She wants to hurt me. I lean in. ‘I’m the only kin who would come. They know, your sons. They know you’re crossing to the Maker. They’d rather drink or game than sit by your stinking flesh and smell the piss on the sheets.’ The words roll out. She holds herself hard against them. ‘I am a curse,’ I say. ‘I am your curse. The one you made. I will eat a Simple Eating on your grave. You can go to Eve bearing the rest of your worst of the worst.’

‘You cannot,’ she cracks. ‘The Maker forgives all if it is recited.’ Her voice is thick and phlegmy. ‘Eat cream and mustard seed,’ she says with urgency. Jealousy and lies. ‘Drink sack . . .’ Mockery. ‘Black pudding, garlic.’ Revenge, miserliness. ‘Pork snout, duck tongue, roast pigeon.’ Smuggling, usury, thieving. She knows all the foods. ‘Eat a lamb’s heart.’ Killing a babe. ‘Tell me you will. Tell me you will eat the foods from my coffin.’

She’s not my granddam any more, just an old, scared woman close to death. The plum stone in my heart grates against my rib bones. I want to dig it out with my thumb and force it down her throat.

‘I will eat your sins,’ I whisper around the plum stone. ‘I will carry them to my grave.’

She sinks back against the bed, quiet.

I leave the house. I walk down the lane lined with its thin grass blades. Daffrey or Owens. Why must these be the choices? What if I could be something new, like the green shoots coming up out of plain earth. Something all to myself.

I go to Northside’s tavern row. I look in tavern after tavern until I find them. Misgett’s deep in a card game with a table full of other rogues. He puts down a card bearing a queen and a black flower. Uric’s perched, silent as a carrion eater, on a stool nearby. The table chatter hushes. I stare first at Misgett, then at Uric. ‘I give you the foods for your mother’s Eating.’ Both men get still.

I list the foods, then let the moment get heavy. When the weaker rogues begin to fidget in the silence, I say, ‘Fail in her Eating, and the food will rot atop your own coffins, for never will I touch it.’ I reach across the table. The other rogues hiss and jerk away, one uttering the Maker’s Prayer under his breath. Misgett doesn’t move and doesn’t stop me either. I take the queen with a black flower. A token of the Daffreys.

24. GINGERBREAD

I EXPECT THE PLUM stone in my chest to be gone. It’s still there, stuck hard. In the stink of Dungsbrook, a few lanes from home, I find home is not where I’m going.