My bread rises when I'm angry. By the time Harlan Mott had finished telling me who would be sleeping in my spare room, the rye on the back bench had pushed its cloth clean off the bowl.
The man he meant stood beside him with a brass lantern in his hand. If he turned his head a few inches to the left, he would watch a batch of rye do in four minutes what rye does in four hours, and I would hang before Martinmas.
"There's the Hart," I said. "They've beds at the Hart."
"Gone," Mott said. "Burned to the joists last night. Didn't you hear the bell, lass?"
I had heard it, elbow deep in the first dough at two in the morning, and decided that whatever was burning was someone else's trouble.
"Captain Bastian Crowe," said the man with the lantern. "Order of the Lantern."
He was younger than I'd have liked, not yet thirty, with a soot burn along one jaw and a grey coat that still smelled of the fire. A fine chain ran from the ring of the lantern to an iron cuff on his left wrist.
Every child in the valley knows about the glass. My mother taught me before she taught me my letters. A thumb of flame behind thick glass, yellow as butter, until someone within twelve paces works a spell. Then it burns green.
Twelve paces, Tam. Never closer.
The bench with the rye was nine paces from where he stood. I'd counted it before he finished his name.
"I've no spare bed," I said.
"You've your mother's," Mott said, and smiled while he said it. He jingled the parish keys at his belt so I would remember whose building I baked in. "Seven nights, that's all. The Order pays a penny a night. Generous, I call it."
"Seven nights," the captain agreed. "On the seventh I open my orders, and then I'll be out of your house."
"And the person your orders name?"
"Will be out of everyone's." He looked at my shelves, not at me. "Do you always bake this much for a village this size?"
"Do you always ask questions you don't want answered?"
Something moved at the corner of his mouth and was gone. He set the lantern on my counter as gently as an egg. The flame stood straight and yellow.
"Lit from the Magister's own flame at Carrow," Mott said, as if he'd made it himself. "Never goes out. Isn't that right, Captain?"
"Reeve." The captain didn't raise his voice. "If I die in your parish, you know what follows."
Mott's smile slipped, just slightly. "The Forfeit. Aye."
I knew it too. If a Lantern hunter dies in a parish, the Order may question every woman in it. Every one. Old Hazel with her herbs. The miller's girls. Me.
Pip came in at four with flour on his nose and news in his mouth, both at once.
"It started at his door, Tam, honest, the captain's door, and Jory says the latch was barred from the outside with a bench leg and he only got out because he went through the window onto the brewhouse roof, and he burned his face doing it, did you see his face?"
I saw it. I'd been trying not to.
"Light the oven," I said.
He lit it with his first strike, the way he always did, which never stopped annoying me. Then he looked up the back stairs, where the captain's boots were moving across the boards of my mother's room.
"Someone wants him dead," Pip said quietly.
"Someone can wait seven days."
Because if someone didn't, if that man died under my roof, the Forfeit would start at my door. The Order would want to know who fed him last.
I took clean sheets upstairs. My mother's room still smelled of beeswax and old wool, though she had been ten years in St Brannoc's churchyard and I had never once aired it. I shook the sheet out over her bed and it snapped like a sail.
"Whose room was it?"
He was in the doorway. I hadn't heard him.
"Nobody's," I said.
"It smells like somebody's."
I tucked the corner hard enough to hurt my fingers. "It smells like a room that's been shut. Supper's at six. I don't wait."
He ate my bread like a soldier, fast and without comment, the lantern on the table by his elbow, the chain looped round his wrist. I watched the flame more than I watched him. I kept my hands still and my temper flat, and the loaf on the board behaved like any loaf.
He took a flask from his coat and drank.
"The reeve's compliments," he said, and capped it. "Filled from his own cask. Your village is very kind to me, Miss Rook."
"My village wants you gone."
"Is that so." He turned the flask in his fingers. Then he set it down too carefully, missed the table, and watched it roll away across my floor as if it belonged to someone else.
His pupils had gone wide and black, eating the grey.
"Captain?"
He stood up. The bench went over. He said something about a window and his hand went to his throat, and then he folded, straight down, the chain dragging the lantern to the edge of the table where it rocked and stayed.
I was on my knees before I'd decided to be. Hot skin. A heart going like a hare's. Henbane: I knew the smell, sour and green, from Hazel's back shelf. Hazel was a mile off across the brook. He would be dead long before I got there and back.
And then the Forfeit, at my door.
I tried to drag him. He was a full head taller than me and limp as wet sacking, and the lantern came with him on its chain, clanking, staying four paces from my hands however far I pulled. I could not get him outside twelve paces of his own glass. Nobody could. That was the point of the chain.
I sat back on my heels. The rye I'd set for the morning sat on the dresser under its cloth.
I tore off my apron and threw it over the lantern.
Then I took a fistful of dough, pressed it flat against his chest, put both hands on it and did the thing my mother made me swear I would never do where a soul could see.
The dough went warm. Then grey. Then black as a chimney, drawing the poison up through his shirt while the heat drained out of my arms and left me cold to the bone.
His breath caught. Steadied.
His eyes came open. They weren't on me. They were on my apron, and on the green light soaking through it.