A sudden pain in my neck pulls me from the dark. The first light of day creeps through the window, cold and colourless.

  A shape stands in the doorway. His arms are crossed. His jaw is set.

  A small smile pulls at my lips. A dream. The boy with a mole on his cheek. His laugh was the only clean thing in a world of mud.

  My son, Max.

  My hand lifts to my cheek, brushing against the damp track of a tear.

  He steps from the doorway. He does not say Grandma.

  "Nora."

  His shadow stretches across the floorboards to touch my feet.

  "The Elders have sent for you," he says, his voice low and final. "I will walk with you."

  I meet his stare and give a slow nod. My hand grips the arm of the chair. The wood groans. I push myself to my feet.

  As we walk, conversations die in our wake. A held breath. A slammed shutter.

  James leaves me at the heavy oak door. Gwendolyn is already there, her hands clasped, a sad smile arranged on her face.

  She takes my arm.

  Her hand is soft, the fingers slender, the skin unblemished. Her touch is too light, too careful.

  "Nora, thank you for coming."

  It's the same touch. Her voice is the same, too. The same warm honey it was when we were girls, playing by the creek.

  She was the only one who never got mud on her dress.

  Her hands were always clean, always ready to pat the shoulder of a crying child. She was rehearsing Gwendolyn even then.

  She guides me inside. Reginald is waiting by the chamber door. He gives a nod, and the two of them flank me, escorting me into their private chamber.

  Their smiles are bright, brittle things. The kind that might shatter if I speak too loud.

  "We know how it must have looked yesterday," Gwendolyn says, her hand giving my arm two soft pats. "We had to play our parts."

  Reginald gives a slow nod. "There are things said for the public, Nora. And then there is the truth we share with friends."

  He glances toward the empty chair at the head of the table. Ursula's chair. "She looks at old friends and sees... well. It's a sad thing when a leader begins to see an enemy in every shadow."

  "But you are no enemy, Nora," Gwendolyn whispers, her hand tightening on my arm. "You are our friend. And we protect our friends."

  Reginald gestures to the room. I watch his hand move to the far wall. On it, above the hearth, hangs a large, detailed map of Greyhollow. New lines have been drawn in red ink. Entire homesteads have been shaded out in black.

  Gwendolyn's smile softens. "We know this must be so hard for you, Nora. Especially after all you've already lost." Her hand moves to smooth an imaginary wrinkle from my sleeve. "Max would have wanted you to be safe."

  My throat seizes, the sound a small, sharp click in the quiet room.

  "We never invite people into our chamber," Reginald says, his voice pulling me back. "You are an exception, Nora."

  Gwendolyn's hand lands on the small of my back. She steers me toward a chair, and my body obeys before my mind can find a reason to refuse.

  I sit.

  The worn leather is cold against my spine. A fire burns in the hearth, a tame and useless flame. It eats the wood and gives nothing back.

  Gwendolyn's hands refuse to settle, skittering from the pitcher to the cups, arranging things that are already arranged. "You must be chilled to the bone," she says, not looking at me.

  As she pours the water, I listen. The sound is clean, a pure stream without the slight hiss our well-water makes when it meets heat.

  "A special blend," she says, softening the edges of her words. "To calm the nerves."

  The aroma reaches me first. Sun-baked earth and honey, the smell of Aeloria. It is a merchant lord's tea.

  She presents the cup with both hands, a gesture of perfect, Gwendolyn-like delicacy that feels obscene. "Be careful, Nora. It's hot."

  I look into the clear liquid. I can see the bottom of the cup.

  No sediment. No slick, oily film clinging to the ceramic.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  It is pure.

  The well water left a scum on the cup. This water is unnaturally clear, as if scrubbed of all life. All this clean water, while the village well runs brown.

  A private spring for them. Mud for the rest.

  Every drop in this cup is a drop they do not get to drink.

  I take the cup and smile.

  Back in the square, I pass the small, manicured garden beside the Elders' hall. Ursula is there. She is on her knees, tending her plants with a pair of silver shears.

  The garden is an orderly bed of ghost pipes, corpse light fungus, and pale, night-blooming flowers.

  Her shears move past a dead leaf. They stop at a single, white rose. At the base of its stem, a patch of greasy, black mould creeps up towards the petals. She looks at it for a long moment.

  Then, her eyes lift from the rot and find mine.

  She turns back to the white rose and, with one single snick, she severs its head.

  The sound of the shears, that single snick, throws me back seventy years. We were girls in Evershade Forest, foraging for reagents. We found it together. A patch of nightshade with a miraculous mutation. One plant was producing berries that were a pale silver pulsing with a soft, internal light. My alchemist's mind ignited. An antidote? A purifier?

  My fingers ached to take a sample, to unlock the secret of its silver blood. But Ursula's hand clamped onto my wrist. 'Don't,' she said, her voice the same cold, flat thing it is today. 'It's a contamination. A weakness in the bloodline. It must be purged.'

  Before I could argue, she crushed the silver berries under her heel, grinding the miracle back into the dirt. She did it without anger, without hesitation. Only the quiet certainty of a gardener pulling a weed.

  I blink, and the dark woods of the memory are gone, replaced by the grey stones of the square. I walk away, but I am still in the garden. My mind is caught there, watching the rose die. Again and again. The image is a sickness, a cold that seizes the root of me.

  A man passes, his shoulders slumped under the load of a wooden yoke, a bucket hanging from each end. Water sloshes onto the stones.

  A dead leaf floats on the surface of the water in one. In the other, a slick of rainbow oil. Below it, the water is the colour of mud.

  The memory of the Elders' clear pitcher sits like a hot coal in my gut.

  The ringing of Ward's hammer on steel is a welcome, honest sound. It is the only thing in this square that feels real.

  He works with his back to the square, a broad and uninviting wall of muscle. I approach the forge. The heat from it feels more alive than their fire did. I stand there for a long moment, watching the hammer rise and fall.

  "The posters, Ward," I begin. "The Elders' orders."

  He does not stop his work. He brings the hammer down. Thunk. He does not look at me. "Orders are orders." Thunk. "We both know that, Nora."

  I watch his hands. The way his fingers protest as they curl around the hammer's shaft. The skin over his knuckles is thick and white, like old scar tissue. I know that pain. It is a cold ache that lives deep in the bone.

  I open my satchel and find a small pot of salve. "Your hands."

  The hammering stops. The sudden silence is louder than the ringing was. He turns, his eyes narrowing as if trying to decipher a language he doesn't speak.

  "This will help the swelling," I say.

  He looks from my face, to the pot, then to his scarred knuckles.

  His hand hovers over the pot for a long moment, then closes around it with a clumsy, unpractised gentleness.

  His voice, when it comes, is the sound of rust being scraped from old iron. "Be careful, Nora."

  He stares at the dark mouth of his forge. "My father. He was proud."

  "He had that Aelorian fire. Argued with a merchant over charcoal prices. He was right, and made sure everyone knew it."

  His hand, resting on the anvil, closes into a fist. The knuckles go bone-white, stark against the deep brown of his skin.

  "Elder William, he just watched. He turned his back on my father, addressing the merchant. 'You have to make allowances. Their kind runs hot.' He said it like my father was a horse he was thinking of putting down."

  His eyes meet mine then. They are two hot coals pulled from the forge.

  "After that day, the fire in my father went out. He taught me to be cold. To be quiet. That fire in our blood, Nora?" He taps his own chest with a heavy thumb. "It's just fuel for their forge."

  The glow in his eyes dies. His voice is flat now, the sound of cooled metal. "This order you want to shatter is the only armour a man like me has."

  His hand finds the hammer's shaft. He sets it on the anvil between us.

  "That's why a man stays quiet."

  He turns from me, presenting his back once more.

  His voice is monotone, a functionary reading a report. "Elder Reginald gave the order about the posters. He believes that putting our grief on display is a southern softness."

  His focus fixes on a row of cooling iron hooks. "He says this is a place of stone, not paper. We are people of the north."

  He picks up a piece of iron, weighing it in his hand, avoiding my eyes.

  "And do you believe that, Ward?" I ask his back.

  His grip on the iron tightens, and a fine, violent tremor begins to shake his hand. He does not answer.

  My attention drifts to the bin where the posters have been thrown.

  I stare at the face on top. Rain has bled the ink, making his smile a faint, sad smudge. A watery ghost of a young man's face.

  Eli.

  "Some ghosts are harder to put down than others," I say, my voice a quiet thing in the cooling air.

  Ward grunts. "Aye. Some are." He nods towards the bin, his eyes avoiding the face. "You knew him, then?"

  "I'm not sure. His face stirs something."

  I pause.

  "What was his story?"

  Ward scratches at his beard. "Eli? He was from Blackthorn. Kept to the woods mostly, so you wouldn't have seen him much. A woodcutter, he was. A good one. Too good for this place, maybe."

  "A good man like that. A shame he had no one here to watch his back."

  Ward picks up a rag, wiping a smudge of soot from his arm. "He had someone."

  He glances around the empty square, then meets my eyes.

  "He had Teddy."

  "Teddy?"

  "Aye." He shakes his head, a small, sad smile touching his lips. "Funny thing is, I couldn't tell you a thing about the lad. He was just a name. Eli's Teddy."

  "To be known only through someone else's love. How lonely that must have been."

  "You'd think so. But for Eli, he was the whole world." He shakes his head, a short, rough chuckle breaking from his throat. "Gods, the way he went on. You'd think the sun rose and set on that boy, the way Eli talked."

  My hand rests for a moment on the pot of salve between us.

  The fondness in his expression fades, replaced by a deep weariness.

  "It's a funny thing, memory," he says. "We all remember the day Teddy was taken for the Flesh Tax. Not for him. But for what we saw happen to Eli after."

  The saliva in my mouth turns to paste. "What did you see?"

  "The sun going out of a man," he says simply. "One day he was bright. The next, he was a hollowed-out thing. Then he was gone."

  I look at the rain-ruined face in the bin. A man who was a fire, now just a smudge of ash.

  "Ward," I say, my voice tight. "The Snatcher. Did anyone else vanish before Eli?"

  He scrunches his brow. "Before him? No. Not like this. These snatchings are new. And they're wrong."

  Ward shakes his head, a single, slow turn from side to side, and returns to his forge.

  I sag against the empty wood of the notice board. I stare at the rain-ruined face in the bin. The fierce, protective warmth burns in my chest.

  My right hand twitches.

  My fingers clench, seeking the familiar curve of an axe handle that is no longer there.

  They close on empty air, and for a terrifying second, my hand is a stranger's, full of a strength these old bones could never hold.

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