The well's damp breath reaches for us. My knowledge of its poison becomes a slick coat on my tongue.

  Vera stops. Her hand lifts, hovering over the stone for a long moment.

  "This well isn't the one I grew up with," she says. "That was Old Seep."

  I nod, the memory surfacing. In my mind, it wasn't even a well back then. Just a damp patch of earth with a few stones around it.

  "The Elders called it a lesson," Vera says, her lips thinning into a hard line.

  "Proof the land was dying," I finish. "So we'd be grateful for the scraps."

  She touches the well wall, a brief caress. "My Thomas was the one who rebuilt it. He spent months walling it, making it deep and clean. He told Ward the village needed a proper chain, not the rusty scrap we had. He wanted to give us one good, clean thing."

  Her thumb finds a small, worn depression in the stone, a place her husband's hand must have rested a thousand times. "The Elders fought him on it. He didn't care. He said it was a gift. A clean start for the village."

  She looks down into the dark water. "He said the deep stone had finally scoured the bitterness away. That you could taste the cold now, not the mud. He was so proud." A ghost of a smile touches her lips, then vanishes.

  She stares into the well's black eye, unblinking. "The summer he was taken, a fever came. Our little girl burned from the inside. Thomas kept bringing water. Bucket after bucket. He'd soak a cloth and lay it on her forehead. The water would steam."

  Her hands open at her sides. Then close.

  "He was holding her when she went cold. He said the strangest thing. He said he was grateful. That at least the heat was gone."

  A long silence passes between us. A bird sings somewhere above. The sound is a profanity.

  "He said the water had changed. Tasted bitter. I told him it was just grief." A sound catches in her throat. A dry click. She swallows it down. "One week later, they drew his name."

  Her face turns to me. The hard lines are gone.

  "My Thomas. He knew."

  Her voice holds steady, but her breath betrays her. A tear breaks free. It clings to her jaw, a bright point of weakness.

  Then her breath evens out. Her hand comes up. Her fingers are stiff, a claw. She hooks the tear with a fingernail and flicks it away. The motion is clean. Disgusted. As if she's just removed a leech.

  Isolate the poisoner. Turn her flock against her, or

  I look at Vera. My throat tightens.

  I have to say it. The words are stones I have to cough up.

  "He was right, Vera."

  They land between us. Heavy. Final.

  I point to the ground. She follows my hand, her attention settling on the ring of black moss. She kneels, her fingers hovering over the brittle growth. A small, involuntary shiver runs through her hand. She pulls it back.

  "It comes from the well," she says. It is not a question.

  She stands, her focus already shifting to the winch. She walks to it, not waiting for me. She sees the chain. Her eyes narrow, tracking the impossible line where rust gives way to a black that does not reflect the dawn, but devours it.

  "It is a slow poison," I say. "Every time the handle turns, it bleeds."

  Her hand shoots out. She grabs the chain. It is the grip of a woman holding the throat of the thing that killed her daughter.

  She turns to me. "Where do we start?"

  "They won't believe me," I say. "My word means nothing against thirty years of her rule."

  Vera's jaw tightens. Her head lifts from the well and scans the village rooftops. Her finger traces a line from the quiet homes, to the bakery, to the forge.

  Her eyes linger on the smithy, on the plume of dark smoke rising from its chimney.

  Her voice is flat. Certain. "The blacksmith. We start there. Village trusts him."

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  I shake my head. "People listen to Ward, but that's not enough to topple her. We need someone from the inside. Someone who knows what she's up to."

  She tilts her head. The question is in her eyes, sharp and cold.

  The only sound is the wind over the well.

  It shifts.

  I catch the scent of rot from the well's mouth. It gives me the words. "We need someone Ursula trusts. Someone she made a deal with. To protect her child."

  The colour leaves her face, leaving it the grey of the well stone. She takes a step back, her hand finding the cold wall of the well. She looks down at her hands, as if seeing them for the first time. The hands that took the deal.

  The wind is the only thing that moves.

  A long silence.

  "No," she says to her hands. Then she looks up, her eyes clear. "I will not be your witness."

  She pushes off from the well, closing the space between us.

  "I will be her executioner."

  The forge is a storm of steel and fire contained in a stone box. A constant shower of orange sparks die in the sooty dark, each one a brief, angry life.

  Ward does not stop his work. The hammer rises and falls, a steady, relentless rhythm of denial.

  "Swamp rot, Nora," he says, the words timed between hammer blows. "Nothing. More."

  Vera steps forward. She waits for the hammer to fall, and in the brief, ringing silence that follows, she speaks. "The week before my Thomas was taken, he went to the Elders. He told them the water had changed."

  Ward's rhythm doesn't break. If anything, the hammer falls faster. Harder.

  Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

  "Then they put his name in the bag," she continues, her voice slotting into the space between the hammer's fall and its ring. "He knew too much."

  The hammer freezes at the apex of its arc. The muscles in Ward's back are a rigid sheet of iron beneath his tunic. A bead of sweat traces a path through the soot on his temple, carving a dark, slick path.

  Vera watches his back. "This has been happening for decades. Someone is doing this. Someone wants this."

  The hammer comes down. And misses. It strikes the anvil an inch from the hot iron, a dead, ugly thud instead of a clean ring. He glares at the steel, his rhythm broken.

  Vera steps into the stuttering silence. Her voice lowers. "Ursula has clean water. She offered me some. For my loyalty."

  Ward's hand opens. The hammer falls.

  A sharp crack on the stone.

  He just stares, blinking once, slowly, like a man waking from a dream into a nightmare.

  "While your family," she adds, her voice a quiet, level sentence, "drinks poison."

  His shoulders slump. The strength goes out of him all at once.

  He looks from my face, then to hers. The scar on her cheek is a white line against the flush of her rage.

  He is silent for a long moment.

  Then he turns and picks up his hammer from the stone floor. He holds it, but the grip is different now.

  "What do you need?"

  The last of the sun vanishes. The rooftops of the village become sharp, black teeth as the square fills with shadows.

  The restless shuffling and coughing of the crowd ceases as I take the platform.

  A baby starts to cry. The mother shakes him. A violent, desperate jerk. The cry stops.

  The silence that follows is the sound of a hundred people pretending they didn't just see it.

  I let the ugly moment pass. My eyes lift. Past the crowd. To the hall. To the three Elders standing on the stone steps, watching me.

  Ward turns to Vera, his body a shield between her and the rest of the village. "Are you sure about this?" he asks, his voice a low, heavy sound. "Once this stone is thrown, you can't undo the damage."

  Vera does not look at him. Her focus is fixed on me. "Thomas threw his stone twelve years ago. Now it's my turn to throw it back."

  Ward says nothing more. He turns and stands beside her, his shoulders squared.

  I lift my head and take a slow breath.

  "Our well is being poisoned."

  The crowd tightens, shoulders pressing together. A dense mass of fear.

  I hold up a vial. It's a thick, black slurry, studded with tiny, sharp flecks of scraped iron.

  "I took this from the well," I say. "It's the same filth they use in Darkwater to remake our people. They're just feeding it to you in smaller doses, so you'll call it sickness instead of murder."

  The word lands. A hundred lungs seize at once, then release in a sharp, collective gasp the size of the square. It is the only sound.

  Then, nothing.

  My eyes sweep the faces and lock on Grace. She is frozen. One hand is a fist, her knuckles pale and bloodless, crushing her cloak. The other rests, limp and forgotten, on the small linen pouch I gave her.

  The stillness breaks. Maud's shriek.

  "Lies! You come to us looking like a neighbour, but you smell of the deep swamp, of things that have been unmade! The old stories warned of a rot that could learn to speak!"

  The accusation lands and then evaporates, a hiss of steam in the cold air. It is too thin. Too hysterical.

  Then a farmer speaks, his voice carrying the grit of the sour earth beneath his boots. "The swamp's poison is in everything, Nora. It sours the soil. It sickens the trees. How can you know this is a hand, and not just the world dying?"

  His voice, unlike Maud's, is low and heavy. It settles among them.

  A man who was staring at me now looks at his own feet. The woman beside him turns her head, her eyes finding the dark treeline.

  A mutter sprouts from the back of the crowd. "He's right."

  The mutters multiply, a knot of weeds strangling the held breath of the crowd.

  One answers from the front. "It's just the swamp."

  They merge, becoming a single, unifying voice. "She has gone mad."

  The sound is a door closing. A final, heavy thud that seals me on the outside.

  A dead, listening quiet settles over the square. The only sound is the hiss of the torches, loud in the sudden stillness.

  Then a new sound. The scrape of a boot on stone.

  The silent crowd parts for Ward as he walks to the platform. He stands beside me, his shadow merging with mine.

  He lays the chain on the platform. Rust on one side. Black on the other. An impossible line.

  He gives them a full ten seconds of silence.

  When he speaks, his voice is the sound of hot steel plunged into water.

  "I have worked iron my whole life. Iron rusts. That is its truth."

  Draping the chain over one forearm, he holds it out to the crowd. "This is a lie."

  He lays the black links on the platform again, then picks up his hammer from the floor.

  He lifts the hammer, then brings it down hard on the black links. The impact shudders up his arm, a vibration of pure wrongness.

  The sound is a dead, flat thud, unlike the ring of true iron. It is the sound of striking a solid block of black lard in which a hundred knuckles have been set.

  "This is not iron anymore."

  He turns his head, his stare locking onto the Elders across the square. "It's a skin. A perfect, dead skin hiding the rot beneath."

  A low, guttural sound ripples through the crowd, like the deep shift of stones before an avalanche.

  Their heads snap as one towards the Elders.

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