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It cannot be him.

I tell myself the man last night was warm. He wasn’t. He was cold as a flagstone, I said so out loud, and he said it was always. I tell myself the man last night wore black and gold, and this one is in grey, and that is the stupidest thing I have ever held on to, because a man owns more than one coat.

I am looking at a creature out of a story people tell to frighten children, and my whole body is telling me, in the only language it has ever been fluent in, that I know this sound.

I ran from him once for Corentin’s sake. I will pick him now for the same sake, in front of two hundred people, and if the voice has anything to do with it I will never say so out loud.

“The quiet one,” I say.

It comes out perfectly clearly. The hall takes it up into the roof and hands it back to me thin, and it is the loudest thing I have ever said.

The auctioneer takes a moment. “Say it in full, please.”

“Him.” I take my hand off the rail and point, and my arm is steady, and I have no idea who is doing that. “The Ankou. Him.” And then, under it, for nobody but him and the four feet of air between us: “I know you.”

Nobody makes a sound. Two hundred people in a stone room and not one of them has anything to say, and I hear the gulls outside on the roof and a cart going past on the quay.

I come down the six steps. The loose one nearly has me again.

I stop where I can hear him without making him raise his voice. It is closer than I intended.

Up close he smells of rain on stone.

“Give him your hand, lot,” the auctioneer says. “Then the settlement room.”

So I put my hand out.

He takes it. His fingers close, and the cold of him goes through my palm and up my arm, and I have felt this exact cold before, last night, with my forehead against a stranger’s chest, laughing so hard I could not stand up.

I want the rest of him. Here, on the flags of the fish market, with the whole of Morlac looking, I want him, and I hate that it’s there.

He looks down at me. Nothing in that ruin of a face moves.

“Enora,” he says, “of the foundry.”

Nobody down here has said my name aloud all morning. He had it anyway.

I open my mouth, and what comes out is, “Your boots are wet,” because my mouth has never once waited for the rest of me, and he says, “Yes,” and leads me off the floor to the settlement room.

RIWAL

Her hand is still in mine when the registrar’s door shuts. It is warm. I have never wanted that from a person and I want it now, and I do not let go.

The settlement room is behind the fish scales and it is not built for me. Stone, a table, three chairs made for humans. The registrar is a small woman with ink on her thumb who has done this fifty times already today.

“Six hundred and twelve, weighed,” she says. “House commission at one twelfth. Lot share to the bride, on the day, in her own hand.” She counts it out. “Forty-nine gold. The remainder is five hundred and twelve. Where does it go?”

The coin on her scale is what the dying pay me. I brought it to this hall last night to buy the market’s sale register, and I did not buy it. The auctioneer sat downstairs with it until two in the morning and went home, and I was two floors above his head with my coat under a woman’s back, and I lost the night I meant to spend reading it.

That is my fault, and I have not stopped minding it.

I listen to where she sends it: half to the Order of the Third Well in the city, for the physicians and not the chapel, and half to the bell foundry past Morlac, into her master’s own hand.

“Two hundred and fifty-six to each.” The registrar writes it. “The house holds the price until the month is out. The Order treats on the house’s note from today. If the marriage is ended inside the thirty days, the price goes back to the buyer, less the bride’s share, and the Order’s note is cancelled.”

“And the sale register,” I tell her. “I meant to buy it last night. Send a copy to Kerlann with the Thursday carrier.”

The registrar adds a line beneath the account.