Page 45

“So it has a face for gathering and a face for feeding. And the gathering face doesn’t stick in anybody’s head, and the feeding face is the one you would open a door for in the middle of the night without thinking about it once.”

Anaig is looking between the two of us.

“What does that mean?” she says.

“That is how it gets in,” I say. “It is taught by the people who miss the dead, and nobody remembers the student.”

“Has it got a name?” Enora says.

“Not one I know.”

“I wonder if my grandmother had one for it,” Anaig says slowly. “She said it about a draught under a door. If the door would not stay shut she said the Sablenn was at it, wearing the face of the lost.” Anaig stops, and her hands come off the table. “She said something else. I thought it was nonsense. I thought all of it was nonsense until June.”

“What did she say?” Enora leans in.

“She said if one came to your door wearing somebody, you told it to its face that it wasn’t them. You had to be the one it was wearing, or it did no good. And if you said it, and kept saying it, it couldn’t put a foot over the step.”

Nobody says anything. The kettle has started to tick.

“I have never heard that,” I say.

“You never asked anybody’s grandmother,” Enora says, looking at Anaig and not at me. “Did she say what happens after? If you keep saying it?”

“No.” Anaig’s hands are flat on the table again. “She said it about a draught at the door.”

“It’s more than we had this morning.” Enora stands up. “Thank you. I mean that. We have to go.”

The light goes with Morlac behind us and the foundry road under the horse. We lost the afternoon to the mare, who will not be hurried on a new shoe with two of us up, and I would not injure her twice in a day with that road still to do.

Enora stops talking somewhere past the last milestone. Her arms do not loosen. I ride with her weight on my back and the dark coming up out of the ditches and count the things that have to be true for us to arrive in time.

It knows what Enora looks like. It knows that the old man is her father in every way but blood, and that he calls her Nora. It has had a whole summer of her in the next room and an open door and a dying man who is glad of the visits.

The foundry comes up out of the dusk: a yard, a shop with a cold furnace, a house tacked onto the side of it, all of it smaller than I expected. There is a light in the window. The door stands open on the warm evening, as a door does in a house where nobody has been told to shut it.

Enora is off the horse before I have stopped it.

ENORA

Iam through the door before anybody has said my name.

Katell is in the passage with a lamp and her sleeves pinned up, and her mouth is open to tell whoever it is what she thinks of them, and then she sees my face, and then she sees past me to what is getting down off a grey horse in her master’s yard, and the lamp goes still in her hand.

“Nora.” She blurts. “What? Who?”

“It’s him. The Ankou. He’s mine, I picked him, I’ll explain. Where’s Corentin?”

“Asleep. He sleeps often now.” Her eyes have not left the yard. “Nora, what is that doing in this yard?”

“Keeping something worse out of this house. Katell, I need you to bar the door behind him when he’s in, and I need you not to ask me why until I’ve seen Corentin.”

Katell looks at me for one more second. Then she steps back against the wall to let me by, and I hear her say, to the yard, in the voice she uses on the baker, “You’d better come in, then,” and I am already through the parlor door.

Corentin is in the chair by the fire with a blanket over his knees, and he is the color of the ash in the grate.

I had the words from Katell’s letter and the physician’s note and Riwal’s table, and I thought that was the same as knowing. It isn’t. His hands on the blanket are somebody else’s hands. His face has gone back to the bone.

I am on the floor beside him with his hand in both of mine, and it weighs nothing.