Ellen did not pray at first. She stood shadowed by lamplight, before her father and the market square crowd. Her left hand closed white-knuckled around her right. She looked back at her sisters; Hannah turned away. Claire did not, but Ellen avoided her older sister’s gaze as if there was fire in it.

Matt read that fire: if Ellen had not spoken at lunch, she would not be here now.

Whispers rippled from the clearing to the crowd’s edge and back. The Crier took notes.

By Matt’s side Sandy stood silent, tense. What should he do now, with all these people watching and Rafferty pacing, his high color deepening to purple?

“Ellen,” Rafferty repeated, in a tone of voice Matt could tell he thought was kind. “Pray. If you’ve told the truth.” Which even Matt could tell was not a choice between two roads so much as the choice between a devil and a cliff.

Ellen’s head bobbed. The first time she tried to speak no words came out, but on the second they emerged: “Mother, hear me—” the prayer the Criers sang this morning, its words made eager by her fear.

She watched her father while she spoke, as if the man was a crumbling wall that might collapse on her at any moment. She cut her finger with a knife from her belt. Blood welled to fall on stone.

No noise dared intrude. People must have breathed, hells, Matt must have breathed himself, but he only heard the splash.

A loud whip crack split the night, and he jumped. A hundred eyes darted skyward at once, toward the stars and moon. No winged shape passed overhead, no shadow rose from the rooftops. Shifting wind had snapped the flag on the market’s flagpole. Matt laughed nervously, and others joined him.

Sandy held herself tense as a watch spring. The Rafferty girls did not laugh, either. Hannah and Claire watched Ellen, and Ellen stared at their father, and Corbin Rafferty was silent and still and grim.

He raked the circled crowd with his regard. The blotched colors of his face merged and deepened. “Don’t you laugh at my girl. She said she saw the Stone Man. She said it came, and it came.” He swung back to Ellen. “Go on. Call it. Now.”

She gave no answer. Whatever she willed against him when she drew her knife, whatever doom she hoped to call down from the skies, it had not fallen.

“She made the whole thing up,” a man shouted outside the circle. Matt didn’t recognize the voice, or else he would have made the owner regret speaking. “She’s cocked, Rafferty.”

“You call my girl a liar?” Corbin’s voice low and dangerous now, as Matt had seen him crouch in bar fights. “Pray, Ellen.”

She lowered her head. Rafferty clutched his stick in a strangler’s grip.

Before he could do anything, Sandy spoke. “Corbin, she’s telling the truth.”