The knock came at three, while I was weighing salt, and nobody knocks on a bakehouse door at that hour unless they want feeding or want something worse.
Bastian stood on the step with his kit bag on one shoulder and the lantern held low against his knee. I looked at the flame before I looked at his face. Yellow.
"I've left the reeve's house," he said. "Your reeve keeps his own cask very close."
The oven mouth was eleven paces behind me. Eleven, with the fire banked and my hands about to go into forty pounds of dough. I did not tell him the number, and I did not tell the fire.
Why would a poisoned man pick a baker's floor to sleep on? I put the question aside like a bowl to be scraped later.
"Flour's on the left," I said. "If you're staying, you're working."
He kneaded like a man strangling a goose. The dough fought back and won.
"You're arguing with it," I said. "Heel of the hand. Push, fold, turn. It's dough, not a witness."
"If you say." But he pushed, folded, turned, and by the fourth loaf's worth he had stopped breaking the skin. His sleeve was floured to the elbow. Pip came down the loft ladder at half past three, grunted "Morning, Captain," and lifted the cloth off the starter crock on the shelf. All week it had sat flat and grey for me. For Pip it domed up like it had been waiting all night for him. He fed it, patted it, and went out for water.
"Does it always do that?" Bastian said.
"It's a crock of flour and old beer. It likes him."
"You said you were ten," I said. "At my kitchen table, over the register. When I asked nothing at all."
His hands stopped. "I did."
"Ten when what?"
He took longer than the question needed. "My mother died of fever when I was ten. The Order took me in after." He said it flat and quick, the way I say the rye's on the back bench, a sentence worn smooth from carrying.
It was a lie. I couldn't have told you which part. I only knew a lie when it came out of someone's mouth with its coat buttoned.
I could have pushed. I handed him more dough.
"Again," I said. "Heel of the hand."
We reached for the same corner of the board, and his floured hand closed over mine. Neither of us moved. There was flour on his jaw beside the soot burn. He leaned a half inch, and so did I.
The oven door banged in its frame, a draught from the yard. I stepped back so fast I knocked the salt over.
"Over-worked," I said, to the dough. "Put it in the trough."
I walked to St Brannoc's at first light, the loaves already out. Tomorrow was ten years since my mother died, and I had been telling myself it was a Sunday like any other.
Her stone leans a little to the east. Beneath it, on the grey grass, lay a bundle of lavender tied with blue thread, the stalks still green at the cut.
Hazel, then. Hazel's stall tied everything with blue thread, and Hazel never forgot a name or a day, however much she pretended to.
I pulled a dock leaf from the foot of the grave. I did not speak to the stone. Neither of us was ever good at it.
By noon I had decided. Mott wanted me running or hanged. I would do neither, and the first card to put down was the one he was sure I'd hide.
Bastian was wiping the bench when I said it.
"The twenty crowns came under a Lantern seal. Mott told me that much. Someone in your Order paid to have you laid flat."
He did not move for a moment. Then the cloth went down on the bench very precisely.
"My Order doesn't buy murder."
"Somebody's seal does."
"Seals are copied by any clerk with a knife and a candle." He was quiet now, which was worse than loud. "Tell me how you got him to say it."
"He's a man who likes to boast."
"You said that yesterday." "Mott would swallow his own hat before he confessed to a baker. What did you do?"
"I gave him a bun."
"What did you do, Miss Rook?"
I opened my mouth and every true answer ended at a rope. My temper went up my back like a rye in a warm room, and the words that came out were not words I'd have chosen.
"I'm trying to help you, and you're asking me to hang myself for the favour."
Behind me the oven had been banked since dawn. I felt it before I saw it: the fire leaning out of the mouth, a long yellow tongue stretching across the flagstones toward my hands, the way a dog goes to a palm that has stopped hitting it.
I put my hands behind my back. The lantern stood on the bench between us, and the flame in it stayed yellow. I hadn't asked the fire for anything.
Bastian looked at the oven. He looked at me. He said nothing at all, and picked up his kit, and went out into the yard.
I had not signed Mott's lease. The evening bell tomorrow would read a name, and I had a day and a night to learn whose.
At dusk I was shutting the shop when somebody knocked. Not a hard knock. Two taps, patient, as if the door might be asleep.
Bastian reached it before I did. He opened it, and every line of him went straight.
"Magister."
The man on the step wore a grey Lantern coat with the hem clean of road. He was near sixty, white at the temples, with a face you'd trust with your coin. Behind him, filling most of the lane, stood a broad sergeant with a cudgel at his belt and nothing in his eyes at all. Sergeant Ede, I'd learn.
The old man ignored them both. He looked past Bastian's shoulder, straight to me, and smiled as if I had done something clever.
"Miss Rook," he said, in a voice like warm milk. "I signed your mother's burial. Hollis Vey."
I didn't need the first name. I had read the other half of it in the parish register, six times in a row, in a fever autumn, in the same neat hand: H. Vey, Lantern.