Chapter 105

We did not open it in the orchard. It had waited three hundred years; it could wait for a fire.

First we put her back.

She was not mine. Nothing about her was mine to decide. So we left her as we had found her, with the ring on her hand and her arms folded the way somebody had folded them, and Rowan and Saskia put the earth back over her a spadeful at a time. Saskia wrote in Lucien’s ledger what had been done, and when, and by whom, and signed it again. Then the two of them lowered the stone back into its bed, ladder and bird uppermost.

Lucien stood at the foot of the grave the whole time. When it was done he said something under his breath in Seelie, very short, and walked back to the house without looking round.

***

There was one room on the ground floor with a whole roof, and Rowan got a fire going in its grate out of fallen roof-timber. It burned very fast and very clean.

Lucien sat on the floor by it with the paper on his knee. He had not unf