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“I know. That’s why I didn’t say it.”

I pull my knees up on the bed and hold them.

“You started with a lie in a stone room,” I say, “and I have lied every night since with my whole body, and I’d have gone on doing it until day thirty, and I’d have got in the cart at the end of it and told myself I was brave. I’m angry at both of us. Give me a minute.”

He gives me a minute. He is good at that, which is the worst thing about him.

The candle burns. Somewhere down the corridor Malo turns over and the snoring stops and starts again.

“Right,” I say. “Here it is, and I’m only saying it once tonight, so listen. I’m still furious with you for saying no when I asked to go to Corentin. I’m frightened for Corentin, every hour, and that letter under my pillow hasn’t helped. And I want you in this bed with your own face on. I’m telling you all of it, and you can do something with it.”

His hands have closed at his sides.

“I want to be in it,” he says. “With my own face on. I have wanted that since you put your hand over my mouth on the second night, and I did not know how to ask for it without you leaving.”

“Well. You didn’t have to ask. I did.”

“Yes.”

“Come here, then.”

He comes. He sits on the edge of the bed and it drops an inch under him, the same as every other night, and I take his face in both my hands and look at it, close, with the light on it. The long jaw. The cheekbones cut and never smoothed. Eyes with no white in them, looking back at me, not moving.

“There you are,” I say.

“Here I am.”

I lean over and put the candle out.

I know the face now. I want the rest of him by hand, as I have had him every night, with no wood on the chest between us and nothing left to pretend about.

It is slow, and it is quiet, and nobody is keeping any rules. He says my name into my shoulder and I say his back, and it is the first time we have answered each other by name in this bed, and his whole body goes still under me when I do, as though he has been struck and is waiting for the hum.

I say it again, so he can be sure. Every time I say it he answers with mine.

Afterward he does not sleep, and neither do I. His hand moves in my hair. Once.

“Riwal.”

“Yes.”

“Nothing. I just wanted to say it again.”

RIWAL

Guillou died on Saturday. His daughter barred the door against what was wearing her dead brother’s face, as I told her to, and it made no difference. Too much of him was gone. I carried him over, and I wrote “fed on” beside his name. That is nine.

I had tried to do more than write it down. On Thursday night I left Enora’s bed and rode to Trevern with no bell to call me. I stood in the chandler’s yard until dawn, watching the Guillou door. Nothing came.

On Sunday night the bell called me to Lannoz, two villages beyond Trevern. A woman was dying there with no fever and no injury and nothing in her body worn out. I carried her over.

As she went I felt the feeding in her, the same as the others. That is ten.

Her husband was in the room. I did not ask him anything. A deathbed is no place to question a man about who has been sitting in his kitchen.

So on the twelfth day I ride back.

Lannoz is four houses and a chapel, and the body of the woman I carried on Sunday is still laid out on her own kitchen table under a sheet, waiting for her son to come home and bury her. Her husband sits beside her with his hands flat on the wood, and he has the look they get when the crying has stopped being possible.