Veyna came after dark with a lantern in one hand and an armful of wilted reed garlands in the other.
She did not knock on the inner door; she waited in the front room of the storehouse until Chaska opened it, then looked past her to make sure Pip was not sleeping against the threshold. Behind the village head stood Merla, Orlen’s father, and Orlen himself, his left arm tucked inside his buttoned shirt to keep the bruised shoulder still and a white bandage wrapped around his knee.
“May we come in?” Veyna asked.
Ysabet looked down at Pip. The creature was awake, eating small crumbs of clean chalk from a wooden trencher. When the door opened, its split shell twitched once—a small, aborted movement that stopped as soon as the cracked seam pulled at its back. It did not rise or move toward the visitors.
“Stay by the bench,” Ysabet said. “And speak quietly.”
Veyna stepped inside and laid the woven garlands on the salt barrel near the wall. Someone had braided dried bladderwrack and yellow marsh flowers into them two evenings ago; now the stems were brittle and smelled of dry mud.
“I took these off the pier posts and the cookhouse door,” Veyna said. She did not look at Ysabet while she spoke; she looked straight at the low platform where Pip lay under its damp linen strip. “And I went to the houses on the upper lane before I came here. Nobody will call you that…
