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He knows me. He watched me carry her out of her own body on Sunday night. He does not get up.

“You came back,” he says.

“Yes.”

“She’s gone. You took her. What’s left to come back for?”

“You,” I say. “Not her.”

I put my hands on her anyway. The soul is gone. What the feeding did to the body is still in the body, and a body keeps its marks longer than a person does. I felt the feeding on Sunday with no time to read it; a soul coming loose does not wait.

Now I read it properly. She is three days cold, and the damage is the same as the others. Thin where a person should be thick.

The feeding has a rhythm to it, and I have felt it in every one of them, and I can read this one off her like handwriting. Twice a week for the first month. Then every second night. The last three visits were greedy, and the greed is new.

It is getting faster.

“Who came to see her?” I say.

He does not want to say it. They never want to say it.

“Her mother.”

“When did her mother die?”

“Nineteen years ago.” His hands do not move off the table. “She was so glad. You understand. She was so glad, and she has not been glad about anything since the boy went, and I let her in. I opened the door myself. Twice a week, and I stood there and I was glad too.”

“Since the boy went,” I say. “Went where?”

“Morlac.” He looks up at me. “Sold himself. Bride market. They take men as well, for the ones that want them. He sent the money back and we have not seen him since, and we have sent for him now, and she never got over the front door shutting.”

The fire pops. Outside, somebody’s dog is going at the end of a chain.

“Was he at the summer sale?” I say. “Or the spring?”

“Spring. The fifteenth of April.”

The sale register came to Kerlann on Thursday, and I have read it twice. Four of my ten houses are in it. Six are not. It was never the market. Four of ten is still more than chance, and I do not know yet what that is.

“Before her mother came,” I say. “Did anyone else come to the house? A stranger. Somebody passing through.”

He thinks. He has to go a long way back for it, through everything since.

“A pedlar,” he says. “In the spring. Sat here two evenings and let her talk. She talked about her mother for an hour, she had not done that in years, and I was glad of that too.” He looks at the sheet. “I could not tell you his face.”

“I am sorry for her,” I say, and I mean it, and it is no use to him at all.

I ride back along the top road with the light going and I make myself think it through.

Ten names with “fed on” beside them. A house loses somebody and goes on waiting for them, and it finds the house that is still waiting, and it comes to the door. I worked that much out on the causeway after Guillou. The Guillou house lost a son to the sea. The woman at Plouder was a widow. Lannoz sold a boy.

What Lannoz adds is the pedlar. It never met that woman’s mother; the mother was nineteen years in the ground. It sat in that kitchen as a stranger nobody would remember and let the daughter talk about her for an hour, and that was enough. It learns a face from the people who miss it. Then it comes back wearing what it was told.

I get down off the horse on the causeway because I want to arrive with all of it in order, and I do not have it yet.

The water is going grey. Four miles of it in every direction and my own house at the end of it with a light in the east window. She has not gone to bed.

Last night she opened her door with a candle in her hand and said my name to my face.