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Since then I have written those two words seven more times. A man at Trevern in the winter. Two in the spring. Four since May.

I carry the dead of the whole fen, and nearly all of them die of ordinary things. These eight did not. These eight were killed. Eight people in one year, in eight different houses, with nothing wrong in their bodies, emptied by something that comes to visit.

In the thirty-nine volumes behind me there is not one.

I can feel how long the feeding went on. I can feel nothing at all about what did it. That is how I am made. I read the damaged. I have never once been able to read the damager.

So I looked for what the eight houses had in common, and in June I found one thing. Three of them had sold a son or a daughter at the Morlac bride market. The market keeps a register of every sale, and sells copies after the ball.

If the other five houses were in it too, I would know where the killing starts. I would also have a list of every house it might go to next.

I wrote it at the foot of the June page, in my own hand: sale register, Morlac, after the ball. Then I went to the ball, and I did not buy it. I went up a stair with a bell-founder.

I am ashamed of that, and I would do it again. I have thought about the register perhaps twice since. I have thought about her on that table every hour I have been awake, and I am awake all of them.

Downstairs, something falls over and she says a word Corentin certainly taught her.

Malo finds me before noon.

“Madam has been through the north rooms,” he says. “She has opened the shutters in four of them and found the old tapestry in the third.”

“The burned one.”

“She says it will do.”

“For what?”

“The hall, sir. She says the hall is a bucket.” Malo puts a cup down at my elbow, which he has done every day since he came. “She has also asked me what the kitchen is for.”

“It is for the kitchen.”

“That is what I said, sir. She says nobody has ever answered a question that badly.”

He goes out. I sit with my hand round a cup I do not need and listen to my house make noises it has not made since before he came.

She is talking to the tapestry. I can hear it through two walls, up and down, up and down, a woman arguing with a thing that cannot answer her.

I go down because I want to hear it properly.

She has the tapestry half up the wall on two hooks and she is standing under it with her arms out, holding the weight of it against her chest, and her hair has come down on one side, and she is saying, “No, no, you’re going to sag, I know you are, you’ve got that look about you.”

She does not hear me. I am a yard behind her.

And I read her.

I do not decide to. She is near, and it comes. The dying are faint, and I need both hands on them to hear anything. The living are loud, and she is standing near enough that it comes to me without being asked for, and what comes is nothing like a person under my hands in a sickroom. No weight anywhere, nothing sitting where it should not be.

She is bright all through, and loud with it, like a bell nobody has struck yet, loud under the palm before it is touched at all.

There is nothing in her that anything has taken from.

My hand is on the back of a chair and the wood creaks.

She turns round. “There you are. Hold this.”

I hold it. She goes up the ladder with a mouthful of hooks and tells me about the last house she saw with a hall this bad, which was a chapter house at Gurunhuel with a roof like a cathedral and a congregation of forty.

Her boots are level with my shoulder. She smells of scorched fat and dust.