Chapter 8: Serafka Voss Arrives Uninvited

The market square had begun, by midmorning, to perform normalcy with the dutiful exhaustion of a village that had been performing it for three years.

A butcher's boy crossed with a string of dried sausages over one shoulder. Two women argued pleasantly over the price of turnips. An old man sat on a barrel near the well and did nothing with the focused commitment of someone who had earned it. Arthur watched all of this from the inn's front step and noted that none of it was quite right — the butcher's boy walked too close to the walls, the turnip women's eyes moved too much, and the old man near the well was not looking at nothing. He was watching the southern road.

Arthur had been watching the southern road too, but that was professional habit, and he was watching it for Drevka.