For me, Aislinn thought sickly, watching the way the pooled blood on the floor seemed to change and move in the candlelight. Because they couldn’t find me. Lady Andrews’s face popped into her mind, and Aislinn amended her thought.
Because she couldn’t.
Suddenly she realized what she was doing: standing here in front of eight corpses, somehow deluding herself that this wasn’t a trap. There was no smell, not a whiff of decay; the bodies had been fixed and preserved, then posed on the wall for Aislinn to see. They had simply been waiting, waiting for Aislinn to do something stupid like come back. She whirled to look behind her, already knowing that it was too late, that they were standing there, the group of bailiffs, and all of them ready—
But it was not the bailiffs. It was only Liam Graham. He was not even looking at Aislinn, but at the bodies, his face all eyes and his jaw hanging to his chest. He was seventeen, two years older than Aislinn . . . but in that moment he seemed only a few years old.
“Liam,” she whispered, and he jerked.
“You’re not a ghost,” he said.
“No.”
“Lady Andrews told us they caught you, took you to the manse. But I knew they were lying.” With some effort, Liam pulled his eyes from the corpses and turned back to Aislinn. “If they’d caught you, they would have hung you out for everyone to see.”
“They would have,” she agreed absently, for now she had noticed the pale, rounded discs that sat between the lips of each member of her family. Holy wafer. Father Moran had been here, had seen it all, and laid them to rest afterward.
“I saw your light,” Liam went on. “I came to see if it was you.”
“I’m going to put the candle out now. I should never have lit it in the first place.”
Liam glanced toward the bodies on the wall, then swallowed and nodded. Aislinn doused the candle, but she could still see them in the dark, a tableau of corpses lined against the blue flare in her vision.
“What of the other families?” she asked.
“They’re fine. ’Twas only yours got hit. I suppose she doesn’t dare kill off the entire workforce.”
Aislinn raised her eyebrows. She had always considered Liam Graham to be a bit thick, and when they were young, he had been something of a bully as well. But the bitterness in his voice made her pause. Aislinn’s mother and father had never been angry—or at least had never been able to show it—and so she had assumed that she was the only one. Were there others?
“Little Willie Pearce is dead, though,” Liam muttered.
“Dead? How?”
“His leg. Him being so young and all, his family went to Lady Andrews, asking her to hire a proper surgeon from the city. But she wouldn’t; wouldn’t even give them her horse doctor for a day. So they had to take the leg off themselves. We all heard it. It was—” Liam broke off, then said simply, “Willie bled to death.”
Aislinn’s throat closed. Little Willie Pearce, who used to toddle around the acreage pulling a tiny cart full of carrots. The violence visited upon her family was terrible, but it had at least been deliberate, done with a twisted sense of purpose. Willie’s death seemed almost worse in that moment, because it was so pointless, so easily avoided.
“What will you do now?” Liam asked.
Against her will, Aislinn turned back toward the wall, the unseen tableau that waited there. She could go anywhere, yes, but where could she really go, that she would not see the eight of them, heads crooked and legs spread, wafer drying forever in each mouth?
“I don’t know,” she said. “I—”
“Shhh,” Liam said suddenly. “Listen.”
For a few seconds there was nothing but the unending buzz of locusts in the surrounding fields, and then they both heard it: the crackle of stealthy footsteps coming through dry grass, more than one pair.
The light, Aislinn realized, cursing herself. They were waiting for me, and they saw the light.
Liam took her arm, pulling her toward the back of the house. Toward the corpses.
“The window’s open,” he whispered. “Can you feel the draft?”
Aislinn could. Lady Andrews’s bailiffs had not even bothered to close the windows before they did their work. Aislinn wondered whether the screaming of her family had been very bad as well, whether the Vines and the rest of their neighbors had heard it all.