What are they doing to her? Ramus drew his knife and stepped forward, but then the gray people fell on him as well. He had imagined them as mere wraiths, but their weight surprised him, crushing him down and squeezing him inside. His head pulsed with pain, but what they sought existed far deeper.

Ramus felt the swell of old knowledge, much of it hidden away in the darkest corners of his mind, and at last he knew where Lulah's desolate scream had originated. He screamed as his own terrible memories rose.

His mother cries as he laughs at her, and it's a childhood wickedness he would never forget. She has had a hard life bringing him up on her own, every painful day etched in her face, and she nurses her bruised arm, loving him far too much to ever curse him for striking her. He is nine years old. He continues laughing, because to stop would be to allow access for the shame and shock pressing in from all around. She looks at him and loves him, and Ramus laughs some more.

More wrongs, more faults, more sources of guilt. A shopkeeper who Ramus stole from in his teens; his mother's look of hurt when he turned down a gift she had bought for him; Nomi, sitting in her home after Timal had left for the last time, her tears icy spears in his heart.

And the gray people grinned and grew fat on what he was experiencing. Their weight increased, their eyes sparkled, the rotten teeth in their mouths gained weight and color, their sunken cheeks filled out; and more and more of them were coming from the forest.

He grasped the round stone charm and struck out, feeling the warm patter of blood across his face.

The Widow spoke to him and he clung to her voice, feeling surprise simmering through the beings splayed across his prone body. Magichala is instinct, she said. You're born with it, and it can never be forced. You breathe it. There's no technique other than that.

Ramus uttered the words he had read from the parchments and they flowed from him like stale breath. He kept his voice low so that Lulah could not hear.

He grabbed Konrad's stone fingers hanging around his neck and they felt warm, a strange heat as though it was from somewhere other than his own flesh and blood. He looked up into the eyes of a woman as the final sound left his mouth. At first, her grin changed into a look of surprise, and then her eyes stopped glittering as they turned to pale, dead stone.

Ramus did not know how long Konrad had taken to die. Perhaps back then, whatever power the words held was still developing in him, growing from the seed planted by his readings of the parchment. But this time, within a dozen beats of his muttering the words, everything had grown still.