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"Two children have died in this village since your arrival. Three, if I have counted right. The third I am not sure of."

Idonea went very still.

Lidiya's eyes were on her, steady and patient. "Arina and Cleo. And Edik, who I have not seen in days. He brought his sister's painted box to me. He told me he wanted it kept somewhere the Templars wouldn't find. He said he would come back for it. He has not." A breath. "Edik didn't run, Idonea. I have been waiting for someone to tell me what happened to him. The Templars don't know he is gone. I have not said anything. I didn't know who I was waiting for, until now."

Idonea's throat closed entirely. She couldn't find anything to say.

"Tell me," Lidiya said.

"Lidiya—"

"Please, child. I have been carrying this alone. I would like to know."

Idonea drew a breath that didn't quite steady.

"He was killed in my cottage. In the bathtub. I found him there. The same wounds as Arina. The same sigil. We — we burned him, Lidiya. Lysander and I. In the basement furnace. We were afraid if anyone found him in my cottage, with that sigil over the body, I would be the next to die in a cell. We didn't tell anyone. We didn't — we couldn't even mourn him properly. He went into the furnace and then into the fjord. There was no body to bury. There was nothing left to keep."

A long, terrible silence.

Lidiya didn't weep, and her face didn't move. Only her hands changed — they came out of her sleeves and folded against the front of her shawl, and she pressed them there as if to hold herself together at the seam.

"I am sorry," Idonea whispered. "I am so sorry, Lidiya."

"Then he died because he saw what I'd begun to see, and someone wanted him silent before he could speak it. Did he have anything on him?"

"Dirt. From the chapel steps. In his fist. He had gone back to where she died. He had gathered some of the earth."

A broken sound came from Lidiya. "Of course he had. Of course he'd gone back."

"Lidiya—"

"I plaited her hair, Idonea. When she was little. I plaited her hair in my kitchen every Sunday for four years, after their mother went into the fields. Edik would sit at the table and watch and not speak. He was not a boy who spoke much. But he watched. He watched everything I did. He learned how to plait from watching me, and after Arina turned twelve she wouldn't let me do it anymore — she said she was too old, and Edik did it for her instead, every chapel-day, until the morning she died. He had been doing it for five years." Lidiya's voice didn't break, it only thinned. "He took her hand-painted box to me because I was the only adult who'd ever touched the hair of his sister. He didn't have a word for what I was to them. But he knew where to bring the box."

Idonea was crying. She didn't bother to wipe her face.

"I am going to find the woman who did this," she said.

"I know."

"I am going to find her and I am going to end this."

"I know that too, child. I have known since the day you came down the path to the river. I was not waiting to be sure. I was waiting for you to be sure."

Idonea nodded. She could not, for a long moment, speak again. When she could, she asked: "Will you open the box?"

"After. When this is done."

"Would you tell me what is inside?"

"Yes. When you come back."

Lidiya stood, slowly. The descent had aged her, and so had the past five minutes.

At the start of the passage, she paused. "Idonea."

"Yes."

"Thank you. For telling me. For not letting me wait any longer. I had — I had begun to think I would never know what had happened to him. I kept setting his place at the table, for weeks."