Chapter 23: What Marsh Was Before She Was Marsh

The lower courtyard was the only part of Dunhollow that smelled like something other than stone and old wood and the particular mineral cold of the lake. It smelled, faintly and inexplicably, of turned earth — not the rich dark earth of gardens but the pale, exhausted earth of places where things had been removed. Callum had noticed this on his third day and filed it without explanation, the way he filed everything he couldn't yet use. Now, standing at the courtyard's entrance in the grey collapse of dusk, he found the smell was stronger.

Marsh was at the far end, seated on the low wall that ran along the courtyard's southern edge, her coat the same February color it had been the evening she appeared at Skerwick's door. Her boots were muddied again — always muddied, as if she moved through a version of the world that was perpetually softened by rain. She was not doing anything. She was simply sitting, looking at the courtyard's center, with the specific stillness of someone who has learned to wait for things they do not expect to arrive.

She noticed him before he reached the halfway point. She always did.