Brielle woke like a patient who had forgotten how.
Mist lay low on the fields and crawled into the lanes, clinging to boot leather and stone. The church bell rang once, then again, as if checking whether the morning still worked. Doors opened in cautious increments. Women swept stoops with eyes on the road. Men spoke in whispers because even daylight felt like a promise the town might not keep.
Élise Varnet lifted the shutters of her bakery and tasted the air, a habit she'd learned since the killings began. Flour dusted her fingers; the smell of yeast and oakfire should have been enough to make a person believe in simple things. Brielle had forgotten simple.
Two boys ran past with too much quiet for boys. A cart creaked after them, pulled by a mule and a pair of men who didn't meet anyone's eyes. There was a tarp in the cart, its edge already dark with what soaked through.
"Another?" a woman near Élise murmured.
"Every week," someone answered. "Always by the edge—river, hedge, the well. Torn like wolves, but wolves don't do that to bones."
Élise set her jaw and went inside. The bread would not knead itself, and if the town had any order left, it started with loaves on tables.
She worked the dough like a prayer—stretch, fold, breathe, turn. Her father had done it the same way until the fever took him: hands steady, shoulders squared against everything the world could ruin. The oven coughed heat; the peel slid round loaves onto the hearthstone; already the first customers shuffled to the door, their coins warm from palms held too long.
Marceau, the watchman, arrived first as always, pretending he hadn't waited outside before dawn. He leaned against the counter, armor mismatched and boots unpolished like a man who had slept in his clothes.
"Morning, Élise." He tried a smile. "Three rye, one white. And two of those honey rolls if you're feeling generous."
"You're the watch," she said, weighing a loaf. "You should be watching your sugar."
"The sugar's the only thing that doesn't run away at night."
He reached for coin. She pushed his hand back and wrapped the rolls anyway. "You and the others on the north road tonight?"
"Aye." His voice thinned. "We found the last one near the well. Father Morel says the Cathedral will send a letter. Says it every day now."
"Then he'll be right one of them," Élise said, the line halfway between hope and duty.
Marceau tipped an invisible hat and left. Through the window she watched him cross the muddy square. People gathered in a tight ring around the cart. The tarp lifted. A gasp ran through the crowd and scattered into the alleys.
She backed away from the glass, pressed flour from her fingers, and breathed through her nose until the room smelled like bread again instead of iron.
Customers came and went. A woman with a sleeping child paid in buttons and a ribbon because money had started to feel unlucky. A millhand whispered that the attacks had started after a ditcher dug up old bones near the north hedgerow. Two men argued—marsh versus forest, demon versus wolf—until one left swearing he'd move to the capital and the other bought two extra loaves as if bread could weigh down fear.
When the rush slowed, Élise set aside a basket for Madame Theroux, the old widow who lived half a mile beyond the last lantern where the imperial road widened and forgot the town existed. The basket got a heel of white, two rye, and a small jar of honey wine wrapped in cloth. Madame Theroux had arthritis now; the tincture steadied her hands. The apothecary hoarded it. The apothecary owed Élise's father, and debts still meant something here.
She wiped the board, straightened the knives, set another batch to rise, and told herself the bell would not ring again before noon. The bell rang again before noon.
At the chapel, Father Morel had a new crease between his brows and the old stole around his shoulders. He stood beneath the cracked arch and blessed a line of charms villagers held up like fish at market. Élise waited her turn without a charm, thinking of letters more than blessings.
"Father," she said when he caught sight of her, "anything from the Cathedral?"
He glanced toward the road as if the answer might arrive while he shaped it. "The courier hasn't returned, child. The Sun touches many places before ours."
"We sent word three times."
"Four." He softened. "And I've written to a friend who once knew a Witch Hunter. It was years ago, but sometimes old doors open when you knock with the right grief."
She managed a smile. "You make grief sound like a key."
"It is, to those who remember what it unlocks." He laid a hand over hers. "Lock your door at dusk. Not because you lack faith, but because the ones who come lack shame."
She left him to the charms and walked the market in a narrow loop: herbs for coin, salt for a loaf, a bundle of dried nettles from the marsh woman who always watched the road as if expecting someone who never came. The market stalls hunched under tarps against a sky that couldn't choose a weather. So few hawkers, so many glances over shoulders. Children played a quiet version of tag that involved not stepping on cracks in the cobbles that led to drains because someone's uncle said things came up from drains now.
At Madame Theroux's place in the market—three crates, two jars, and a chair—Élise found the old woman pinching mint leaves with hands that shook just enough to make the task frustrating.
"You're early, child. Or I'm slow."
"You're steady," Élise said. "Early enough to be a nuisance."
Theroux's laugh was a rusted hinge. "You bring me that bread before sundown?"
"I'll bring it after. The apothecary's setting your tincture and he swears the roots lose strength if I make him hurry."
"Roots don't know the clock. Men like to pretend they do." Theroux's eyes found the fog hips rolling across the square. "Dark comes faster lately."
"I can come at dusk," Élise offered. "I'll be quick."
"Bring a lantern. Keep to the road. Don't step into the grass. And if you hear someone calling your name, don't turn." She smiled a little. "Old wives and their rules. Go bake your bread, girl."
The day wore out its feet. Élise baked, sold, bartered, watched. She refilled the oven, fetched water, burned her wrist, swore in a way that would have made her father cough into his fist, and kept moving until moving felt like a promise she could keep.
Afternoon fled without providing a letter.
By the time she slid the final loaves from the oven, the light outside had gone thin and watery—sunset already damp around the edges. Brielle did not bother pretending to be brave after the fourth bell. Doors shut with the authority of habit; shutters thumped like hearts in ribs. People carried candles from room to room as if they could be spared if the map of light stayed accurate.
Élise counted the coins, slid them into the tin under the loose floorboard, tied back her hair with the ribbon she didn't sell, and packed the basket for Madame Theroux with the care she reserved for the living. The apothecary's tincture—golden and viscous—went into the center under cloth beside the bread. She added a pinch of sugar wrapped in paper because it made tea feel like something.
The knot in her stomach arrived on schedule.
She banked the oven, warmed a stone for her pocket, and told herself three lies: it was only half a mile; the road held its own safety; this was still the world she knew.
On the stoop she paused, listening. The bell had stopped. The sounds of the town had narrowed to dishes, footsteps, low voices. The air smelled like damp ash.
"Foolish," she told the empty lane. "Generous foolish."
Her lantern took flame on the second try. The glass was clean enough to make the light seem larger than it was. She hooked the handle over her fingers, lifted the basket, and set off down the lane.
Brielle had edges even in daylight. At night they sharpened. The last lantern the town paid to keep lit stood at the end of the last respectable house. After that, the road widened into the Empire's business and forgot the price of oil. Élise passed the grocer's grate, the cobbler's shutter with a crack she kept meaning to tell him about, the well with its stone lip smoothed by a hundred years of hands and, recently, by a week of grief.
Something shone near the well—small and metallic in the lantern's swing. She stopped long enough to see a broken chain lying in the crack between stones, one end twisted as if torn. She didn't touch it. Some objects belonged to the stories that made towns empty.
Past the well, the homes grew farther apart—gardens that used to be tended now gone to seed, fences leaning like men who'd lost arguments with weather. The lantern showed her a little circle of world and promised to keep its promises only so long as the oil lasted.
She reached the last lantern and stood under it like a guest who didn't know when to go home. The Empire's road waited beyond: packed earth in the middle, rough stone at the edges, ditches that carried spring flood and late summer trash. Her breath clouded for the first time that day. She tucked the warmed stone deeper into her pocket and stepped beyond the town's light.
The road had a sound she'd never named, a kind of wide hush that pressed from both sides. Grass on the verge whispered old secrets. The hedgerow made a thin black seam. Somewhere far off, a cartwheel complained; the noise didn't cross the fog.
Élise kept to the crown of the road and swung the lantern low to see the ruts. Madame Theroux's cottage would be a brief glow ahead—always a candle in the window, always a pot on the hook, always the old woman's voice promising that the world could be bargained with if one knew the right rules.
Halfway, she told herself. She was good at halves. They made things survivable.
The lantern glass winked at a pair of eyes—no, not eyes, dew on a nettle. She laughed under her breath at herself, and the laugh sounded like it had been waiting.
A crow muttered from a dead tree. She preferred crows to silence. There had been a lot of silence since the first torn body and more since the second. Brielle had learned to listen for absence.
A tangle of thorns reached into the road. She skirted it. There was a place where the ditch deepened and held water longer than it ought. She quickened her steps past that spot because the children said it gurgled at night. She didn't believe them. She didn't test the belief.
Lantern. Basket. Heel-toe. Keep the flame steady. Keep the breath even. Don't listen for anything that says your name.
The fog thickened by degrees until her lantern lit a smaller world. She adjusted the wick. The flame swelled, then steadied in a small, stubborn way that made her feel a fraction braver.
The road bent. Around that bend, if the world still obeyed its own rules, Madame Theroux's candle would sit in the window like a sane star.
Élise lifted the lantern higher and stepped into the bend.
The wind dropped out of the hedges as if a door had closed somewhere. The air went still in the heavy way that meant weather in fields and something else on roads. The flame ticked against the glass.
"Almost there," she told the dark. "Almost."
Behind her, Brielle was a blur of roofs—a thought of houses. Ahead, the imperial road stretched into fog and empire. The last of the daylight bled out of the mist with the exhausted look of a thing that had done its best and would try again tomorrow if given the chance.
Élise tightened her grip on the basket handle until it bit, pulled her cloak close with her free hand, and set her feet toward the pinprick of light she hoped would be a widow's candle and not a trick of her tired eyes.
She did not see what moved in the ditch.
Not yet.
She heard only her own breath and the small, brave sound of a lantern insisting on its job as she walked into the part of night where Brielle ended and the empire began.