The child was dying badly.

Seryn knelt beside the pallet and took the girl's hand. Small bones, fever heat pouring off her in waves. Six years old, maybe seven, the sickness having thinned her until the bones of her wrists pressed up through the skin like sticks in wet cloth.

The cottage was cold, the air heavy with smoke and the smell of a sickroom that had been sealed too long. One candle on the windowsill, burning down to a stub, the flame guttering in its own melted pool. An old man by the hearth had his arms folded tight across his chest, and near the door two women held each other. A boy of ten in the corner, not moving, not blinking, rigid against the wall.

The mother looked up. She held herself the way people did when they knew what Seryn had come to do.

Seryn nodded toward the mother's hand.

The mother's face crumpled, one moment of it, before she pressed her lips together and let go of her daughter's wrist. Sat back.

The child's hand was small and burning in hers.

Dull compression behind her sternum, tightening with each of the girl's shallow breaths. She'd learned to feel the boundary as texture, like the skin on milk left to cool — still holding, barely. Thinning already, starting to give. Close now. Warmth on the far side, the kind she hadn't felt since she was eleven and didn't know yet what the cold spot in her chest would cost.

She closed her eyes. "Sev thallan," she murmured. I hold you. The words her grandmother had taught her, the old language, the one that could cost her tongue if the wrong person heard it.

She reached. The taste of blood in the back of her throat and the pressure behind her sternum deepened, pulling her forward.

A small presence crouched in the dark, pulling itself tight against nothing.

Mama?

Not pain. The body's pain was behind her now and what was left was worse — a child alone in the dark who didn't know why everything had gone quiet.

No, small one. My name is Seryn. I followed the door to find you. Can you see it?

I can't— it was there and then it went dark and I don't know where—

I know. What's your name?

Nell. And then, barely there: Did I do something wrong?

She missed a breath.

No, Nell. This is not your fault.

I want Mama. She was right there and then she wasn't.

She's there. She let go so I could find you.

The child's presence pressed closer, not trust, not yet, just the pull toward anything that wasn't the dark.

Reach toward me, Nell. Past the dark. Tell me what you feel.

She pressed against the threshold until it gave, thin as old linen.

Something flickered against Nell's awareness. The child flinched, then went still.

It's warm.

Yes.

Why is it warm?

Because that's what's on the other side.

The child's presence uncurled. Barely. Like the kitchen. When Mama does the bread and the whole house gets warm.

Like that.

Cold pressed in around Seryn, breath fogging in the dark, but her focus was Nell.

I'm going to open the door now. You don't have to go through.

What if it goes dark again?

It won't. I promise.

She pushed and the door resisted and then it didn't.

Light.

She couldn't see it directly. Warmth on her face like winter sun through glass. Blood ran warm from her nose and over her lip. Every muscle in her back locked tight, holding.

Look. Tell me what you see.

Oh.

What do you see, Nell?

Grandda. Her presence brightened. Steadied. The one who went away. He's there. He's smiling at me.

Do you want to go to him?

Yes. No hesitation. But won't Mama be sad?

Very sad. But she'll know you're somewhere warm.

Tell her I saw Grandda? That he was smiling?

I'll tell her.

The child slid toward the threshold, toward the light, toward her grandfather. Her body went slack under Seryn's hands.

Then Nell's presence stuttered, mid-step, pulled short.

Wait. There's someone else.

Something caught in her, mid-breath.

A woman. She's got eyes like yours. Blue. The light shifted. She's waving at me. She says to tell you hello.

The threshold slipped from her. The door shuddered, buckling.

What woman? Nell, what does she look like—

But the child was already moving, already stepping through, pulled toward her grandfather's hand. She says hello, Seryn. The blue-eyed woman says—

Gone.

The door closed. The light cut out. And Seryn knelt on the dirt floor, blood running from her nose and the girl's body already cooling beneath her.

Nell's face had gone slack, the tension out of her jaw, the twitching stilled, her lips parted. At the corner of her mouth, the faintest lift.

The two women near the door moved to the mother's side, an arm around her shoulders, the other stroking Nell's hair. By the hearth, the old man closed his eyes, lips moving without sound.

The boy in the corner had not moved. Had not looked away. He struck his thigh once, hard, one quick blow. Not a tear on him.

She let go of the child and tried to stand.

Blue eyes. Waving.

Her mouth filled with blood and her legs went. She caught herself against the wall, shoulder to the rough mud, head down, breathing through her mouth while the blood from her nose dripped onto her cloak.

The old man opened his eyes and held Seryn's gaze.

"She saw her grandfather." She wiped blood from her lip. "Smiling. Waiting for her."

The mother's mouth opened. No sound came. She bent over her daughter's body, pressing her face into the blanket, and the sound she made was barely human.

Seryn did not wait for what came next.

The cold closed around her the moment she stepped outside, frost thick on the path and the stars hard and bright above the bare trees.

Seryn leaned against the cottage wall and let it hold her up, her knees loose, her fingers useless at her sides.

Behind her, a cottage in mourning.

She closed her eyes and found the words, her grandmother's words, the first ones she'd ever learned. You come back the same way you go in. Name by name. Bone by bone. It was supposed to pull her back into her body, into the cold and the wall against her back. It was supposed to work faster than this.

My name is Seryn. I am twenty-two years old. I am a death-speaker. I just helped a child die.

Cold stung her fingers. She pressed them against the cottage wall, the rough daub under her skin.

It is winter. It is night. The girl's name was Nell. She saw her grandfather and she went to him smiling.

She opened her eyes.

And the woman with blue eyes, waving, telling Nell to say hello.

Seryn pushed off and walked. The path wound between frozen furrows toward the line of bare trees that marked her aunt's farm, frost cracking under her boots and the keening fading behind her with each step. At the edge of the field, the broken base of a threshold stone jutted from the frozen earth. Knee-high, its top sheared flat.

Blue eyes. The woman Nell saw had blue eyes. Seryn's mother's had been grey. Seryn's own had been grey too, until she was eleven and woke up and they weren't. Protection, her grandmother had called it, and that was all she would say. Seryn had stopped asking. She didn't know anyone else with eyes this blue. No one living.

She walked faster, boot catching a frozen furrow so her ankle turned and the stiff rim of the boot drove into her heel before she caught herself. She kept going.

The farmhouse showed through the bare trees, one candle in the window, and Seryn stopped at the edge of the yard and stood there longer than she needed to. The blood had dried on her lip. She wiped it with her sleeve and went inside.

Heat rolled over her the moment she crossed the threshold.

Her aunt looked up from her mending. Took in the blood on her collar. Went back to her stitching. "Frost got the turnips."

"I saw."

Seryn hung her cloak on the peg and crossed to the basin and scrubbed her face until her skin stung and the water in the bowl turned pink.

"There's bread. And a bit of the stew."

Her aunt was already ladling stew into a bowl, and Seryn's mouth flooded at the smell of it. She sat and ate, her grip still unsteady enough that the spoon knocked against the bowl. Thin broth with turnips and the last scraps of something that had once been rabbit. Across from her, her aunt settled with the mending back in her lap, needle flashing in the firelight.

Seryn finished the stew and mopped the last of it with bread.

"The Kovar girl," her aunt said. "The one with the cough."

The needle didn't stop.

"Yes. I sat with her for a while."

She should sleep. The frost would deepen overnight and the morning would come with ice on the trough and the fence post she'd been putting off.

"Aunt."

The needle stopped.

"Tomorrow, could we—"

Blue eyes in the light, a hand raised in greeting.

"What, child?"

"Nothing. I'm tired."

She set down the mending and reached across the table and covered Seryn's wrist with her own, calluses rough and warm against Seryn's skin.

"Whatever it is," she said. "It'll keep."

Seryn turned her hand over and squeezed back.

"Thank you," she said. "For the food. For all of it."

Her aunt huffed through her nose. "Go sleep."

Seryn went.

The narrow pallet, the ceiling beams dark above her, the fire settling in the other room, her aunt's slow humming carrying through the wall.

She didn't dream. She never had, not that she could remember. But the space before sleep was the only quiet she had. No one else's dying to hold, no one to pretend for.

She sank into it.

The knock came hard — three blows, fast, no pause between them.

Seryn was wide awake before the last blow finished, listening, pulse beating.

In the other room, her aunt's chair scraped back.

The knock came again. Louder.