The morning starts with me being casual about it, which is its own kind of lie, because there's nothing casual about counting keys.

I go to the motor pool first, on the pretext of asking whether the second truck's coming back on the road before the ford closes for good — which is a real question, but not the one I'm actually there to ask. Fennick's got his head under the hood of something that isn't running and won't tell me why, and I lean on the fender and ask, easy as anything, who had cottage keys cut last winter.

"Nobody," he says, not looking up. "Locks are original to the build. Nineteen-whatever. You'd need the master, and that's Kastel's, and the spares are in the lodge safe."

Which tells me nothing except that whoever went through my mother's tin box either has the master or doesn't need one, and I already knew my own lock could be walked through with a hairpin and a bad mood, so that's not information, that's just me confirming what I already suspected on principle: locks in this pack are theater, same as everything else.

I try the fence line next, because Ossian works it six to eight most mornings and Ossian notices things — cruelly, casually, the way a cat notices a bird it isn't hungry for yet, but notices — and if anyone saw a shape at my cottage window Wednesday night it'd be him.

He's not there.

I stand at the tree line a full ten minutes with a basket of nothing on my hip, pretending to check the frost heave on the lower fence post, and the man who is never, ever late for his own cruelty is nowhere on that line. I ask Casker's boy, who's out setting rabbit snares, if he's seen him. The boy shrugs. I ask the same thing of the woman at the ration shed, in the careless tone of someone making conversation about the weather, and she says she thinks she saw his truck up toward the lodge road Wednesday evening, later than his usual round.

That's it. That's the whole haul from a morning's worth of careful, sideways questions: Ossian Reyle was not where he was supposed to be on Wednesday night, and nobody thinks that's strange enough to remark on twice.

I think it's strange enough to remark on for the rest of the day.

—

Junie Calloway comes to the infirmary a little after noon with her sleeve rolled to the elbow and a burn along the inside of her forearm the length of my thumb, angry-pink, blistering at one edge where she must have leaned too close to the lodge's big kitchen range.

"Grease popped," she says, before I ask. Nineteen years old and already good at getting ahead of the question, which tells you something about the house she works in.

I clean it, and while I'm working the arnica into the skin around the blister, not on it, I remember setting this same arm's wrist not quite a year back — May, it was, a fall on the lodge steps she said, though I never believed the falling part — and I remember how she didn't cry then either, just watched my hands the whole time like she was memorizing the technique for later use.

She watches my hands now, too.

"You don't have to pay me for this," I tell her, because she's already reaching for something in her apron pocket, and I know without looking it isn't money, because nobody on lodge staff carries money, they carry favors and gossip and the occasional stolen tin of something, and I already know which currency Junie deals in.

"I know," she says. "I want to anyway."

I let her. It costs me nothing to let a girl feel like she's not just a mouth that gets fed and a set of hands that clears plates. It costs her something to keep it in, is the thing — I can see it building behind her front teeth the whole time I'm taping the gauze — and eventually it comes out in the flat, fast voice of someone reciting something she's been turning over so long it's worn smooth.

"He's been asking Dr. Kastel about an old panel," she says. "Twice this winter. Whether it can still be trusted after this long. Thirteen years, he said once. I was clearing the good glasses, they don't think I count for a person in the room."

"A panel," I say, keeping my face very still, very professional, the face I use when a patient tells me something that changes the whole diagnosis and I don't want them to see the diagnosis change. "Panel of what?"

"I don't know. Blood, I think. There's a folder he keeps in the lodge safe. Manila, all coffee-ringed on the corner like somebody's set a mug on it a hundred times. He takes it out sometimes at night and reads it in the office with the door shut, and Kastel doesn't come in when he's doing that, and Ilsa doesn't bring coffee in when he's doing that either. Everybody just — knows not to."

"Whose is it?"

"I don't know," she says again, and this time I believe her, because her eyes don't do the thing eyes do when someone's protecting a name. "I only ever see the outside of it."

I keep taping the gauze at exactly the same speed I was taping it before she said any of this, because if my hands change speed she'll notice, and if she notices she'll wonder why, and I've spent thirteen years making sure the wondering stops at me and goes no further.

"There's more," she says, and now there's something almost apologetic in it, like she knows she's handing me weight and doesn't have anywhere lighter to put it down. "Back in February he asked which of the human-born women were still under thirty-five. At the table. Like he was asking after the weather."

I don't ask her what she thinks that means. I don't ask her anything else at all for a second, because my mouth has gone dry in a way arnica and gauze have never once made it go dry, and I need the second to get my voice back level.

"And Elder Hoxie's raised the succession twice at Circle," she adds, quieter now, because she can tell she's said the real thing and everything since has just been filler to soften the landing. "Both times Dorian's voice went — quieter. Not louder. Quieter. Which is worse, I think. When his voice gets loud you know where you are with him."

That's a true thing she's just said, and it lands harder than anything else in the room, because it's exactly what I've thought for thirteen years and never once heard another person say out loud.

"Thank you," I tell her, and mean it, and send her off with the arnica jar and instructions to keep the burn dry, and stand at my own counter for a long minute afterward not moving, because moving feels like it would spill something.

—

The infirmary keeps an index. Alphabetical, cardboard tabs, twenty years of it in three drawers under the counter, every household's file going back further than I've been alive in some cases. I go to the V's on the pretext of checking dosage history for old man Casker's neighbor, and I let my fingers walk past Trewitt, past Underhill, straight to where Vesely ought to sit.

There's a tab. VESELY, I. There's no folder behind it.

Not misfiled — I check the drawers on either side, I check under the H's in case some careless hand shelved it by married name that doesn't exist, I check the box in back where Kastel dumps anything too old to matter — and there is nothing anywhere in this building with my mother's full case history in it. What's left, wedged behind a duplicate carbon nobody thought worth stealing, is a single half-sheet, faded to the color of weak tea, with one line of Sable's handwriting on it.

Internal haemorrhage. 3 November 2011.

That's the whole of my mother's death, reduced to five words and a date, and even that much has apparently been worth someone's trouble to leave behind only in triplicate carbon, as if the original had somewhere better to be.

I stand there with the half-sheet in my hand and I do the thing I do instead of feeling things, which is turn it into a question with an answer I can go get. I go get Sable.

—

She's at the scrub sink in the back room, elbow-deep in suds, running a brush along the serrations of the suture scissors with the particular ferocity of a woman who scrubs harder when there's something she doesn't want to talk about. I put the half-sheet on the drainboard next to her, careful not to get it wet, and I don't say anything. I let her see it.

She goes still for exactly as long as it takes her to recognize her own handwriting, and then she keeps scrubbing.

"Where's the rest of it," I say. Not a question. I've had enough of questions today from other people; I want this one to land like a fact she has to step around.

"There is no rest of it, far as I ever kept." She doesn't look up. "That's the record. That's what I signed."

"That's five words, Sable. That's not a record, that's an epitaph."

"It's what happened." Her voice doesn't rise, but something under it goes tight, the way a rope goes tight right before it either holds or doesn't. "Your mother bled out. That's the worst thing I know, and it's the only thing I know, and I have carried it around long enough that I'd appreciate you not asking me to hold it up to the light again on a Friday."

"Somebody's asking Kastel about a panel run on her. Thirteen years ago. Somebody's got a folder in the lodge safe with a coffee ring on it that nobody's allowed to look at."

Her hands stop, just for a second, on the scissors. Just a second. Then they start again, faster.

"I don't know anything about a panel," she says, and turns the tap up harder, water hammering into the basin loud enough to end a conversation without either of us having to say it's ended.

I let her have it. I stand there another second in the noise of the water and I hate myself a little for standing down, because thirteen years of being handled by this pack has taught me exactly which doors will open if I push and which ones will only close harder and lock, and Sable's door, right now, with her back to me and the water running, is the second kind. I could push. I don't.

I go home instead, and I don't sleep in my bed again that night either, though I don't examine that decision too closely, and I lie on the infirmary cot with the lamp off and listen to the pipes tick as the building cools, and somewhere in that stretch of listening the fear organizes itself into something with edges, and the edges have Ossian's shape and Dorian's handwriting and a coffee ring on a folder I'll never be allowed to open.

—

He comes to the garden gate the next evening, not the door.

I clock that before I clock him — the fact that he's standing at the low wire gate in the last grey light instead of knocking at the cottage, like he worked out somewhere in the last two days that the door is the thing that scares me and the gate isn't — and something in my chest does a small, unauthorized thing at the noticing.

He's got my thermos in one hand, the one I left at the line shack, and a coil of new chicken wire slung over the other shoulder like it weighs nothing, though I know for a fact it doesn't, I've hauled that gauge before and my forearms remember it for days.

"Fence post by the tansy bed's leaning," he says, by way of hello. "Figured you hadn't gotten to it."

"I hadn't."

He doesn't ask permission to start. He just crouches at the post, tests it with one hand, and starts unwinding old wire off it while I stand there in the cooling dark with my arms crossed over my ribs, watching a man fix something of mine without being asked, for the second time inside a week, and not knowing what column to file that under either.

The sleet's started up again, fine and almost silent, ticking against the new wire as he stretches it. Small sound. Steady. I find myself listening to it instead of to him, because listening to him feels like standing too close to a fire I haven't decided if I want.

"Who searched your cottage," he says. Not looking up from the wire.

"I never said it was searched."

"Boot prints under your window went both directions." He tugs the wire taut, testing it against the post with his shoulder. "In toward the glass, and back out. Somebody stood there a while before they went round to the door. And you slept here Wednesday night instead of your own bed, which you've never done in the two days I've been paying attention to what you do."

I don't have an answer for that that isn't a confession, so I don't give him one.

He finishes the splice, sets the pliers down, and straightens up, and for a second neither of us says anything, and the only sound in the whole garden is sleet on wire and my own pulse going somewhere it has no business going.

"What do you want, Mira," he says.

Not are you okay. Not what happened. Just that, flat and plain, the exact question nobody in this pack has ever bothered to actually wait around for the answer to.

"I want a stove that draws on the first try," I say, light, quick, the joke already halfway out of my mouth before I've decided to make it, because a joke is a door I can close behind me.

He doesn't laugh.

He doesn't move either. He just stands there in the ticking sleet with the coil of leftover wire still looped over one shoulder, and he waits, and the waiting stretches out long enough that I start counting it without meaning to — one Mississippi, two — the way I count jars on a shelf, the way I count breaths of whoever's nearest the door, because counting is the only tool I own for a silence I don't have a better one for, and I lose the count somewhere past thirty because my hand's found the nearest solid thing, the gatepost, and is gripping it instead of finishing the sentence I owe him.

The sleet keeps ticking. He keeps not filling it.

"I want one thing," I say, finally, low, and it comes out rawer than I meant it to, "that nobody gets to take."

The second it's out of my mouth I want it back. I actually reach for the thermos on the ground like I might busy my hands with the cap, screwing and unscrewing it, anything to have something to do that isn't standing in my own garden having just told a man the truest sentence I've said out loud in nine years.

He doesn't say anything gentle. He doesn't say anything at all for a second, and I use that second to claw my way back to solid ground, because I need to be the one asking questions again or I'm going to come apart standing right here at the gate.

"Why," I say, sharper now, deliberately sharper, "does the second-in-command of a pack he's been refusing for two years and eight months spend his evenings fixing an herbalist's fence."

"Because logistics are the only kind of help you'll take." He says it like it's obvious. Like he worked it out a long time ago and has just been waiting for me to catch up to my own pattern. "You won't take comfort. You'll take a fence post."

I have no answer to that. Not one. It sits there in the dark between us, true and unbearable, and the sleet keeps ticking on the new wire like it's counting for me since I've lost the thread of my own count entirely.

"What does he want with my mother's records," I ask instead, because I need to be somewhere else, any other room than the one he just put me in.

"I don't know." He says it plainly, no performance in it. "But I know some things. Do you want them."

Something in his voice on that last part isn't a threat and isn't comfort either. It's an offer with a door in it, and he's standing at the door waiting, same as he waited a minute ago, and I understand that if I say no he will let it go and never bring it up again, and some sick, exhausted part of me almost wants to say no just to see if he'd actually do it.

"Yes," I say.

He nods once, like that's the whole ceremony required, and sets the coil of wire down against the post, and when he speaks again his voice has gone very level, the register of a man reading something off a ledger he's kept a long time and never shown anyone.

"Since he took the seat, he's had seven human-born women brought up to the Hollow Cabin. One at a time. Years apart, so nobody ever put them in a line and counted. Four left Ironroot inside a year of it. Two are dead." A beat. "None of them ever carried."

The cold that's been sitting in my collarbone all evening moves up, all at once, into the back of my scalp, a crawling numbness like someone's lifted the braid clean off my neck.

"I was ordered to close the cabin and clear it the morning after. Every time." He looks at me now, finally, straight on, no mercy in it and no cruelty either, just a man laying facts on a table because I asked him to. "The eighth of October, twenty-sixteen, was the sixth. Yours was the seventh — the seventeenth of October, twenty-sixteen. Sable set your collarbone two days later. I burned the bedding myself."

The sleet keeps ticking on the wire.

I don't confirm it. I don't deny it.

I don't say anything at all.