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“I know,” he says. “I am too.”

Katell goes and bars the door.

Nothing will bother us. Nothing will stop him. I wish that I could.

Riwal takes his coat off and opens his shirt, and puts one hand on the crown of Corentin’s head and one flat on his chest, and the seam opens.

The warmth goes out of the room. I feel it go. The fire is lit and the warmth goes out of the room anyway, into him, and the line down his left side is a door standing open in my master’s parlor, and Corentin, in the chair, says, “Oh,” very quietly, and then nothing else.

I have had my hand on that line every night for a week. I did not know it could do this to a room. I’m frightened of it for the first time, and I do not take my eyes off it.

The damage does not come out in a piece. I watch it.

It comes out the way a splinter comes out of skin that has grown over it, a little at a time, with the flesh unwilling. I cannot see what it is. I can only see what it does to the two of them.

Corentin’s hands open on the blanket a finger at a time. Riwal’s face does nothing, for hours.

Katell feeds the fire and wipes Corentin’s mouth when he needs it.

I sit on the floor beside the chair with my hand flat on Riwal’s knee, and I do not take it off once, and every quarter hour I tell him what the clock says, because he asked me to.

“Half past eleven.”

Nothing moves in his face.

“Noon.”

“Quarter past.”

What goes out of him with it is not pain. I would know pain on him by now. It is something behind his face that was always there, and that I have been looking at for a month without seeing, because I had nothing to see it against: a stillness that was not patience. The look of a thing that has all the time there is.

By one o’clock there is less of it. By two it is gone, and what is behind his face instead is a man who has been sitting in one position with his hands on an old man for five hours and is tired.

I am watching him become something that can be worn out. I did that. I asked him for it, with my face, in a dark lane and a lit kitchen, and he is giving it to me a quarter hour at a time.

A little after two the last of it goes through.

The seam closes on its own. I see it close. Riwal’s hands come off Corentin and his knees give, and I catch him, which I should not be able to do, and get him down onto the hearth with his back against the chimney breast before either of us has worked out how.

Corentin is asleep in the chair with his color changed.

Katell goes to Corentin and puts two fingers on his wrist and stands like that for a long time. Then she puts her apron up over her face, and nobody in that room says one word about it until she is finished.

I put my hand inside Riwal’s open shirt, on the seam.

Warm.

“Still there,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Riwal.” I have to stop and start again. “How do you feel?”

He has to think about it. I watch him think.

“Tired,” he says.

He has never said that word about himself. I have never heard it in his mouth.