John Pike, priest of Ashwrath, reads from a chronicle that knows more than he does — a record of a village dying of one sickness while another moves quietly through its lanes, leaving cold where warmth should be, silence where there should be sound, a mark in the mud with corners too sharp for any sole he knows.

Two girls are still missing. A wisewoman waits in her leaning house for what she has known was coming. A careful constable keeps a list he has not yet finished.

And in the iron case on Pike's desk, the seventh volume waits.

Tonight the priest opens the iron case. There is a passage he has never read before — sitting between two he knows by heart, as though it was always there and he simply wasn't ready to find it.

It concerns Edith Crow.

Two girls went to the tree line before the market bell. Agnes in her mother's green shawl, Ruth with the basket, walking with the quick serious purpose of children who have been given a task and mean to finish it. They did not come back. The ground remembers nothing of them.

Somewhere beneath the chapel, by one candle in a locked room, the priest reads. The chronicle is on his desk. It was not the same book yesterday that it is tonight. It will not be the same book tomorrow that it is now.

He reads because someone must witness it. He is that someone. It is the only thing he has left that he is sure of.