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“Asleep. Katell has him.”

“Then I’d like to go in now.”

RIWAL

Icarry her up the lane, and I read her as I go, because I can.

Cold. Exhausted. Frightened still, under the laughing. The thing had her wrist for less than a minute, and it took a week off her life for it, and no more than that. Her arm will ache for a month. She is alive.

I am so relieved that I have to stop for a moment and hold her tightly against me, and she lets me.

Katell is at the door with the bar already off.

Katell looks past me at the lane, where there is nothing to see but dark. Then at Enora in my arms. Then at me. For once in her life Katell has no instruction ready for anybody.

Then she has four.

Blankets. The fire. Her boots off, the mud will not come out of the rug.

The good chair, not that one, that one has a bad leg.

I put Enora in the good chair, opposite her master’s, and Katell puts three blankets on her, and Enora gets her hand out from under all of them and finds Corentin’s, and holds it, with her teeth going.

Corentin is asleep. He has slept through it, as she said he would.

Before I sit down I put my hands on him, because I have to know.

One hand on the crown of his head, one flat on his chest.

Nothing has changed.

The feeding has stopped.

But what the thing took out of him is still gone, and nothing has grown back to fill the place. He is thin where a man should be thick, all the way through, and his body is doing what a body does when there is not enough of a man left to run it.

Killing it did not save him.

I did not know that until now, with my hands on him. He is exactly as he was on Thursday, and the thing that did this to him is through the door in my side and will never do it again, and the man my wife calls Father is dying anyway.

I take my hands away. I am ashamed, because I let them hope. I am afraid, because I already know what I am going to have to offer in the morning.

Enora is watching me, and I do not say any of it.

I sit down on the hearth with my back against the chimney breast and my hand round my wife’s ankle under three blankets, and I do not sleep, and I think it through.

ENORA

Corentin wakes properly for the first time in months, and looks at me, and says, “Nora. You’re filthy.”

He is awake. All the way awake, looking at me, being rude. I have not seen that face since the spring.

I laugh, and it turns into crying inside one sentence, and he gets his hand out of the blanket and I take it, and the pair of us stay like that for a while with nobody saying anything useful.

“So he’ll mend now,” I say at last, to Riwal.

“No.”

I hear it and do not understand it. I look at Corentin, who is awake and talking, and back at Riwal, who has never once said a thing to me that was not true.