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She goes off down the hall with the heel of the loaf, talking to herself about hooks, and I sit with my cup going cold and look at the place where she was standing.

She has been counting the days. The rest of the month, she said, in which she can say it is ended and go. Of course she has been counting. It hurts more than I had allowed for, this early. I have made myself not count them, and now I have her count in my head.

Malo brings a note up to the study at ten, the same morning.

“From Trevern, sir. The Guillou house. They sent a boy on a pony.”

It is four lines in a woman’s handwriting, asking the Ankou to come. Her father is failing. No fever. He sleeps a great deal and says the sleep is restful. He has been cheerful, and he has had company in the evenings, and he is asking for his son, who has been dead nine years, and she writes that something is wrong and she cannot say what.

I have been looking for wrong for a year. Those are the signs. Every one of the eight had them, and every one was past saving when I was sent for. This man is alive and talking.

I am on the causeway inside the quarter hour.

The Guillou house is behind the chandler’s yard and it smells of tallow and sickness, and the daughter takes me up the stairs without touching the rail and without looking back at me once.

The old man is in the bed by the window. He is the color of the sheet. He turns his head when we come in and he smiles at her, and then he looks past her at me, and his whole face eases. He is relieved to see me. The old and the sick often are.

I have never got used to it.

“Is it now?” he says.

“Not today.”

“Oh.” He shuts his eyes. “Good. No. Good.”

I put my hands on him. One at the crown of his head, one flat on his chest. The daughter makes a sound behind me and I ignore it because nothing I do here looks kind.

And I read him.

I read the body first. He is old and tired, and left alone that body is good for another five or six years.

Then I find the same damage as the eight. It sits low, under the breastbone, in the part of a person that is not flesh. That part should be thick, and in him it has been worn thin. Something has come and fed on it, and come back, and fed a little more. I can feel each visit separately, like the rings in a cut tree.

Five weeks and four days of visits. Twice a week at first, then more often.

Of what fed on him I can feel nothing at all. I could keep my hands on this man for a day and a night and learn the hour of every feeding, and not one fact about the feeder.

“You are the Ankou,” she says, on the landing, not as a question. “From out at Kerlann.”

“Yes.”

“My boy says you’re a story. My father asked for you. I sent.”

“Most people manage to believe that until the day they do not.” I let it sit. “Mistress Guillou. Who has been coming to the house?”

“Only us. Soaz from the chandler’s on Sundays.” She stops. “And Yann.”

“Your brother is dead.”

“I know that.” Her voice goes up and cracks and she puts both hands over her mouth, and then she says, “I know that, but he comes in the evening and he sits with father and he talks to him about the boats, and I have seen him. I have made him tea, and he drank it, and I stood in my own kitchen with a cup in my hand and I never thought anything was wrong, and my father is so much better when he has been.”

“Was he here last night?”

“Yes.”

“Will he come again?”

“He always comes again,” she says.