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“The Guillou daughter wrote me those words,” I say. “Nine days ago. Sleeps a great deal. Cheerful. Company in the evenings. Her father was asking for his dead son.”

She sits down on the bench. Her legs put her there.

I come round the table. I do not touch her. I want to and I do not know if I am allowed.

“When did he fall ill?”

“Spring. April, May. The apprentices went in June because he stopped coming out to the shop.”

“Did that house lose anybody before the spring?”

She looks up at me.

“His wife,” she says. “Maela. We buried her in February.”

There it is. I have been three steps behind this thing for a year and I have never once arrived in time, and I have arrived now, at my own table, with her sitting on the bench in front of me, and it is the worst place I have ever been.

“Then it may have come to him first as her,” I say. “After February. His wife back in the kitchen. He would have let her in. Anyone would.”

“I was in the next room.” Her voice has gone thin. “All spring. I was in the shop cutting a bell and Maela was in the kitchen with him.”

“It could not come as you. Not with you thirty feet away at your bench. Every face I have heard of it wearing belonged to somebody dead, because the dead do not come home and catch it at the table.”

I make myself say the rest.

“Then you went to the block in August and did not come home, and everyone in the district knows it. Half of Morlac watched you stand on a platform and say the quiet one. Yours is the easiest face in the district to learn, and it had a whole summer in that kitchen listening to him talk about you.”

She puts both hands flat on the table and looks at them.

“It’s wearing me,” she says.

“I believe so. You are the first living face I have known it to take.”

Her hands close on the edge of the wood. I put mine over them, and she lets me, and they are cold.

“I am frightened,” I say.

She looks up.

“I have not been frightened of anything I can remember. I am frightened now.”

Her mouth opens and nothing comes out of it. Then she is on her feet.

“Then go.”

“Enora.”

“Now. Tonight. Take the horse.” She has hold of my sleeve. “You rode to Trevern and were back by three. You can be in his kitchen by midnight, and if it comes through that door tonight you will be sitting in it. Go. I’ll follow in the cart with Malo at first light.”

“No.”

“Riwal.”

“It is wearing your face.” I can hear my voice raise. I have never needed to shout before, and I cannot seem to stop now. “It is loose somewhere between this house and that foundry, and it has spent a summer learning you, and you want me to leave you on the fen with Malo and a cart and a day’s road between us. No.”

She goes still with her hand in my sleeve.

“That’s what the sixth day was,” she says. “You weren’t keeping me in. You were keeping me off that road.”