Chapter One
The horse smelled it before Aldric did.
She slowed without being asked, her ears flattening, her breath coming short and quick through her nose as the road crested the final hill and Ashenmere spread below them in the last grey light of afternoon. Aldric had been half-asleep in the saddle. Three weeks of hard riding had stripped him to something barely resembling a man, but the mare's fear woke him, and when he looked down at the village, he understood why.
The fires were wrong. Too many, burning too bright, too late in the day. And they were not hearth-fires.
He had seen burning before. He had been the reason for burning before, in places he did not let himself name. He knew the difference between a village burning food scraps and a village burning its dead, and what lay below him was unmistakably the latter: smoke rising in thick, dark columns from the far end of the village, where the church ground would be.
He pressed his heels to the mare's flanks anyway. She went, reluctant and shivering.
★ ★ ★
The village had changed.
He had known it would. He had been gone two years and left England already fraying. The rains had failed, the harvests had been thin, and there were rumours, even in the port of Dover, of some sickness moving north from the continent. He had told himself the rumours were exaggerated. Sailors told stories. It was what sailors did.
He had not told himself that because he believed it. He had told himself that because he had needed to make the journey home without losing his mind, and believing the worst before he arrived would not have helped anyone.
It was worse than the worst.
The market square was empty. The well was unattended, its rope trailing. Three houses on the eastern row had their doors marked with red, the old sign, the one he remembered from childhood, meaning plague-house, meaning do not enter, meaning God have mercy. As he rode through the main street, a woman he did not recognise leaned out of an upper window and looked at him with eyes that had forgotten how to be surprised by anything.
"You're not from here," she said. Not a question.
"I was," he said. "Aldric Vale. Thomas Vale's son."
Something moved across her face. Not pity she had used that up. Something closer to relief that the name still meant something to someone. "Your father's house is standing," she said. "Your sister's in it. She stopped. "She's in it."
He did not wait for more.
★ ★ ★
Mira was fourteen and should have been insufferable about it.
That was what Aldric had prepared himself for on the road, the version of his sister who had been twelve when he left, all elbows and opinions, who had cried when he rode away and then, according to her letters, immediately pretended she had not. He had prepared himself for the girl who wrote to him in France that she had learned to ride properly, by which she meant she had stolen his old gelding and broken her wrist falling off a fence, and could he please not tell their father in his next letter.
He had not prepared himself for this.
She was in the bed that had been their parents'; someone had moved her there, perhaps for the size of it, perhaps for the warmth, and she was so still that his heart stopped for one long, terrible moment before he saw the faint rise and fall of her chest. Her face was the colour of tallow. Her hair was lank and dark with sweat. The room smelled of illness in the specific way that the worst rooms always smelled, and Aldric had been in enough of those rooms, in enough countries, to know what it meant when a room smelled like that.
He crossed to her. Put his hand on her forehead. She was burning.
He stayed there for a long time, in the dark, in the smell, in the silence, and he did something he had not done in two years. He prayed. Not with any great faith. Not even with much hope. He prayed the way a drowning man reaches for a rope he is not sure is there because what else was left to do, and because she was Mira, and she was fourteen, and she had not even learned yet that the world was cruel.
No answer came.
He had not expected one.
★ ★ ★
He slept in the chair by her bed, which was not so much sleeping as losing consciousness briefly before surfacing again. Sometime in the deep hours past midnight, he thought, the fire burned low and the village absolutely silent, he woke and saw the light.
Under the door. A faint gold, nothing like firelight, nothing like candle or torch. Too steady. Too warm. The particular colour of sunlight through closed eyelids was a strange thing to see in a plague-ridden English village in the middle of the night.
He was on his feet before he was fully awake. Years of soldiering: the body learned to move before the mind caught up.
He opened the door.
She was standing at the far side of the room.
His first thought was that she was a nun, the pale clothing, the stillness, the sense of someone accustomed to silence. His second thought was that her hands were glowing. Not a trick of the light, not a reflection from somewhere. Her hands, held over his sister's chest, were emitting the same warm gold that had been leaking under the door, steady and sourceless, and Mira beneath them had stopped shaking.
His third thought was that this was impossible.
His fourth thought, the soldier's thought, the thought that had kept him alive through things he had no business surviving, was: impossible things still have wrists.
He crossed the room in three strides and grabbed hers.
The glow snuffed out.
She turned to look at him, and he saw her face for the first time, grey eyes wide with something that was not quite fear, more like the startlement of someone who has dropped a very valuable thing and has not yet decided how to react. He understood, in the way that certainty arrives without reasoning, that whatever she was, she was not a nun.
She was not a woman.
She was not, in any category he had words for, human.
"Let go," she said. Her voice was low and precise, with the faint quality of something heard from very far away. "I will not tell you again."
His grip did not loosen.
"My sister," he said. "What did you do to my sister?"
A pause. Then: "Slowed it. I cannot stop it. I do not have" Something crossed her face. "It is complicated."
"Try."
She looked at him for a long moment, looked at him the way he had once seen a scholar look at a Latin text, like she was reading him, cataloguing him, deciding what could be translated and what could not.
"You should let go," she said, quieter now. "When you let go, I will leave, and you will not remember me by morning. That is how this is meant to work."
Aldric thought about the fires at the edge of the village. The woman with the empty eyes. Mira's face was the colour of tallow.
"No," he said.
The thing that was not a woman blinked as though no one had ever said that to her before.
Given what she was, he supposed, perhaps no one had.
★ ★ ★
