I have seen it and I have prayed not to see it again and here it is, standing in the ruins like it owns the place."
The shape did not return. The smoke went on with its slow, indifferent weaving.
"Eli," Iris said. "Father Bramwell."
He nodded, as if she had only confirmed something he had known for a long time and had not yet permitted himself to say out loud.
"The envelope," he said.
She drew it out. The paper was soft with handling. The wax had cracked but not given way. She held it in both hands and looked at it as if it were a thing that could bite.
"He told us not to open it unless we were willing to learn the truth," she said. "He said the truth would not be kind."
"He also told us to burn it and go home," Eli said. "And he didn't sound like a man who expected us to listen."
"No." A breath, almost a laugh. "He didn't."
She broke the seal.
The paper inside was not one sheet. It was many, folded small, pressed together, the edges darkened with age. She unfolded them with care, the way one handles a bird with a broken wing, and she read, and as she read her face went very still.
"It is a list," she said.
"Of?"
"Names." Her voice had gone flat and far away. "Dates. And beside each name, a notation. Three kinds of notation. There are three marks he used. A cross. A circle. A line through the whole entry."
"What do they mean?"
She did not answer at once. She turned a page, and another, and another, and the smoke shifted around her as if it were curious what she had found.
"The crosses," she said, "are the dead. The ones who died cleanly, who were blessed and buried and remembered."
"And the circles?"
"The living." She swallowed. "The ones he blessed but who did not die."
"The lines through the entry."
She did not speak for a long moment. The smoke went on with its weaving. The alders leaned in closer, listening.
"The lines," she said at last, "are the ones he could not bury."
Eli looked at the ruin. He looked at the smoke. He looked at the place where the shape had stood.
"Father Bramwell is a line through the entry," he said.
"Yes."
"And he is in there."
"I don't know," she said. "The list is old. Some of the names I don't recognize. Some I do." She looked up at him. "Lenna is on the list."
He took the page from her hands. He held it the way a man holds a thing that has cut him, gentle and wary. He read her name. He read the mark beside it. He read it again.
"Circle," he said. "She is a circle."
"She is a circle," Iris said. "She was blessed. She did not die."
"But she did die."
"She died after he left." Iris's voice was careful. "He left the village nine days ago. She died nine days ago. The list was made before. He knew, Eli. He knew she was going to die, and he marked her as one who would not, and he left before it happened."
Eli folded the page. His hands were not steady.
"He couldn't stay," he said.
"He couldn't stay," she agreed.
"Why?"
"Because he had done what he came to do." She looked at the ruin. "He came to this village. He did what Marget described, whatever that was. He marked the names. He wrote the list. And when it was done, he could not bear to be here when the last of them fell."
The smoke stirred. It came toward them, slow and curious, and Iris felt the warmth of it against her face, the wrong warmth, the warmth of a thing that had no right to be warm. She did not step back. Eli did not step back. They stood together at the edge of the foundation and watched the smoke move among the broken timbers, and the smoke moved as if it had somewhere to be.
From the trees at the far side of the ruin, a bird rose. It went up in a long, startled curve, crying once, and was gone. The cry hung in the air for a moment after the bird had vanished, as if the sound had been caught in the smoke and held there. Eli lifted his head and watched the place where the bird had been.
"We should go back," he said.
"Yes."
"Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow we begin."
Iris folded the papers and put them back into the envelope. The seal was broken. There would be no sealing it again. She held the envelope against her chest with one hand and reached out with the other and found Eli's arm, and they stood for a moment in the wet air at the edge of the ruin, listening to the smoke breathe.
"Come on," she said.
They walked back through the mud, past the cooper's, past the smithy, and the village received them without comment. The clouds had closed again. The thin sun was gone. Eli walked her to the boarding house and stood at the gate with his hat in his hands and the look of a man who had begun a thing he did not know how to end.
"Tomorrow," he said again.
"Tomorrow," she said.
She went inside. The envelope was in her hand. The list was in the envelope. The names were on the list. And somewhere in the village, in a house that was not a house, in a ruin that breathed, the shape of a man in a coat that hung too long was waiting, patient as a held breath, to be seen again.