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I’m frightened. I have been frightened for a fortnight and I am looking at why.

He wakes while I am halfway through saying his name. He looks at me, and his whole face comes up out of somewhere a long way down.

“There she is,” he says.

“Here. I’m here.”

“You’ve been and gone twice this week and never stopped for soup.”

My hands close on his. Behind me the door has opened and shut and the passage has gone quiet as it does when Riwal is standing in it.

“Have I?” I say.

“Sat where you’re sitting. Last night. Told me about the bell.” He is pleased. He is so pleased I have to look at the fire. “You’ve got thin.”

“So have you, and I’m going to do something about it, and you’re going to let me.” My voice does not break. I will not let it. “Corentin. This is Riwal. My husband.”

He looks past me.

I have watched a whole town look at Riwal. I have watched two hundred people in a stone room take one step sideways without anybody giving the order. Corentin looks him over as he would a tool he has not used before, weighing it in his hand, and that is all.

“Ah,” he says. “The quiet one.”

“Yes,” Riwal says.

“She wrote and told me she’d picked an Ankou.” He pats my hand. “My mother used that word at me when I wouldn’t come in off the strand. I have been sixty-one years finding out it was a job.”

“If you will permit it,” Riwal says, “I would like to put my hands on you.”

“I’ve had three physicians put their hands on me. You can’t be worse.” He gets his arm out from under the blanket and holds it up, and the arm shakes. “Go on then.”

Riwal comes round the chair and puts one hand on the crown of his head and one flat on his chest.

I cannot feel what he feels.

I watch his face instead, which does nothing, and goes on doing nothing, and then does one thing, so small that if I had not spent a fortnight learning that face in the dark I would have missed it. His fingers spread wider on Corentin’s chest, and stay there a moment longer than the reading needs.

He takes his hands away.

“Well?” Corentin says.

Riwal does not soften it. I have never heard him soften anything.

“You have been fed on since April by something that wears the faces of people you love. It is not an illness. Your physicians have been treating the body they could examine. What is hurt is farther in.” He stops. “It was here last night.”

Corentin looks into the fire for a while.

“Maela,” he says. “In April. She sat where you’re standing and told me she’d been worried about the furnace.”

“Yes.”

“And lately.” He stops. He looks at me on the floor beside him, and I watch him take the next step on his own, and I would have given a year of my life to spare him it. “Ah. Nora. It’s been pretending to be you, hasn’t it, these last weeks.”

“It hasn’t been me.”

“No,” he says. “No, I know now. I’m saying I called it in. Katell goes home at dusk. I’d hear the knock and I’d say come in, Nora, and I was glad every time.”

My forehead goes down against our hands. He puts his other hand on my hair, slowly, as though the weight of it is more than he can manage.