‘And love.’

‘You will feel her from there. Feel her anew. Her ghost will touch you again, but with tender hands. As the dead owe to the living, no matter their state. The dead owe it, Punished Man, to salve your grief, and to take from you the grief you feel for yourself.’

He wept, while their hands slipped from him, and their voices fell into a cadence, making sounds that seemed less than words, yet truer somehow, as if they spoke the language of the souls.

After a time he thought he heard her then. His wife. The sounds of weeping to answer his own. He felt their shared grief washing back and forth, cool and impossibly bittersweet. The madness of long ago, the endless torment of uncertainty each time he stepped into a room where she waited, the dread of what might come the instant he looked into her wild, panicked eyes.

If there was magic in the world worthy of its power, this was surely it.

I must tell everyone. There is another kind of sorcery. Awake in the world, awake in our souls.

And her words on that last day, before he set out to place an order with Galast the cooper, for the casks they would need at the estate. ‘I have a surprise for you, beloved husband, for your return. Proof of my feelings for you. You will taste my love, Listar, when you come home. You will taste it, in ways unimagined. See how my love blesses you.’

And so he had, returning home filled with a new hope, and yet something trembled beneath the surface of his thoughts, a visceral fear. Hope, he now knew, was a vicious beast. Every thought a delusion, every imagined scene perfect in its resolution and yet utterly false; and when he found her, with the braided cord about her neck that she must have slipped over the bedroom door’s latch – in a house emptied of servants, who each later swore that they had been sent away by Listar’s express command – and when he comprehended the power of the will that kept tightening the cord while she sat against the door, only then did he understand the blessing of her love for him.

Illness, a mind bent, a soul broken, wherein every cruel impulse had slipped its leash. He knew now the horror behind her eyes, the fleeing child within who had nowhere to run.

He lowered his hands, wiped at his eyes, and looked to the two Bonecasters kneeling opposite him. So many undeserved gifts.

But the Dream will fade. The Dog-Runners will die out.

Abyss take us, that loss is beyond all recompense.

Something left him then. He did not know what it was, could not know, but its departure was like a sob, a relinquishing of unbearable pain. And in its absence, there was… nothing.