Silas. I pull away from her and she steps back immediately.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and I don’t know if she’s apologizing for my loss or her embrace.
“It’s the first time I’ve been here,” I say, my voice echoing strangely off the stone.
She looks around the inside of the vault, taking in the plaques, the small, bare altar, the stone shelf that doubles as a seat. “That’s why you didn’t want to come. You should have said.”
“Is this what your vaults are like? For your nobles?” I ask her.
“No. They’re not like this.” She shakes her head curtly, and instantly my upper lip curls in anger. “They’re … cold,” she says quickly. “This is simpler, but real. The nobles’ vaults have carved effigies of the dead in them. Faces, hands, all picked out in marble. More museum than mausoleum.” She smiles wryly. “It’s not a place you’d go to grieve. It’s a place you’d go to be cowed. They make you feel small, but this … this is supposed to make you feel as though you’re part of something.”
She nods to herself in her strange way and steps out of the tomb, leaving me alone with my family. I step forward to touch my father’s plaque when she appears in the doorway again.
“The horses are fretting,” she says. “And the smell of smoke seems stronger. I think something nearby is burning.”
I follow her out. The wind has changed direction, and the faint smell of smoke is now powerful, blowing into our faces, thick and sharp. The sky is darkening, the night swooping in, in the swift, without-warning way it does in autumn. Already out, the moon is newly waning, just losing its fullness, and blue smoke passes over it, trailing a line across it, and the image nags at me.
“We should go.” I shake off the irritation. “It’ll be dark soon.”
“Where are we going to shelter tonight?”
Apprehension tightens my belly, but we have little choice. “Tremayne is closest, two miles, if you want an inn.”
“Where the alchemist house is.”
“Where I was born, too. And Lief.” She doesn’t reply. “They close the city gates at sundown.”
Dimia looks up to where the sky is starting to turn dark around the edges, like ink bleeding across paper. “We should hurry, then.”
We stumble in the growing darkness back to the horses, which are fretting, whickering softly to us as we untie them. We ride out, past the silent graveyard, cantering into the night, the smell of smoke getting ever stronger. Half a mile outside the town walls, we find the source of the fire. There, smouldering crimson and orange in the darkness, is what remains of one of the harvest stores built on the outskirts of the village. The barns where the hay harvests were stored over winter, the lofts filled with apples and pears. Byres and sheep houses and stables where cattle and sheep were sheltered when the snows arrived. Burned to the ground. The air is thick with smoke, the smell of burnt hay and corn. Of roasted meat. My throat catches when I think of the animals that would have been caught inside their barns, frightened and trapped.
Dimia is looking at me with some curiosity. “Do you know who owns it?” she asks.
“The Prythewells. Friends of my father’s. They kept sheep and cows for eating. That’ll be all their food and income for the winter.” I shake my head at the loss.
“It looks as though there is nothing to be done.”
I frown at the remains of the buildings. The ruins still smoulder. Surely someone should be here, trying to put them out? If the wind blew hot cinders into the village and they caught in a thatch, then the fire could easily spread, passing through Tremayne like a plague. Where are the people? Where are the soldiers? Shouldn’t someone, anyone, be here, salvaging, or even looting?
I turn towards Tremayne as a cold, stark fear begins to bloom inside me. I kick the horse straight into a gallop; I can hear Dimia’s pony pounding the dirt behind me. The smell of smoke becomes stronger and the ears of the horse flatten against her head as she stops, despite my urging. She skitters sideways and refuses to move, weaving across the track. Dimia’s pony pulls ahead of me. Dimia clings to its neck as it rears, its whinny more of a scream. The whites of its eyes are visible as it tries to throw her.