“Good day t’ye, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty!” Aunt Cord greeted her in a cracked, vivacious voice that made Susan’s heart tremble. Aunt Cord curtseyed one-handed, holding the little box curled against her chest with the other. “Where go ye on this fine autumn day? Where go ye so speedy? To no lover’s arms, that seems sure, for one’s dead and the other ta’en!”

Cordelia laughed again, thin lips drawing back from big white teeth. Horse teeth, almost. Her eyes glared in the sunlight.

Her mind’s broken, Susan thought. Poor thing. Poor old thing.

“Did thee put Dearborn up to it?” Aunt Cord asked. She crept to Pylon’s side and looked up at Susan with luminous, liquid eyes. “Thee did, didn’t thee? Aye! Perhaps thee even gave him the knife he used, after runnin yer lips o’er it for good luck. Ye’re in it together—why not admit it? At least admit thee’s lain with that boy, for I know it’s true. I saw the way he looked at ye the day ye were sitting in the window, and the way ye looked back at him!”

Susan said, “If ye’ll have truth, I’ll give it to ye. We’re lovers. And we’ll be man and wife ere Year’s End.”

Cordelia raised one dirty glove to the blue sky and waved it as if saying hello to the gods. She screamed with mingled triumph and laughter as she waved. “And t’be wed, she thinks! Ooooo! Ye’d no doubt drink the blood of your victims on the marriage altar, too, would ye not? Oh, wicked! It makes me weep!” But instead of weeping she laughed again, a howl of mirth into the blind blue face of the sky.

“We planned no murders,” Susan said, drawing—if only in her own mind—a line of difference between the killings at Mayor’s House and the trap they had hoped to spring on Farson’s soldiers. “And he did no murders. No, this is the business of your friend Jonas, I wot. His plan, his filthy work.”

Cordelia plunged her hand into the box she held, and Susan understood at once why the gloves she wore were dirty: she had been grubbing in the stove.

“I curse thee with the ashes!” Cordelia cried, flinging a black and gritty cloud of them at Susan’s leg and the hand which held Pylon’s reins. “I curse thee to darkness, both of thee! Be ye happy together, ye faithless! Ye murderers! Ye cozeners! Ye liars! Ye fornicators! Ye lost and renounced!”