The iron pry-bar had three notches filed into its taper, each marking an inch of leverage Tessa had earned the hard way.
She worked the flattened wedge behind the upper leaf of the brass hinge, setting the heel of the tool against the oak frame of the west stair doorway. The wood was black with thirty years of rot, soft enough to crumble under her thumb, but the hinge itself was solid cast metal—heavy, green-crusted along the knuckle, and fastened to the masonry with four stout iron wood-screws whose heads were thick with grease and dried lichen. Down in Mere, four pounds of clean salvage brass would fetch sixteen copper bits from the smith, or two jars of clear tallow and a twist of salt from Mother Rella.
Tessa leaned her hip into the bar. The rusted threads groaned inside the damp jamb.
Then the stone spoke.
The voice began with an organ-deep rumble that vibrated through the shale flagstones beneath her boots, climbed the shank of her iron bar, and rattled the brass buttons on her sheepskin vest. The sound rolled out of a narrow mortar seam six inches above her right ear, rich and terrible and drenched in velvet gloom.
“Woe to the trespasser who lays cold iron upon the threshold of the Seven Widows,” the wall boomed. “Turn back, mortal wanderer, before the weeping women drink the marrow from your wrists. Touch not the sacred brass, lest your fingers blacken like charred birch and wither into ash before the setting of the sun.”
The sound had a hollow echo, the sort of bass voice wandering players used when they wore papier-mâché crowns and pretended to summon demons at the Midsummer fair in Greyford.
Tessa did not drop the pry-bar. She did not stumble back toward the porch.
Instead, she paused with her weight thrown against the tool, cocked her head, and squinted at the lime joint.
The mortar between the two grey ashlar blocks was oddly fresh. It was still damp, pale grey rather than the weathered soot-black of the surrounding walls, worked with a trowel into the rough likeness of a pair of lips. A faint wisp of vapor curled from the opening, smelling of river clay and marigolds.
“Seven widows,” Tessa said aloud. Her voice was flat, dry, and thoroughly unimpressed.
The wall paused. The deep harmonic shudder died away in the stone, leaving only the thin hiss of mountain wind through the cracked upper gallery.
“Did you... did you not hear the doom spoken?” the wall asked. The booming majesty had slipped, revealing the sharper tenor of a man accustomed to people gasping on cue. “The curse takes the blood first. It creeps through the fingernails.”
“I heard you fine,” Tessa said. She shifted her grip on the pry-bar, digging the cold iron deeper into the gap behind the hinge plate until the wood splintered with a sharp pop. “I’m asking a practical question. Does this curse make the hinge any lighter?”
A long silence hung in the stairwell. A speck of loose lime fell from the mortar lips and bounced off Tessa’s shoulder.
“Does it make it... what?” the wall stammered.
“Lighter,” Tessa repeated patiently. “To carry. It’s three miles down the ridge to the river bridge, the path is loose shale the whole way, and the wind is coming out of the north. If I have to haul four pounds of dead metal in my salvage sack, I want to know if these seven weeping widows intend to carry their share of the load, or if they’re just going to sit around weeping while my shoulder cramps.”
“It is a death-curse,” the wall snapped, its baritone swelling again with theatrical force. “It rots the flesh from living bone! It does not provide pack-mule services for common thieves!”
“Then they’re useless, aren’t they?” Tessa muttered.
She reached into her coat pocket, drew out a blunt iron screwdriver forged from an old carriage bolt, and seated it firmly into the slot of the topmost screw. She braced her shoulder against the tool and leaned forward, applying steady, grinding pressure.
The screw resisted for two heartbeats. Then, with a dry complaint of iron against oak, it yielded a quarter-turn.
Behind the stone, deep within the foundation core, something clicked like a dry tongue against teeth.
Tessa had grown up in the shadow of the Crown mines, in a river town where every clerk had a seal and every prosperous man had three different voices. A voice shouting curses from behind a safe barrier of plaster was just another clerk with a louder desk.
“You’re making an error in judgement, girl,” the wall warned, though the tone sounded more like an actor whose costume had caught fire in the wings. “Can you not feel the chill in the marrow?”
“I smell damp lime and wet dog,” Tessa said, giving the screwdriver another hard twist. The screw groaned out half an inch, shedding flakes of orange powder onto her boot. “My father worked thirty years in the wet drift at Seam Four. I’ve heard supervisors threaten worse things than rot before breakfast. If you’re going to wither my hands, do it on the left one first. I use the right to turn the iron.”
The wall sputtered in baffled silence.
A faint blue shimmer flickered deep within the mortar mouth, then guttered out entirely. Nothing withered. No frost crept over her knuckles. Her skin remained rough, stained with river clay and iron grease, and completely whole.
Inside the hidden alcove, Prit stood beside the cold chimney with his white chalk hovering above the dark slate. The stone ledger refused the entry, carving a single brief line of rejection before fading:
CLAIM REFUSED: WITNESS UNPERSUADED.
“She didn’t blink, Master Vey,” the imp whispered toward the blue stone in the chimney socket. “The balance remains flat zero. You cannot draw a thimble of force from a mind that treats an ancient doom like a bad wheel on a vegetable cart.”
“I heard her,” Noll hissed back, his voice vibrating through the internal resonance tubes so only Prit could hear. “The little wretch has no poetry in her soul! Seven weeping widows! I gave that speech in Oakhaven and made a baron’s daughter faint dead away in her box!”
“A baron’s daughter does not carry a pry-bar,” Prit observed mildly, tapping his chalk against his ribs. “And she does not have holes in the toes of her boots. People with cold feet are notoriously difficult to terrify with ghosts.”
Out in the doorway, Tessa gave the screwdriver four more swift revolutions. The top screw pulled free with a soft click, landing squarely in her calloused palm. She held it up to the dim daylight, turning the heavy metal between thumb and forefinger.
Good iron. Coarse-threaded and stout enough to trade back to the cooper for six penny-nails.
She dropped the screw into her leather belt-pouch, where it chimed against her pry-bar.
“One,” she announced to the empty doorway.
The wall did not answer. The puckered lips of fresh mortar remained motionless, though Tessa could feel a stubborn warmth lingering in the surrounding stone.
She set her screwdriver into the second screw, two inches lower on the plate.
“I know you’re in there,” Tessa said conversationally, leaning her shoulder into the iron again. “And I know you’re not seven widows. Widows have more sense than to talk through a hole in the plaster. My aunt was a widow twice over, and when she wanted somebody out of her kitchen, she threw boiling kettle-water at their shins.”
The stone remained sullenly mute.
“Whoever you are,” Tessa continued, her breath misting as the screw began its retreat, “you ought to hire a better mason. The face on this joint looks like a dried plum. If you’re trying to play the grand phantom, you should smooth the edges so people can’t see the trowel marks.”
Deep inside the wall, Noll Vey suffered a sharp pang of professional pride.
“And another thing,” Tessa added, wiping rust from her knuckles. “You’re wasting good brass. Leaving good metal to rot in the rain is just lazy.”
“It is not rotting,” Noll muttered through the seam, his voice settling into the irritable baritone of a tired landlord. “It is an architectural feature.”
Tessa gave a short, dry laugh.
“An architectural feature that’s worth four coppers a pound,” she said. “Which means it’s my feature now. I walked all the way up the gorge with five pounds of scrap nails in my pack just to buy my father two twists of lung-tea. If you think a talking wall is going to talk me out of sixteen bits of clean brass, you’ve never met anyone from the river lanes.”
The second screw broke free with a rusty snap. She caught it against the heel of her hand and let it drop into her pouch.
“Two,” Tessa said. “Two more and the top leaf swings free. If you have any more dead relatives who want to curse my fingers, you’d better bring them out now. The light’s fading, and I want to be across the gorge before the mist thickens.”
She set the iron tool into the third screw.
From within the chimney recess, Noll Vey watched the girl through hairline fractures in the lintel. He saw the frayed wool cuffs of her coat, bound tight at the wrists with waxed twine. He saw the iron-stained calluses on her fingers, the stubborn set of her jaw, and the broad bread knife sheathed at her hip.
There was no fear in her. Not a single drop of it.
“Prit,” Noll whispered, his resonance barely a hum in the mortar. “What do we do with someone like that?”
The imp adjusted his spectacles on his bare nasal bone, white eyes glittering in the chimney gloom.
“You don’t frighten her, Master Vey,” Prit replied softly. “You can’t. A girl who has watched her father cough black coal into a tin basin has already seen everything your theatre can invent. If you want her to listen, you will have to offer her something far more terrifying than a ghost.”
“What’s that?”
“A fair wage,” Prit said.
Before Noll could digest the suggestion, the sky above the unroofed gallery turned the color of bruised slate. A low, rolling growl echoed from the mountain peaks to the north—the heavy rumble of a winter storm breaking over the heights.
Tessa paused with her screwdriver braced against the third screw. She tilted her face toward the open rafters. A single drop of icy rain fell from the grey sky, struck her cheek, and ran cold down the side of her neck.
“Three minutes,” she muttered to herself, measuring the smell of the wind with an experienced sniff. “Maybe four before the cloud opens up. Come on, you old bolt.”
She threw her weight into the tool once more.
Behind the wall, Noll felt the sudden plunge in atmospheric pressure through the core’s deep rock anchors. The mountain was about to pour a torrent of freezing runoff down the hillside, and the west stair culvert was choked with thirty years of dead briars and shattered roof-slate.
The show was over. The weather had arrived to demand the rent.