Chapter 6: What Lives Beneath the Mill

The mill door was unlocked.

That was the first thing. Arthur filed it away — the specific vulnerability of a woman who had stopped being afraid of the wrong thing breaking in and started being afraid of the right thing breaking out. The bar sat in its bracket, unused. The bolt hung open. Three years of hiding a cursed child beneath your floor, and you stopped locking the door. He wasn't sure if that was courage or exhaustion or something so far past both that it didn't have a name in any language he'd learned.

Pela went ahead of him with a tallow candle, moving through the mill's ground floor with the unconscious efficiency of someone who knew every plank by sound. The millstone was cold, the grinding arm chocked and still. Sacks of rye waited against the north wall in careful stacks that were thinning at the top in ways that suggested a winter that had gone longer than expected. The whole room smelled of grain dust and cold stone and, underneath both, the particular damp that comes from something beneath the floor.