He was not a lettered man; most often he depended on the family of the dead or whoever was on duty at the infirmary to write down the names for him. Sometimes there was only a tally mark on the page. I entered the names as he had given them to me. They’d go into a ditch grave tomorrow; there was little point any more in worrying about the order in which I wrote them down. And so I logged Eldafleur Sims, Coby Tarn, Rufus Lear, Joffra Keel, A Retired Soldier, Carsina Thayer—

I set down my pen. I looked at the name on the list, and the name my hand had so obligingly written. Hadn’t my Carsina been betrothed to a Captain Thayer? My nervous fingers scrabbled lightly against the tabletop. Carsina Grenalter. Carsina Thayer. Many couples wed hastily in the face of the plague. My friend at the academy, Gord, had done so. It seemed likely that Carsina had wed her handsome captain. No matter how foolish or shallow the attraction had been, Carsina had meant something to me. My first romance, and my first heartbreak. And today her body had been unloaded from a corpse cart and somehow I hadn’t even noticed. I rubbed my face and took up my pen again. Reddik Koverton was the last name, and I carefully entered it into the ledger. I blew on the ink to dry it and then closed it.

Did I want to look on her again, dead?

No. Of course not.

Yes.

However we had parted, whatever I had discovered about her, she had been my sister’s friend, a longtime friend of my family, and the first girl I’d ever kissed. Her love letters to me at the academy were still bundled in with my soldier son’s journal. Tears found their way to my weary eyes. I wouldn’t bury her in a ditch, with strangers tumbled beside her and lime eating away her flesh. I’d dig her a separate grave myself; she would not lie in a common hole. I put my face in my hands and sat like that at my table for a time. I knew that I was going to go out to look at her tonight. I could not decide if I was motivated by sentiment or morbid curiosity. It probably didn’t matter. I took my lantern and went out into the darkness.

The circle of torches still burned. Nonetheless, I heard a squeak of alarm and then a rustling as I approached. Rats. I held my lantern high as I entered my torch circle. The seven bodies lay as we had left them. Of the three women, only one could be Carsina. I knew her by a single blonde curl that had escaped her shroud. Unlike the others, she was not wrapped in coarse white sacking. A fine fabric enveloped her, white linen with white lace worked along the edge of it, and someone had wound the sheet around her with care. I went down on one knee beside her and reached a hand toward her face. Then I drew my hand back. It wasn’t that I feared to see how the disease had ravaged her. I suddenly felt that I intruded.