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I am on the bench by the cold furnace. I hear her on the stones and do not turn round. She sits next to me, with her boots on and her basket by her feet, and the trial frame is a bare shape over our heads where a bell should hang.

I take the bronze disc out of my coat and put it in her hand.

She knows what it is before she has it in the light. Her fingers close on it.

“My apprentice token. You’ve had this since Morlac.”

“You left it on the floor where your dress had been. I meant to put it back in your pocket at the settlement table. Then you asked me whether it had been me, and I lied to you, and after that there was no way to hand it back without the lie coming with it. So I kept it.” I do not look away from her. “You should have had it in your pocket on the block. You should have it in your pocket today.”

She does not say anything. She puts the token in her apron, and then her hand goes inside my coat to the warm place on my left side.

I leave it there. We sit in her master’s shop with one warm strip between us and five minutes to spend, and we spend them like that.

At noon she is at the gate with the basket on her arm.

“Come back up the lane,” I say. “Whatever is in it.”

She does not smile. “Be on that horse at dusk.”

“I will be on the horse.”

She goes down the lane as a cheerful girl would go, the girl this house is missing, with the basket swinging, saying something over the wall to Yannick about the price of eggs that the whole lane can hear.

At the bend she turns round and lifts one hand. Then she is gone into the hedge, and I make myself not look at where.

I ride through Morlac in daylight.

The job today is to be seen leaving. I have ridden away from Enora before, when the bell rang. This is the first time I have ridden away from her so that people would watch me do it.

Trevern needs me. I knew it from the foundry yard, and it is stronger with every mile.

A house by the harbor. A man of sixty on a bed that has been dragged to the window for the air, with his mouth pulled down on one side and his wife and two grown sons in the room.

I put my hands on him and know the hour, which is not far off, and I wait for it, standing, as I have waited in rooms like this one more times than this town has people.

The hour comes. I carry him.

Afterward the wife looks at the floor. One son looks at my collar. The other one, the younger, looks at my face and says, “Thank you,” which has happened to me perhaps twice before in my life, and I do not know what to do with it this time either, so I say, “He did not go alone,” and leave them to it.

Then I go to the square.

I stand under the ash tree where I knelt in the mud three days ago with a woman’s hand on my arm, and I let Trevern look at me for an hour, because that is the other half of today’s work: to be seen somewhere that is not a bell-founder’s yard.

The space opens round me as it always does. The eel-trap man finds a reason to be elsewhere. Nobody sells me an apple.

I watch the sun. I know where she is, to the yard, and I could draw the bend in that lane with my eyes shut. I go over what the grandmother said, word by word, and what she did not say, and she said nothing about its hands.

I have never waited for anything. I am called and I go and the hour is the hour. I stand under a tree in Trevern and wait for the sun to go down, and I find out that I am no good at it.

There is nothing I can do about that either.

At dusk I ride.

I do not run the horse, because a lame horse on the Morlac road is the one thing that would make tonight worse than it is. I hold her to a pace I can keep, and I go through Morlac with the lamps coming on in the windows and the street getting out of my way, and onto the foundry road with the light going.

The lane past Enora’s house is a mile off, and whatever is in it is going to have to deal with me.

ENORA