Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Five

They went through Ashenmere together in the afternoons, when the weak December light held.

Seraphel moved at the edge of visibility, not quite invisible, but easy to overlook, the eye sliding past her the way the eye slid past things it wasn't ready to reckon with. Aldric walked beside her, conspicuously mortal, greeting people by name, stopping at doors. He was the face of whatever they were doing. She was the knowledge behind it.

She had walked through a thousand dying places. She knew that, in the abstract, the way she knew facts about herself: she was old, she had seen suffering, she had observed and recorded and moved on. But walking through Ashenmere with Aldric beside her, she found that the abstraction was becoming specific, the way things became specific when you stopped observing them from above and stood among them.

There was a woman named Agnes Thatcher who was caring for four sick grandchildren alone because her daughter had died in November. She was sixty years old, had not slept in a week, and her hands shook as she carried the water, but she did not stop. Seraphel stood in Agnes Thatcher's kitchen and felt something she did not have a good name for.

"You're frowning," Aldric said quietly, as they left.

"I do not frown."

"You were doing something with your face that isn't your usual expression. I'm choosing to call it frowning."

She filed this away. "The youngest child," she said. "Thomas. He is worse than he appears. The lungs. He will not show the worst of it for another day, but the sound" She had heard ten thousand people breathe across ten thousand years. She could hear the water in the lungs before the body announced it. "He needs the steam treatment. The tent of cloth over boiling herbs, the monk knows the method."

"I'll tell Cassian tonight." Aldric glanced at her sidelong. "What else?"

"The miller's family is better than it was. Whatever they are eating, there are turnips, onions, and a broth with bones, which is helping. The body needs more than herbs when it fights this. It needs feeding."

"The miller has more resources than most."

"Yes. That is always the shape of it."

She said it without bitterness, because bitterness required a stake in the outcome, and she had never permitted herself a stake. But something in the words came out heavier than she intended, and Aldric heard it.

"You've seen this before," he said. "Not just plagues. This. The ones with resources survive better than the ones without."

"Many times."

"Does it?" He stopped. Started again differently. "What is it like, seeing the same things happen again and again? Do you become accustomed to it?"

Seraphel considered the question honestly. "I became accustomed to it," she said slowly. "That was what I believed. That the accumulation of observation produced a kind of equilibrium."

"And now?"

"Now I am less certain. Equilibrium may be what happens when you are not permitted to be disturbed. And I am" She chose the word carefully. "Increasingly disturbed."

Aldric was quiet for a moment. "Is that bad? Being disturbed?"

"I do not know yet," she said.

He nodded, as though that were a perfectly reasonable answer. "Come on. The Perrin family is at the east end. Widow and three daughters. I want to see how they're faring."

She followed him through the mud and the cold, and she noticed and permitted herself to notice that she was glad to.

★ ★ ★