Chapter 21: Tomak's Confession in the Market Square

The lie was about Tomak's wife.

She had been dead six years, which Arthur knew because Pela had told him on the walk back from the chapel, in the compressed, efficient way she delivered information she considered relevant — the way she told him the cellar floor flooded in spring, or that the market's east stalls closed early on Tuesdays. Tomak's wife had died of a fever in the third year of the grain shortage. Her name had been Renka. She had been, by Pela's accounting, a considerably better person than the man she married.

The lie Arthur told Tomak was that she had come back.