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.

When Ramus moved, the crackle of breaking stone limbs startled him. The gray people around him were still gray, but now they were motionless and dead. Here and there he could still see the soft texture of flesh and skin instead of the dulled tones of stone, but as he watched even these hardened. His attackers were statues, frozen forever into one moment in time. He heaved away the people who had been crawling and clasping across him, pulling himself from beneath their dead weight and feeling the rough edges of their fingers, teeth and hair scratching the exposed skin of his face.

An arm stood in his way, fingers turned into the soft ground where its owner had been grasping for balance. One thump with the heel of his hand snapped the arm from the shoulder and it tipped over, fingers still splayed like a dead spider.

Gasping, still barely believing what he had done, Ramus stood and looked across at Lulah.