They locked Wren's bedroom door from the outside now. She sat on the quilt in her stiff white dress and listened to the housekeeper's chair creak in the hall. Two weeks ago, the villagers had found her alone in the abandoned house at the edge of the pines, humming to the floorboards. They'd sewn her into this new life like a patch on a coat. She had walked back to the house three times since. Each time, someone dragged her home before she reached the porch. The last time, the constable had said the word penitentiary out loud. Black button eyes cannot cry, but Wren felt the pressure behind them anyway. Something under the floor of that empty house was still waiting. She had promised she would come back and finish knocking. A soft tap at the window. Wren turned her stitched face toward the glass. A raven stood on the sill, soot-black with a white patch at its throat. It tapped again, deliberate, three times. Wren slid off the bed and lifted the latch. Behind the raven, on the frozen path below, stood the village elder in her heavy wool robes and flower crown. Elsa Crane. The woman who greeted every stranger at the Tidebark Hut with open arms and that wide, unblinking smile. The woman who had signed the papers placing Wren with this household. She was smiling now, up at the window, as if she had known which room Wren slept in all along. Elsa raised one plump hand and beckoned. In the other hand she held an iron ring of keys. "Come down, little bird," Elsa called, soft enough that the housekeeper in the hall would not hear. "You've been trying the front door. That was never the way." Wren's fingers tightened on the sill. Elsa had spoken at every meeting about keeping the village safe from what slept in the pines. Now she stood in the snow offering keys. "Why?" Wren whispered. Elsa's smile did not move. "Because it's tired of waiting. And so, I think, are you." Wren climbed out. Her stockinged feet touched snow and did not feel cold. Elsa took her hand and led her past the frozen iron fence at the property line, past the icy lantern post at the corner where the constable usually stood watch. The lantern was dark. The constable was gone. Elsa had cleared the road. At the bend, Elsa pressed the keys into Wren's palm and pointed toward the pines. The abandoned house waited at the end of the path, windows black. "Wake it gently," Elsa said. "We've all been so patient." The raven landed on Wren's shoulder. Behind her, lamps came on in the household she had just left. Voices rose. A door slammed. They knew. Wren ran toward the trees. There would be no going back to a locked bedroom now. Only the house, and whatever answered when she knocked on the floor.

The pines closed over the path behind Wren like a shut mouth. The lit windows of the village fell away. Ahead, the abandoned house waited at the end of the trail, a black shape against the snow. She had the keys in her fist and the raven on her shoulder. She started to run. Her stockinged feet made no sound. The snow held her weight as if it wanted her to pass. She counted her steps to keep the panic small. At twenty, something behind her stepped too. She stopped. The step stopped. She started again. It started again, heavier now, closer than her own footfall had any right to allow. The raven's claws tightened on her collarbone. It did not caw. That frightened her more than a cry would have. Wren risked one look back. Between two trunks stood a moose. Frost caked its shoulders. Its eyes were flat and white, not looking at her so much as through her. It lowered its antlered head and came on at a walk that ate ground faster than her run. She broke for the house. The porch was still a hundred yards off. She would not make it. The raven left her shoulder and shot ahead down the path, low between the trees, then banked hard to the left and vanished. Wren followed it without thinking. She crashed off the trail into deeper snow and came up short against a cart tipped on its side. Frosted slats, spilled ice lanterns still glowing faintly in the drifts. Someone had left it here and never come back. Behind the cart, a woman crouched. Broad shoulders under a faded yellow slicker. Mud-caked waders. A leather ledger open on one knee, a pencil in her bare hand. She looked up at Wren without surprise, as if Wren's name were already on the page. "Down," the woman said. "Now." Wren dropped. The woman, the village gravedigger, reached past her and lifted one of the fallen lanterns from the snow. She held it out at arm's length toward the trail. The moose stepped from the trees. It saw the light. It stopped. For a long moment nothing moved but the woman's breath. Then the moose turned its huge head aside, as if listening to an order Wren could not hear, and walked back into the pines. The woman lowered the lantern. She looked at Wren's stitched face, at the iron ring of keys, and made a small mark in her ledger. "Elsa sent word ahead," she said. "I'm not to stop you. I'm to see you reach the door." She closed the book. "But I've already written your name in, girl. Whatever you wake in there, you don't walk back out the same." She stood, and pointed at the porch. The house was close now. The keys were warm in Wren's hand.

The gravedigger stayed behind the cart. Wren climbed the porch alone. The door was already unlocked. She pushed it open and stepped inside. The house swallowed her. Her button eyes were sewn tight and painted flat. In daylight they let her see well enough. In here the black was thicker than cloth. Shapes pressed at her from every side and none of them held still. She put one hand out and touched nothing. She put the other out and touched a wall that felt wet. She took a step. Her foot came down on something round that rolled. She fell hard on one knee. A shelf tipped somewhere in the dark and glass broke against the floor in a long, slow spill. She held her breath. If she kept walking blind she would break a leg before she reached the boards Elsa had told her to knock on. The raven landed on the sill behind her. Its white throat caught what little light came through the door. It hopped once, twice, and pecked at something on the floor near her feet. A shape there. A handle. Wren felt for it. Metal, cold, with wings folded against the sides. A lantern. She lifted it and the glass inside warmed under her palm without a match. Soft gold light opened a small circle around her. She could see her own dress. She could see the broken jar at her knee. She could see, at the far end of the hall, a stripe of floorboards darker than the rest. The light did more than show the room. Something in the air behind her thinned. A pale blue shape unpeeled from the wallpaper, tall as a grown person, with two glowing eyes and a body like slow smoke. It did not lunge. It drifted between her and the dark hall, close enough that she felt no heat from it, only a draft. "Little sewn girl," it said. The voice was almost the wind through the eaves. "You brought a light in. That was clever. Put it down before you reach the boards. It will not like the light." Wren did not answer. She stood up. Her knee hurt. She held the lantern out in front of her the way the gravedigger had held hers at the moose. The blue shape drifted aside. It did not fight the light. It only watched. She walked the hall. The lantern showed her every nail and every stain. She reached the dark stripe of boards at the end. She knelt. She set the lantern down beside her, close enough to see, far enough that her hand was free. She made a fist. She knocked three times on the floor. Under the boards, something knocked back.

The knock from beneath the boards was still ringing in Wren's ears when she noticed the light. The lantern sat where she had set it, but its gold circle had shrunk. The edge of the glow was sliding back across the floor toward her knees. Toward the dark stripe. If it touched those boards, the thing under them would sink away, and she would have come all this way for nothing. She looked at the lantern. The flame inside was steady. Something outside the flame was eating the light. The blue shape from the hall drifted closer and hovered at her shoulder, thin as breath on a window. "It pulls the light in," the ghost said. Its voice slid under the floor like a draft. "Your lantern is losing. Move it, sewn girl, or lift the boards yourself." Wren looked at the gap between the glow and the dark stripe. Two hand-widths. Less. She could shove the lantern away and buy the thing below its darkness. Or she could keep the lantern close and lose whatever waited under the floor. She chose. She slid the lantern backward down the hall with the flat of her hand. The glow retreated with it. The dark stripe went black again. Cold air rose from the seams between the boards like breath from a mouth. Something pushed up from underneath. A board lifted at one end, then dropped. Another cracked along its length. A nail popped and skipped past her knee. Wren did not move. Her button eyes stared straight down. A hand came through first. It was long and gray and had too many joints. Then a shoulder. Then a face she could not look at all at once — pale, wet, with eyes that had not opened in a long time. It did not climb out. It only rose to the chest and stopped, half in the floor, and looked at her. "You knocked," it said. Its voice was low and slow, like the house settling. "I heard you the first time. I waited to be sure." Wren nodded once. "Then it is done," the thing said. "I am up. I cannot go back down." Behind her, out on the porch, the gravedigger's boots hit the wood and stopped. The raven flew in through the door and landed on the broken board by Wren's knee. It did not caw. It watched the thing in the floor the way it had watched her, tilting its white throat. The ghost thinned against the wall and was gone. The thing in the floor lifted its second hand and set it flat on the boards beside Wren's small shoe. "Take me out of this house, sewn girl," it said. "You brought me up. Now you carry me." Wren stood. Her knee still hurt. She reached down and took its cold hand in hers.

Wren led the creature down the porch steps by the hand. Its long fingers bent around hers in too many places. The gravedigger stood at the bottom of the steps with the ice lantern held low. She looked at the thing beside Wren once, then away, and did not speak. The raven landed on the porch rail behind them. Above the pines, the sky had gone the color of watered milk. Dawn was close. "I cannot stand the sun," the creature said. Its voice was slow. "Take me somewhere the light does not reach." Wren did not know where. The house behind her was empty of its secret now. The village would not take a thing like this. She looked at the gravedigger. The gravedigger looked at the trees. "There's a root cellar under the hut where the elder holds her meetings," the gravedigger said. "Stone walls. No windows. It's the only dark room I'd trust to hold him." She did not sound glad about saying it. Wren nodded. She stepped down into the pine needles. The creature followed, folding itself smaller than it should have been able to. Its bare feet made no sound. They moved between the trees. The gravedigger walked ahead with the lantern low. Wren kept the creature's hand. Its skin did not warm. Once it stumbled and caught itself on a trunk, and the bark split under its fingers like wet paper. The village edge came up faster than Wren expected. Smoke rose from two chimneys. A dog barked and stopped. The gravedigger took them the back way, along a fence line, to the low building at the meeting ground. She lifted a slanted door in the earth beside the wall. Elsa Crane was waiting at the top of the cellar steps. She wore her flower crown and her heavy brown robes, and her round face was set in the same wide smile she wore at every gathering. She did not look surprised at the creature. She did not look surprised at Wren. She held the door open with one hand and gestured them down with the other, the way she waved strangers into her meetings. "Quickly, dear," Elsa said. "Before the bakers open their shutters." Wren stopped on the top step. The creature stopped with her. Something in the old woman's smile did not match the situation. "You knew he would come up," Wren said. "I knew someone would need to bring him somewhere," Elsa said. "Down you go." The gravedigger would not meet Wren's eyes. The lantern in her hand had already begun to dim in the growing light. Wren looked at the creature. It looked back at her from under its wet hair and squeezed her hand once. Wren went down the steps. The creature followed. Elsa closed the cellar door above them, and Wren heard a bolt slide across the wood.

The bolt slid shut above them. Wren stood at the bottom of the stone steps and listened to the elder's footsteps cross the floor overhead. Then the footsteps stopped. The cellar was colder than the forest had been. Torches burned in iron sconces along the walls, low and steady, throwing yellow light on stone blocks carved with symbols Wren did not know. The creature let go of her hand and folded down against the far wall, away from the flames. Wren climbed back up the steps and pushed the door with both palms. It did not move. She hit it once. She hit it again. The wood was thick and the bolt was iron. Above her, the meeting hall was quiet. No one would come. No one was meant to come. She went back down. The creature watched her with wet black eyes. Its too-many-jointed fingers rested on the floor like spider legs. Wren looked around the cellar. Shelves of jarred roots. A folded pile of dark cloth on a low bench. Nothing that would break a door. She crossed to the bench. On top of the folded cloth lay a silver stake, its head and blade set with blue stones. The cloth beneath it was a long green cloak trimmed in silver thread. Both had been placed for her. She understood then what Elsa had meant by housing him. Wren picked up the stake. It was heavier than it looked. She turned toward the creature. He did not move. He did not beg. He only watched. "She left it for me," Wren said. "Yes," the creature said. Wren's stitched button eyes did not blink. She thought of the floorboards in the pine house and the thing still knocking somewhere beneath them, the one the ghost had wanted her to reach. This one was not that one. This one was the door the elder had opened to keep the deeper door shut. She set the stake down on the bench. She lifted the green cloak instead and carried it to the creature. She draped it over his long shoulders and pulled the hood up over his wet hair. The silver lace caught the torchlight. He looked, for a moment, like something that could pass through a village at dusk. "Stand up," Wren said. He stood. He was taller than the ceiling wanted him to be. Wren went to the wall where the torches burned and took one down from its sconce. She carried it to the base of the steps and held the flame against the underside of the wooden door, in the corner where the bolt bit into the frame. Smoke gathered along the boards. The wood began to darken. She held it steady. Above them, footsteps returned to the door. The bolt did not slide. The footsteps waited. Wren kept the torch pressed to the wood.