“Strangers came and ye welcomed em in!” she cried in her rusty crow’s voice. “Welcomed em and gave em bread to eat, and it’s ruin they’ve fed ye in return! The deaths of those ye loved and depended on, spoilage to the time of the harvest, and gods know what curses upon the time to follow fin de año!”

More murmurs, now louder. She had touched their deepest fear: that this year’s evil would spread, might even snarl the newly threaded stock which had so slowly and hopefully begun to emerge along the Outer Arc.

“But they’ve gone and likely won’t be back!” Rhea continued. “Mayhap just as well—why should their strange blood taint our ground? But there’s this other... one raised among us... a young woman gone traitor to her town and rogue among her own kind.”

Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper on this last phrase; her listeners strained forward to hear, faces grim, eyes big. And now Rhea pulled the pallid, skinny woman in the rusty black dress forward. She stood Cordelia in front of her like a doll or a ventriloquist’s dummy, and whispered in her ear... but the whisper travelled, somehow; they all heard it.

“Come, dear. Tell em what ye told me.”

In a dead, carrying voice, Cordelia said: “She said she wouldn’t be the Mayor’s gilly. He wasn’t good enough for such as her, she said. And then she seduced Will Dearborn. The price of her body was a fine position in Gilead as his consort... and the murder of Hart Thorin. Dearborn paid her price. Lusty as he was for her, he paid gladly. His friends helped; they may have had the use of ’er as well, for all I know. Chancellor Rimer must have gotten in their way. Or p’rhaps they just saw him, and felt like doing him, too.”

“Bastards!” Pettie cried. “Sneaking young culls!”

“Now tell em what’s needed to clarify the new season before it’s sp’iled, dearie,” Rhea said in a crooning voice.

Cordelia Delgado raised her head and looked around at the men. She took a breath, pulling the sour, intermingled smells of graf and beer and smoke and whiskey deep into her spinster’s lungs.

“Take her. Ye must take her. I say it in love and sorrow, so I do.”

Silent. Their eyes.

“Paint her hands.”

The glass gaze of the thing on the wall, looking its stuffed judgment over the waiting room.

“Charyou tree,” Cordelia whispered.

They did not cry their agreement but sighed it, like autumn wind through stripped trees.

3

Sheemie ran after the bad Coffin Hunter and Susan-sai until he could literally run no more—his lungs were afire and the stitch which had formed in his side turned into a cramp. He pitched forward onto the grass of the Drop, his left hand clutching his right armpit, grimacing with pain.