Margery Holt was twenty-three that winter, old enough to know better and young enough to dislike being told so.

She and Tom Waryn crossed the lower field after dusk, when frost had begun to silver the cart ruts and the last crows were dropping one by one into the hedge. No one in the village had wanted to go near Mother Alis’s cottage after the reeve’s boy saw her through the window, stiff in her chair, mouth open as if she had called into the dark and the dark had finally answered.

“She’s dead,” Tom said.

Margery glanced at him. “You said.”

“Dead women want no visitors.”

“Dead witches keep things.”

That quieted him for three steps. He carried a lantern in one hand and a billhook in the other, though neither made him look braver. He was broad through the shoulders from hauling timber, fair-haired, with a habit of smiling when he should have been praying. Margery had known him since they were children, which was the trouble. Familiarity had made a path between them, worn and safe, but lately her body had begun straying from it.

Tom caught her looking. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Aye, and pigs fly.”

“Walk, Tom.”

He did, but his mouth bent. He knew when she lied. Not always what the lie covered, but enough.

The cottage waited at the edge of the alder copse, half-sunk in bramble, its thatch grey with frost. That evening, no smoke rose from the hole in the roof. No goat bleated from the lean-to. Mother Alis had lived there alone since before Margery was born, selling simples to women who crossed themselves before paying, cutting charms from rowan bark, delivering babies no priest had wanted named too soon.

Witch, they called her.

Yet when Margery’s monthly blood had stopped two summers past and fever took her mother, it was Mother Alis who came through the rain with bitter leaves and clean hands. Witch was what folk said when a woman knew too much and bowed too little.

The door was not latched.

Tom lifted the lantern, and the cottage gave back its little portion of light: iron handle, warped boards, the narrow black where the door already stood open by a finger’s width. “Margery.”

She heard the warning in his voice. She heard the plea, too.

She pushed the door open.

The smell met them first: cold ash, old herbs, tallow, and beneath it the sour, closed scent of a body left sitting too long in its own ending. Tom swore under his breath as Margery stepped in before courage could leave her.

Mother Alis sat by the hearth, wrapped in a brown gown, hands folded neatly over her belly. Her head had fallen back against the chair, eyes open, frost filmed and pale.

Margery had thought she would be frightened by the face. But the room held her instead. Bundles of rosemary and rue hung from the rafters. Dried foxglove lay in a bowl. On the table stood a black cup, a twist of red thread, and a clay dish full of white ash. Beside the dead woman’s bare foot, someone had drawn a circle on the floor with soot and salt.

Tom shut the door behind them.

The sound was small. Final.

“Take what you came for,” he said.

“I came to see if there was aught worth telling.”

“You came because old Joan said she had silver hidden.”

Margery looked at him then.

He shrugged, ashamed but not enough. “Well. Did she?”

“Hold the light.”

He came closer. The cottage narrowed around them. His sleeve brushed hers, and through wool and linen she felt the warmth of him, living and inconvenient in that dead room.

“Touch nothing strange,” he warned.

“Name me one thing that isn’t.”

He almost smiled.

Margery moved to the table. There were jars marked with scratches, a comb carved from horn, a knife with a bone handle. A little mirror lay face-down beside the cup. She did not touch it. Something about its stillness bothered her more than any moving thing might have.

Behind her, Tom breathed through his mouth.

“Poor old soul,” he muttered.

And then Mother Alis answered.

The sound came from the hearth, from ash settling into itself.

A sigh.

Tom’s hand closed around Margery’s wrist. Hard.

“She’s dead,” Margery whispered.

“I heard.”

The red thread on the table twitched.

Once, and then again.

Margery should have run then. Later she would understand that. The opportunity had opened in front of her, plain as a door, and still her feet stayed where they were.

The thread uncoiled, slow as a waking worm, and dropped from the table, not falling—reaching.

Tom yanked Margery back, swinging the lantern as he did. Light lurched over the walls, over bunches of herbs, over Mother Alis’s open eyes.

The dead woman was smiling.

No. Her mouth had not changed.

Margery knew that.

She knew it, and still...

“Tom,” she said.

“I see it.”

The thread slid over the floorboards and touched the toe of Margery’s shoe.

Heat climbed her leg.

She gasped. The warmth moved under her skin with a knowing softness, up her calf, behind her knee, straight between her thighs. It found her where no charm had any right to know her, calling heat into the lips of her cunt until her shift clung wet against her. Then the heat gathered tighter, drew itself into her clit, and took the strength from her knees. She drew a sharp breath and tightened her fingers around Tom’s wrist.