She stands alone by the boarded-up tavern. Her back faces me, shoulders bunched high. She traces the raw cut in the oak with one finger. The newest tally. Alistair's mark.

  Nora's instinct to soothe her loss straightens my spine. My boots crunch on the thin frost covering the cobblestones.

  "Belladonna, dear." The words feel smooth, unearned. "A cold morning."

  She turns. Her eyes find me, and they do not move.

  "The cold doesn't bother me." Her chin points toward the square. "Come. The ash pit will be warm."

  She walks. A single, straight line cutting through the morning.

  I follow.

  The pit burns slow, an orange glow against the grey. Wet ash and the ghost of burned meat taint the air. We stand over it, on opposite sides.

  The baker shouts for flour. A shutter scrapes open. The village wakes.

  Belladonna focuses past the village noise. Her stare is fixed on my breath, on the small white clouds forming in the air before me. She watches them expand, then disappear in the cold air.

  "You feel the cold more, when you get older," I say.

  "Some do." Her eyes find the glowing embers. "He was never cold. My father. His hands were furnaces. He could hold a hot coal for a second longer than any other man. He was proud of that. When I was small, I'd press my face into his palms just to feel the heat."

  The corners of her mouth lift. The firelight catches on her teeth, but her eyes stay dark.

  "He was too warm inside."

  She holds her hands out over the embers. I mirror her gesture, my hands joining hers above the heat. Side-by-side.

  She studies her hands, then mine.

  The embers paint her skin with life. A deep, healthy red. Mine is a fish belly. White. Dead.

  I pull my hands back from the heat.

  The smile slides from her face.

  "You." She leans toward me an inch. "The heat doesn't touch you. You're still so cold."

  Her hand clamps down on my wrist.

  I wrench my hand from her grasp. A clean, sharp motion. Not Nora's.

  Her head jerks up, the pupils of her eyes shrinking to pinpricks.

  Her stare is a nail. Driven through my skull.

  She knows.

  I turn. I run.

  Her quiet, certain breathing presses against my back until I reach the door.

  I slam it shut, and the bolt shrieks into place. My body gives out, sliding down the wood. I press my forehead to my knees and wait for the world to stop tilting.

  James stands by the window, his back a wall of quiet, focused rage. I force my old body from the floor. My hip grinds. I stand beside him.

  Through the glass, I see what has him so rigid.

  Two figures. Gwendolyn and Reginald.

  They move through the grey morning with a new, methodical purpose. They stop at the Baker's house. Gwendolyn's hand lifts, a pale slug against the dark wood of the door.

  A pause.

  Anna, Peter's wife, opens the door. I see the muscles in her neck tighten as her hand flies to her throat. I see the patient, ecstatic smile on Gwendolyn's face.

  James makes a sound. A low, guttural thing from the back of his throat.

  His hand finds the wooden frame of the window. His thumb presses into the soft grain, digging, until a splinter breaks free.

  I should be thinking about Anna's terror. But I'm not. I'm watching the process. How neat it all is. How careful.

  I know this work. Gods, I taught him this work. Sat him on my knee and showed him how to take things apart, piece by piece. I thought I was teaching him to turn iron into silver. Turns out I was teaching him to turn people into meat.

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  The Bakers' door closes. James turns from the window.

  "I'm going to Darkwater," he says. The sentence is flat.

  Evangeline appears in the doorway. "He will kill you."

  "He needs to answer for this." James's hand slashes across the mantelpiece. A clay pot holding a single, dead flower slides from the mantelpiece and breaks on the cold hearth. A puff of dry soil.

  "I'll go," I say. "He is my son."

  James turns to me, the hard lines around his eyes easing. "No. You see a son. I see a butcher. I will not let you walk into that abattoir."

  A tremor enters my voice. "Let a mother speak to her son."

  "And what will you do?" he asks, his voice the rough sound of a man who has already wept himself dry. "Plead with him? He doesn't have ears for that anymore. That part of him is stone."

  "He might listen to me," I say, my voice cracking. "I'm the only one who ever understood him."

  His eyes hold no pity. They are the eyes of a man who has already seen the end of the story.

  "Love is not a weapon, Grandma. He'll use it against you, just like he uses Pip against me."

  Evangeline flinches. "James, stop."

  "No." His wooden leg makes a hollow sound on the floor as he crosses to the far wall. He grabs his jerkin from a peg. "We're out of clean water." He does not look at us.

  "We have the rain barrel," Evangeline says, her voice tight. "It's clean enough. The well is forbidden until Ward says otherwise."

  He ignores her. "I'm going to the stream."

  "What are you really going for, James?" she asks, her voice thin with a knowledge she does not want. "Water? Or a weapon?"

  He pulls the jerkin on, the leather groaning. "Does it matter? Either way, we're dying of thirst."

  He leaves. The door closes with a soft, final click.

  The window frames James as he crosses the empty square. His path is a straight line to the smithy. The forge breathes a plume of dark smoke, the only living thing in the square. A shadow detaches itself from it. Vera.

  She gives him the poker. He returns, the dark metal a new, ugly limb.

  He brings it inside. He sets it by the hearth. The iron is a third person in the room, drinking the last of the room's warmth.

  Evangeline sees it. All the fight drains from her. Her shoulders slump. She looks at her husband, but a stranger looks back.

  "So that's it, then." Her stare is fixed on a point on the far wall. On nothing. "You're going to become him."

  The muscle under his eye twitches. The rest of his face is perfectly still. "I'm nothing like him. This is for Pip."

  "Eli thought he was doing it for Teddy," she says, her voice a dead, flat calm. "The children are just the excuse. The fire is the reason."

  She walks to Pip's room. Opens the door. She leans against the frame, her body a question. "Are you coming, Pip?"

  James closes his eyes. A tear escapes, a clean cut through the soot on his cheek.

  She takes Pip by the hand. The boy does not look at his father. He just takes his mother's hand. As she passes James, she stops. Her hand lifts. She could touch him. Instead, her fingers hover over the poker's cold iron.

  "I hope it's worth it," she says. "Don't be here when I come back for our things."

  They are gone. The key turns. The tumblers fall into place, one by one. A series of small, final clicks. Then the heavy thud of the bolt.

  James opens his eyes. I search his face for the boy I raised, and find only two stones at the bottom of a cold well.

  He looks at the empty doorway. He looks at the poker. He looks at me.

  He does not move for a long time. I count my own breaths. One hundred. A thousand. Finally, he takes a single, shuddering breath.

  He walks out the door. I expect it to slam, but it closes with a quiet click.

  In the silence he leaves behind, my lungs expand. A clean breath, taken without an audience. No one is watching. No one is listening. The air is my own. The house is my own. A quiet, perfect peace.

  I walk to the hearth. The clay pot is a ruin of sharp edges and dry soil. The dead flower lies on the cold stone. I kneel, my old bones protesting. I pick up the flower. I place it back on the mantelpiece.

  I return to my post at the window.

  My first thought is of them. Of the boy. James could go after them. Drag them back. But the shape he carries looks different. Harder.

  This is not the posture of a husband. A husband stands by his family. The set of his shoulders belongs to a man who has lost his way.

  The square is empty, save for him. He stands in the centre, letting the cold wind strip the warmth from his face. The wind does not make him shiver. He does not seem to feel it at all.

  Belladonna appears. She is simply there, standing near the Elders' platform, as if the stones themselves had birthed a hard, new weed.

  He sees her. He turns. He walks to her.

  Her hands move, a small, quick exchange I was not meant to read. Then she points in the direction of the tavern. A single, sharp nod from him.

  What did she say to him? What did he just agree to?

  A cold certainty takes root in me. This is not a chance meeting. This was planned.

  Belladonna reaches into her cloak. Her hand emerges, holding a ring of heavy, iron keys. She holds them out. His hand closes over hers. A brief touch.

  Keys? Why is she giving him keys? To the tavern?

  James pivots. The wooden leg and the good one strike the cobblestones with the same, hard, even beat.

  He's marching. Marching where? Why is he marching for her?

  He does not look back at our window. He does not look at the square. His eyes are fixed on the boarded-up door.

  Belladonna watches him go. Her face is a blank slate, her eyes too still. The eyes of a doll. A doll that sees everything and feels nothing.

  She knows I am watching from the window. Her head tilts, and her eyes find mine. A single, silent beat. Then she looks away.

  The first crack of wood is a sharp, tearing sound.

  A pause.

  Then a final, splintering crash as the whole structure gives way.

  He disappears into the dark mouth of the tavern.

  The square is silent again.

  I remain at the window. Waiting.

  An hour. Then two.

  The world outside my window bleeds from grey to black. A single lamp is lit in the Millers' window. A small, defiant point of warmth. A life I am not a part of.

  He has been gone a long time.

  A loose shutter on the bakery slams against the stone. Once. Twice. Then the wind tears it from its hinge. It shatters on the cobblestones.

  A moth thuds against the windowpane. Again. Again. A stupid, hopeful creature, beating itself to dust against a truth it cannot see.

  What could he find in that place? Empty casks? Old ledgers? A weapon? None of those things take two hours to find.

  The door of the tavern explodes outward.

  James stumbles into the square. His face is the colour of bleached bone. His breath comes in ragged, tearing gasps.

  He sprints. His leg pounds the cobblestones in frantic, uneven strikes.

  Our door crashes open. He stands on the threshold, his chest heaving, his eyes two hollowed-out things. He smells of damp earth and a hundred years of rot.

  He holds an envelope. White. Open. It trembles in his hand.

  His voice is the sound of dry kindling snapping. Sharp. Brittle. Final.

  "I know what you are."

  A pause.

  "You are not my grandmother."

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