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“He wakes up, he eats a little, he tells you about the first bell he ever cast, you sit with him and the fire’s lit. Every day, for years. All I need is for Corentin to be glad to see me, and for you to stop walking up this lane.”

“And when he’s used up?”

“Everybody is used up.” It says it gently. “He stopped wanting to eat in February, the week he put his wife in the ground, and you were on the road three days out of seven and did not see it. I have given him a summer of being pleased instead of frightened, and the grey article you married can’t give him one hour of that.”

It can lie. I know it can lie, and I want it anyway. A fire lit and an old man glad to see me, for years. I want it so badly my mouth is open to say yes.

“Say yes,” it says, kindly. “Let it be a gift to an old man.”

I stand in the ruts and let it talk, because I came here to say four words to it and I cannot get them out. I’m frightened. It has my face and my voice, and I had not known what that would do to me until it was doing it.

Then I notice something. Its voice is not echoing.

Every voice in this lane echoes. The hedge is on one side and the wall is on the other, and the wall throws every sound back half a beat late. I have sat in that hedge for eight hours listening to it happen. It did it for a cart. It did it for Yannick’s dog. It did it for my own breathing.

This thing’s voice goes out and stops dead, as if the lane were empty.

Because it is. There is nothing standing in front of me.

A face, a voice, a lamp, and nothing behind them for a wall to hear. I stop being afraid of it, all at once, the way you stop being afraid of a shape in the dark when the lamp finds it.

“You’re not me,” I say.

The lamp does not move.

“Nora.”

“You are not me.” Louder. I put it out across the lane on purpose and hear my own words come back off the wall, half a beat late, as they should. “That’s my face and it isn’t yours. You’re not me.”

And the thing in my dress stops being able to walk.

I see it happen. It is coming forward and the foot goes down and does not take it anywhere, and the lamp swings, and for half a second all of it is wrong, like a bell with a crack in it that you only hear when you strike it true.

An old woman’s story about a draught, and it works.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” it says. My voice. Sharper. “Nora, look at me. Make the deal.”

“You’re not me. You’re not Maela and you’re not Yann Guillou and you are not me.”

“Your master is dying in that chair because you went to a market and sold yourself to a monster.”

“You’re not me.”

“You left him.” It is still trying to come forward and its boots are doing nothing in the ruts. “You left a sick old man alone in a house for thirteen days and lay down every night with the thing that carries the dead, and you knew what it was, and you liked it.”

I wanted Riwal. I still want him. That is true, whatever mouth says it. What was done to Corentin is its doing, not mine.

“Yes,” I say. “I did. You’re still not me.”

It screams.

It is my voice doing it and it is a sound I have never made in my life, and every bird in the hedge goes up at once.

I take a step toward my own screaming face before I know I am moving.

Too close.

The grandmother said nothing about the hands.