Page 47

“Can you put it right?” he asks my husband, over my head.

“I can stop what is doing it. I do not know what you will be when it stops; I have never seen a man live past it. We stop it, and then we see.”

Katell has stood in the parlor doorway for all of it with the lamp.

When Riwal straightens up Katell does not move out of his way. She is fifty and broad and she has never once in her life moved out of anybody’s way, and she looks up at the thing in her master’s parlor with her chin where it always is.

“You’re the one she picked,” she says.

“Yes.”

“I’d have picked the glassmaker.”

“So would I,” Riwal says.

Katell looks at him for a moment longer. Then she says, “You’ll be wanting something hot to drink, after that ride,” and goes to put the kettle on, and that is how Katell decides to deal with somebody.

Then I go over the wall into Yannick’s yard, because Yannick has two dogs, one useless, and I would rather have a useless dog in this yard tonight than nothing.

Yannick is at his back door with a lamp. He has heard a horse. He has heard, by now, whose horse.

“Nora,” he says. “Is that...”

“Yes. I need the dogs. I’ll explain tomorrow, I promise, it’s a long story and Corentin’s asleep. Please, Yannick.”

He looks over the wall at Riwal standing in Corentin’s yard. Then he goes in and comes out with the dogs on a rope and hands me the rope without a word, and goes back inside, and I hear the bar go across his door.

Riwal stands under the shop eaves until the dew is in his boots. I stand with him for an hour and talk at the dark about the room-note of the furnace, which is a C when it is lit and nothing at all when it is cold, and then Corentin wakes and asks for soup, and I go in.

Nothing comes.

When he wakes I feed Corentin soup from a spoon, which I have never done and which he lets me do, and he falls asleep in the middle of it with his mouth open, and I sit on the floor by the chair with his hand in mine and the bar across the door and two dogs in the yard and the Ankou under the eaves, and I listen to this house.

I know this house. I learned to listen in it. It has never once in my life sounded like this.

When Riwal comes in he stands in the parlor doorway and does not come further, because he knows what he is and he knows what he looks like standing over a sick man’s chair at midnight.

“Nothing,” he says.

“No.” I do not let go of Corentin’s hand. “He said last night. You heard him. It was in here last night, sitting where I’m sitting, with my face on, and you were at your own table telling me you wouldn’t take the horse.”

“Yes.”

“You chose me over him, and something was in here, feeding on him, while you did it.”

“Yes.”

I look at Corentin in the chair. I look at Riwal in the doorway.

“I don’t know if I would have chosen the same.” My voice goes and I let it. “I know why you did it, and I’m not going to hold it against you. I’m angry anyway. It was in here with him while you chose me, and I needed you to hear me say that once.”

He does not come in. He does not go away either. He stands in the doorway of my master’s parlor with the dew on his boots, and I sit on the floor with a dying man’s hand in mine, and neither of us sleeps, and nothing comes to the door.

RIWAL

We make the plan in the parlor, the four of us, with Corentin’s chair in the middle, because nobody will move him and he will not be moved.

The bar goes across the door at dusk. Yannick’s dogs stay in the yard. Enora and I stand in the yard together every night, inside the reach of Katell’s lamp, where the thing can see the face it has stolen standing beside the one creature in the fen that can take it through a door.