Henrietta went alone.
Oz did not argue with this. She had expected him to offer to come and he had not, which meant he had already arrived at the same conclusion she had: that Wren Ashby had felt something when she looked at him at the market, something she could not name, and that a second look of that kind in her own home would close her before the conversation had a chance to open.
She took the lower lane in the early afternoon, when the light was at its flattest and the village had settled into the quiet that came between the morning's business and the evening's dread. She had the notebook. She did not open it on the walk. This was not a chapter that would be written in advance.
Wren's house was the third from the end of the lane. Stone-built, single storey, with a kitchen garden that had gone to seed in the way gardens went to seed when the person who tended them was no longer present to think about it. The door was answered before Henrietta had finished knocking.
Wren had been waiting.
She stepped back to let Henrietta in and did not speak, which was the behaviour of someone who had been rehearsing the conversation since the morning and had decided, somewhere in the rehearsal, that she would let the other person go first.
The room was small. A table, two chairs, a shelf with a few books and a mug with a faded pattern that had been placed rather than left. A shawl on the back of the near chair, folded with the particular care of something that belonged to someone else. The room had the feeling of a person living beside an absence, arranging around it rather than removing it.
Henrietta sat down. Wren sat across from her and put her hands on the table and looked at them.
The flowers were on the table between them. She had carried them from the church gate and she had not put them down since.
"I need to tell you something about the flowers," Henrietta said.
Wren looked up.
"The ones from the riverbank. The ones you have been taking to the graves." She kept her voice the way she kept it when she was giving information that had weight to it. Even. Not soft. Not hard. "The river has something in it. Something that has been there since the flood, six weeks ago, that is not water. And the flowers you carried, with the roots still attached and the stems still damp, carried a small part of it with them. Every place you brought them, it reached a little further."
Wren was very still.
"You did not know," Henrietta said. "I want to be clear about that before anything else. You were grieving and you did something that felt like the right thing to do for the people who had died. You did not know what you were carrying."
A silence. Outside, a cart moved on the far road. The Maren was not audible from here. That was something.
"My mother," Wren said. Her voice was steady. The steadiness of someone who had already been through the worst thing and had learned, on the other side of it, that steadiness was a choice. "She used to bring them home too. Before she died. She put them in the window." A pause. "She said the smell of them helped her sleep."
Henrietta did not reach for the notebook. She wrote it on the inside of her wrist instead, pressing lightly with the tip of her pen, the way she did when there was no time to find a page. Window. Sleeping. Flowers from the bank.
She said, carefully: "How long did she do that."
Wren thought about it. "Months. Since last spring, maybe. She always liked them. She said they were the only flower that smelled like the water and the earth at the same time." Her eyes moved to the shawl on the chair. "She kept them fresh. She went to the bank herself, every few days."
Henrietta looked at the table. She kept her face still because what she was understanding required a moment before it was ready to be on her face at all.
The mother had not been taken by the flood. The flood had not been the beginning. The flood had been the most recent opening, the widest one, but the thread to this house had been older than six weeks. Wren's mother had been carrying the river home herself for months, placing it in her window, sleeping beside it in the deep hours, making herself available to something that had not yet grown strong enough to use the access she was giving it.
When the flood came, it had found a door already open and a path already worn.
The entity had not started with the ten. It had started here, in this room, in the smell of pale flowers in a window, in a woman who loved the sound of the river in the early morning and did not know what had learned to love her back.
She said: "Thank you for telling me that."
Wren looked at her. She was not foolish. She could see that the information had landed somewhere. "It matters," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
Wren was quiet for a moment. Then: "Corvin."
Henrietta waited.
"He has been watching me. At the market, on the lane. Not in a bad way." She paused, choosing the words with care. "In the way of someone who is watching because they are worried. I didn't know what to do with it."
Henrietta looked at her hands on the table, then back at Wren. "Corvin found your mother," she said. "At the bank. That morning."
"I know."
"What happened to your mother found him there too. He has been carrying something since that morning that he does not fully understand, and it has been pulling him toward the river at night." She said it plainly, the way she said things that needed to be plain. "He has been fighting it. He has not told anyone because he did not know how."
Wren's face did several things in a short space of time. Grief was one of them. Something that was almost anger but was not quite anger was another. Then something quieter, underneath both of those, that took Henrietta a moment to identify.
Recognition. The specific kind that came from hearing someone else described in terms that matched your own experience.
"Neither did I," Wren said. Very quietly.
Henrietta did not write that down. Some things belonged to the room they were spoken in.
It was when Wren reached across the table absently, to adjust the flowers, that Henrietta noticed.
The girl's hand had gone to the bundle without intention. Not to pick them up. Not to smell them. Just to touch them. A small reflexive motion, the kind that happened below the level of decision. The kind that happened when something had been reinforced long enough to become automatic.
She looked at the flowers and then at Wren's hand on them.
Wren noticed her noticing. She looked down at her own hand as though it had done something without her permission, which it had.
"Can I ask you to put them down," Henrietta said. "Not just on the table. Down. And step away from them."
Wren looked at the flowers. The same expression Corvin had worn on the embankment road, looking fixedly at the road ahead. Effort. Visible, real effort. Not inability. The thing that lived on the other side of ability when the ability was hard.
She lifted her hand from the bundle.
She stood up and took two steps back from the table and stood with her arms at her sides.
She looked at the flowers from across the room. Her jaw was set.
"It's still there," she said. "I can still feel it."
"I know," Henrietta said. "That is not the same as it having you."
Wren looked at her. Her eyes were very clear and very tired and very nineteen years old.
"What do I do now," she said.
Henrietta closed the notebook. She did not look at it when she answered because the answer was not something she needed to find.
"Nothing tonight. Stay inside. Don't go to the river and don't go to the graves." She met Wren's eyes. "Tomorrow we will tell you more. Tonight, just this."
Wren nodded. She looked at the flowers on the table. She did not look at them the way she had been looking at them. Something had shifted in the quality of the looking, a small separation that had not been there before.
She looked like someone who had been doing something very hard for a very long time and had just been given permission to put part of it down. Not all of it. But enough to breathe.
Henrietta left as the light was beginning to go from the afternoon.
She walked the lower lane back toward the baron's house and wrote as she walked, which she did not usually allow herself. Notebook open, pen moving, eyes going between the page and the road.
She wrote: It started with the mother. She brought it home herself, months before the flood. Flowers in the window. Sleeping beside them in the deep hours. A door opened slowly, from the inside, by someone who did not know she was opening it. The flood was not the beginning. The flood was when it was strong enough to walk through.
She wrote: Wren inherited the practice without the knowledge. The hold on her is lighter than Corvin's. Not absent. Lighter. The flowers are on the table. She is inside. That is tonight.
The baron's house appeared at the end of the lane. A lamp was lit in the front window. The Maren made its sound from the east, steady and patient, the same as it had been making all week.
She wrote one more line, walking, as the last of the afternoon light went out of the sky.
Not enough to end it. Enough to make tomorrow possible.