‘She is mad.’

‘We are all allowed one vice, no? You, of all people, know that.’

‘But she has a demon in her.’

‘She is just a woman,’ the man replies.

‘If a mare kicks you break it, get it pregnant, or acquire a new one,’ Colca says, ‘else you are a dead man.’

‘You only think of horses.’

Colca laughs at this, and the man feels annoyed by the coughing sound of it, as though Colca had never learned how to laugh.

‘This should be a welcoming town,’ the man says, pointing at the forge, and then at the abandoned monastery. ‘Remove these bodies from sight, and prepare that little family for transportation. They must be enshrouded. Even in this depopulated land their faces are famous. Their deaths, even in this charnel house, would be too revelatory.’

‘It would be far easier for me to scratch out their faces,’ Colca says. ‘It is hard to recognise a face without its eyes.’

‘No,’ the man says. ‘There is too much blood already, and theirs is old and fetid. The stains are hard to hide, and there are already too many flies. I can hardly sleep with the noise.’

‘Will you let me play with Emota first?’ Colca asks. ‘Then I will work till nightfall for your leisure.’

The man shakes his head. ‘Is Emota the only reason you have sided with me against your own town?’

‘You do not know what it is to be hated,’ Colca says. ‘And, besides, who is to say enforcing a curfew won’t separate the sickness within itself and kill it off. It has as much sense to it as anything else the people do. I do not do too bad a thing, and am a little freer for the doing of it.’

‘I am not using Emota today, but first drag the bodies from the forge. The day is sweltering, and we must begin. When de Fonteroy arrives everything must be ready; that man is not the waiting sort.’

Colca tramps towards the monastery and the man stands on the wall of the fountain for his morning address. From his higher vantage point he can see some large black thing at the midpoint between the town and the woods. He knows he should care about this new thing, but he does not. It is too hot, and he can still feel Mary’s chain round his throat.