The baron's name was Aldric Voss.
He said so himself the moment they stepped through the door, his voice carrying the specific urgency of a man reminding the world that he still existed. Stout, somewhere in his fifties, with the frame of someone who had once been broader and was now just soft. His coat had started life as a fine piece of work. That life was behind it now. The cuffs were fraying, and one of the buttons had been replaced with something that did not quite match.
He was holding his hat with both hands and turning it in a slow, steady rotation. He seemed completely unaware he was doing it.
The boy behind him was young. Seventeen at most. Dark-haired, slight, with the practiced stillness of someone who had learned early on that being noticed was rarely worth it. The baron introduced him as Corvin, eventually, when he remembered to. Corvin nodded once and did not speak.
"Please," the baron said. "Come in out of the cold."
The house smelled like fear with good intentions.
Not rot. Not neglect. Something more deliberate: fires burning in the middle of the day, every lamp lit, windows latched and curtained as though someone had called a vote and darkness had lost unanimously. The entry hall was narrow, dark-wooded, low-ceilinged, with a staircase going up into shadow that showed no interest in being welcoming.
Henrietta noted the lamps. Midday, and all of them burning.
She filed it away and said nothing.
Oz moved through the hall the way he moved through every space he entered, which was to say without disturbing it. He did not brush the walls. He did not look directly at anything. He gathered the room the way some people gathered a room without ever appearing to look at it at all, and whatever conclusions he reached from that, he kept entirely to himself.
They were shown into a sitting room. Fire going, four chairs arranged around a low table, a tea service already laid out and waiting. The kind of arrangement that required forethought. The baron had been rehearsing this conversation since morning, possibly longer.
Corvin poured the tea.
Crossing from the tray to the table, he caught the edge and spilled a small amount. He steadied himself quickly, set the cups down with care, then retreated to the wall. He stood there with his hands folded and his eyes fixed on a neutral point above the conversation, which was the posture of someone trying to be furniture.
"Please," the baron said again. "Sit."
Aldric Voss set his hat on his knee and left it there, apparently finished with it. He looked at Oz, then at Henrietta, then back at Oz. The look of a man who had been told what to expect and was now doing the arithmetic between expectation and reality and finding it did not add up.
"You are the one who handles matters of this kind," he said.
It was not quite a question. It was not quite settled enough to be a statement either.
"Yes," Oz said.
The fire made its small sounds. Outside, fog pressed against the glass with patient indifference.
The baron leaned toward Corvin and said something. Too low to make out. Corvin left without a word, his footsteps careful on the floorboards, and returned two minutes later with another person entirely.
The priest was a small, thin man wearing his collar like he had dressed in the dark. When he sat down, his right hand went immediately to his coat pocket. His fingers found something there and closed around it. He did not take it out.
He also did not look at Oz.
Most people did not look at Oz directly, at first. There was usually a moment of approach and then a brief internal adjustment, the way the eye adjusted to something abrupt. Henrietta had watched it enough times to find it almost predictable.
What the priest was doing was different. His not-looking had a direction to it. Deliberate, like a man choosing which side of a door to stand on before opening it.
"Father Carne," the baron said. "He has been here from the beginning."
"From the first death," the priest confirmed. His voice was steadier than the rest of him. "Six weeks ago."
Ten dead.
The baron said it plainly, with the grim purposefulness of a man who had decided that directness was the only way through this and was paying for that decision one word at a time.
All in their sleep. No wounds. No illness. The physician, Dr. Pembrook, had examined each body thoroughly. He had found nothing he could name or account for. The bodies simply stopped. Some of them lingered for a day or two, breathing but hollow, as if the person had already left and only the body remained out of habit. Then they stopped breathing too.
"The physician," Henrietta said. "What was his conclusion?"
The baron's jaw worked for a moment. "He used the word coincidence."
A pause.
"You found that unsatisfying," she said.
"Ten people, Dr. Ashford. Ten, in six weeks. I found it insufficient."
Father Carne's fingers moved against whatever was in his pocket. "The village is frightened. People are not sleeping. Some have not slept in days." He stopped. "There is talk of leaving."
"Has anyone left?" Oz said.
"Not yet."
The priest left the rest of that sentence to speak for itself.
"The deaths began after the river flooded its banks," he continued. "Six weeks ago. Some people believe the flood disturbed something it should not have. Others say it is divine punishment for some collective sin, though they cannot settle on what sin. There is always a sin available when one is needed." His thumb traced something through the fabric of his pocket. "I have run out of things to offer them by way of comfort or explanation. That is why you are here."
"What do you believe?" Oz said.
The priest looked at him then. Directly, briefly, for just a moment. Something crossed his face that was not quite an answer and not quite a refusal. The look of a man standing at the edge of something he could not yet bring himself to name.
He said nothing.
That was its own kind of answer.
Silence settled over the room.
The four of them, two cups of cooling tea between them, ten dead in the village outside, and the fog pressing at the glass like it had nowhere else to be.
"I want to see the bodies," Oz said.
The baron's hat stopped moving on his knee.
Something shifted in his face. Not guilt. Not the look of someone concealing something. Something quieter and more private than that, something that lived in the neighborhood of grief but was more specific. The look of a man who had just been asked to go back to a room he had not yet finished leaving.
He recovered in two seconds. If Henrietta had not been watching for exactly that, she would have missed it entirely.
He knew one of them, she thought. Not the way a man in authority knew the people under him. The closer way. The kind that cost something.
"Of course," the baron said. "I will take you myself."
They stood.
Corvin moved to collect the cups. Reaching across the table, his sleeve rode up slightly at the cuff.
Henrietta caught it. Just the edge of it, just in passing.
His sleeve was already damp. Not from the spill. The spill had been on the far side of the tray, and it was a small amount besides. This was something else. Something prior. Something Corvin had arrived wearing, before the tea, before this room, before this morning.
She looked up. He had already turned away.
She looked at Oz.
He was standing with his back to her, facing the door the baron had already moved toward. She could not see his face.
But he had not moved yet to follow.
For just a moment he stood completely still in the center of the sitting room, and the quality of that stillness was different from his usual stillness. Not the stillness of watching. Something else. Something that looked, from the outside, the way a person looked when they were not listening but receiving. When something was coming through on a frequency that had no name she knew of.
Then he moved.
"Show us," he said.
The baron led. Father Carne followed. Corvin came last.
Henrietta fell in beside Oz. She did not ask him what he had sensed, because she had learned by now that asking too early only closed the door. What he knew, he would offer when it was time.
Outside, past the latched and curtained windows, the River Maren moved through Ashenmere the way it always moved.
Steady. Cold. Patient.
Without any hurry at all.