Chapter 24: What Ashford Looks Like After

The plague did not leave cleanly. It retreated the way floods do — grudgingly, leaving residue, taking longer than anyone wanted to believe it would. Three days after the ritual, old Marya from the north end of the market was still coughing, though differently than before, with a quality to it that Pela said was ordinary sick rather than wrong sick, and Pela had spent three years learning the difference. The mill's eastern neighbor, a tanner named Borsz who had lost two sons to the coughing season and spent the winter with a grey quality to his skin that had nothing to do with the trade, sat in his yard in the weak afternoon sun and lifted his face toward it with the specific vacancy of a man rediscovering warmth. He didn't look healed. He looked like someone who had stopped drowning and had not yet remembered how to walk on dry ground.

Arthur watched him from the road and said nothing and kept moving.

The guild enforcers had broken camp before dawn on the morning after Drevka's withdrawal, efficiently and without theatrical display. The tent stakes had left rectangular impressions in the mud at the market square's southern edge. Someone had already begun filling them in with barrow-loads of gravel — quietly, without comment, the way communities erase things they need not to look at anymore. By the second morning there was nothing left to mark that they had been there except the gravel, and the gravel looked like it had always been there, and Arthur suspected that was the point.