The messenger boys await me outside. Two play a throwing game with a bit of wood. Another stamps on ants. A curly-haired boy about as high as my breast has gathered some of the others with a story. ‘And Corliss, the Queen’s governess, was the witch that made the poppet!’ the curly-haired boy finishes. Some of the boys nod solemnly.

The ant stamper pauses in his stamping. ‘No, it was the Queen’s governess got cursed by the witch. That’s why she died. So she can’t be the witch.’

I remember Corliss clutching her belly, just where the poppet was said to have been stuck with pig bristles. If a witch is at work in our town, no folk is safe.

‘The newspanto said the governess was a lamb among wolves,’ a boy with two missing teeth joins in.

‘It’s a wolf among lambs,’ bites back the curly-haired boy. ‘I saw the panto. The Queen’s secretary said she was a murderess and traitor. He said her crime was treason against the crown and against Queen Bethany, and there’ll be an inquiry into it because the governess was a wolf among lambs.’

‘Who’d she kill?’ asks the ant stamper. ‘Who got murdered?’

‘Sin eater ate deer heart on her coffin,’ is all the curly-haired boy says in answer.

To be treason, Corliss would have had to kill royalty. Is that what the deer heart signifies? There hasn’t been royal folk who died since Queen Maris. And none before that except the old king. Unless you count Queen Maris’s babes that were lost in the womb.

Was Corliss a killer and a witch who didn’t recite her sins? Who would dare such a thing if her soul’s endless torment was the cost? No, somefolk falsely blamed Corliss for murder.

But the ant stamper asks a good question. If there really was a murder, who got killed? And if everyfolk thinks Corliss did it, then the true killer must still be out there. The thought makes me cold and hot in the same moment. Trying to shake the feeling off catches the boys’ attention.

The ant stamper gathers himself quickest. An Eating near the Great Makerhall, he announces. The others come right in, all their words heaping atop the others. Recitation for an ailing child south of the river’s bridge. Recitation for Goodwife Miller. Eating at Spring’s Meadow Farm. Eating for the second son of the chandler near the guild house. And on and on and on.