Chapter 10:

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Briar grabbed grandmother’s cheek.

Not a slap. She actually grabbed it — pinched a fold of skin between her fingers and pulled, hard enough that grandmother hissed and jerked back. Through the window I saw the cheek stretch, and I thought: that is not how skin is supposed to move on a face that age. It moved like something with too much give.

Briar laughed. She was still flushed from before, her hair half-undone, one strap of her robe slipping off her shoulder, and she looked at grandmother with the complete absence of self-preservation that had always been her most alarming quality.

“How come you kept all of this to yourself?” She gestured at the room — the men, the lamps, all of it. “Didn’t you say you loved us?”

Grandmother straightened up and touched her own cheek, slowly, with two fingers. When she took them away the skin stayed slightly raised for a moment before settling back. Her expression hadn’t changed.

That was the part that frightened me. The expression not changing.

Briar pulled a knife from somewhere — her sash, probably, she’d taken to carrying one since Hazel died and hadn’t told anyone — and moved it to the throat of the man beneath her. She pressed just enough that a thin line of red appeared.

𝘔𝗼𝗿𝘦 𝗇o𝗏е𝘭𝗌 𝗼𝘯 𝗀a𝘭no𝗏𝘦𝘭s.𝘤o𝘮

“Leave,” she said. “Or I open him up.”

Grandmother went still.

Her whole body: still. Not the stillness of someone frightened, but of someone performing a rapid internal calculation. Her eyes went to the blood at the man’s throat. Then to the floor beneath him. Then back to Briar.

“Fine,” she said.

She stepped back toward the door. Briar watched her go with the triumphant look of someone who has just won a hand they had no business winning.

She shouldn’t have taken her eyes off the floor.

The tiles were silver, all of them, fitted edge to edge without grout. Except — I could see it now from above, now that I was looking — a large section in the center that was fractionally darker. A tarp fitted to match the tile color, laid flat beneath the lamplight. The man’s blood, dripping from the thin cut on his throat, was falling onto cloth, not stone.

“It can’t be,” Briar said. The triumph had drained out of her voice. “They said if a man’s blood touched the floor —”

Grandmother moved.

In the space of one breath she crossed the room and had Briar by the throat, lifted, her feet scraping at nothing. Grandmother was not hobbling. She was not using a cane. She held Briar one-handed with the ease of someone who has been pretending at frailty for a very long time and is tired of the performance.

“Did you think,” grandmother said, “that I wouldn’t have heard that rumor myself?”

Briar clawed at the hand around her throat. Her face went dark. She was still trying to say something — I could see her lips moving — and grandmother watched her with the mild interest of someone observing a beetle on its back.

“Do you think,” grandmother said, almost to herself, “that I didn’t notice you at the wake? The corner of your robe, under the coffin.”

Briar’s hands slowed.

“That wasn’t me,” she managed, barely. “That wasn’t —”

Grandmother’s grip tightened. The rest of the sentence didn’t come out.

My hands were locked around the window ledge so hard the stone edge cut into my palms, and I did not look away. I don’t know why I didn’t look away. Some part of me thought that if I kept watching, it would mean something, though I couldn’t have said what.

Briar’s body went slack.

Grandmother set her down with a care that was almost gentle, arranged her arms, and stepped back to look at what she’d done with the critical eye of someone reviewing their own work.

The corner of your robe, under the coffin.

Briar hadn’t been there. I had. We’d made matching robes that year — same fabric, same cut, same buttons — and in the dark, a corner of cloth was just a corner of cloth.

Grandmother had killed the wrong sister.

I let go of the ledge and dropped to the ground and walked back to the house and lay down in my bed without taking my shoes off. The ceiling was dark. Outside a nightjar called once, then stopped. I lay there and did not think about anything for a long time, because thinking would come later and right now there was just this: the ceiling, the dark, the silence where Briar’s voice used to be.

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