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He is tall and he is in grey, bare-headed, his hair black and cut short, and his skin is the color of new tin. The bones of his face are too long for it, the jaw too narrow, the cheekbones standing out, cut and never smoothed, and his eyes are black all the way across, no white in them anywhere.

Every part of that face sits where a face keeps its parts, and he is still the worst thing I have ever looked at directly, in a room full of people looking at him.

The Ankou.

I have heard the word all my life without it meaning anything. Mothers use it on children who won’t come in. Katell used it in June about a bad week. There is one at Kerlann, out in the fen, they say, and everybody says it, and nobody checks.

Nobody I know has ever seen him, and here he is on the flags of the fish market, in the daylight, with his boots wet like anyone else’s.

I’m frightened. My knees have gone to water. I lock them. My hands are wet on the rail and I cannot make them dry.

Every other man in this hall has looked at my hips and my teeth. He is looking at my head.

He sets a purse on the bidding table. He does not say a number.

The auctioneer’s assistant gets the scales out, because a purse with no number on it gets weighed, and tips it into the pan.

I hear them before I see them.

Bells make you learn coins. Dropped metal tells you what it is. These come out soft and dull and wrong, no ring at all, and when I look, they are green-black at the edges, every one, and there is white paste in the crevices of the stamping.

Grave goods.

Somebody near the front says it out loud and then wishes he had not. Coins from the mouths of the dead. Passage-money, paid to the thing that does the carrying, and he has walked in here and put it on a scale to buy a woman with it, and the house cannot refuse it, because it is gold, and the rule is weight.

“Six hundred and twelve,” the assistant says. Her voice is not steady.

Perig Kerneau looks at the table. He looks at me. I watch him work out, in front of everybody, what that money is and where it has been.

He sits down.

“The bid stands at six hundred and twelve,” the auctioneer says, and his low easy pitch has gone up into the roof with everyone else’s. “Going once. Going twice.”

The hammer.

“The choice is the bride’s.” He says it to the boards rather than to me. “Fifty-one. Name him.”

I have known for six days that I am allowed to take the lower bid. The rule is the rule and the house makes it good.

Perig Kerneau would feed me, give me Sundays and a room with a bench, and I would grow old a glassmaker’s wife with a decent life, and I would never have to sit across a breakfast table from the Ankou.

Five hundred buys six months and change. Six hundred and twelve buys eight.

Two months more of a man’s life.

I do the sum twice on the block, because it is the reason, and because I would give a great deal for it to be the only one.

“Bring the bidders forward,” the auctioneer says, “so the lot may look at them.”

They come. The thing with the joints chimes. The merchant is a wet-looking man with rings. Perig will not lift his head. And the Ankou stands at the foot of the steps, and everyone else has moved along the front of the platform to be seen, and he has not moved at all.

“Fifty-one,” the auctioneer says again. “Name him.”

And the Ankou says, “Take your time.”

Three words, pitched low, and they do not carry. In a hall that throws everything into the roof, they come across four feet of air and stay exactly where they are put, and the back of my neck goes warm from the hairline down, and my body answers as it answered on the table last night, with two hundred people watching.

My knees give again. I lock them again.