Oz was already awake when she knocked.
She had not expected otherwise. He opened the door looking exactly as he looked at all other hours - coat on, hair not quite settled, red eyes clear and without any of the particular vacancy that sleep left in people's faces. There was a cup of something on the small table behind him. He had found the kitchen, then. Or the kitchen had found him.
"I want to walk the village," he said, before she could speak.
"I know," she said.
He picked up the cup, drank whatever was in it, set it down, and came out into the hall.
Ashenmere in the early morning was a different village from the one they had arrived in.
The fog was still present but thinner, worn down by a weak grey sun that had not yet decided whether it intended to do anything useful. The streets were not empty. People were out. They were buying bread, drawing water, carrying things from one place to another with the heads-down purposefulness of people who had decided that normality was a thing worth performing even when it no longer felt true.
They watched, though. Everyone watched.
Oz moved through the village the way he had moved through the baron's house. Without pressing against anything. Without announcing anything. Henrietta kept pace and kept her notebook open and wrote down what she saw, which was mostly things that looked ordinary and therefore were worth recording.
Three houses on the lower lane had dried flowers hung above their doors. Not decorative. Something older than decoration, the kind of thing people did when they wanted protection and had run out of more specific options.
The well at the village centre had a piece of rope tied to the handle. Red rope. Someone had put it there recently - the colour had not faded.
Two of the windows on the north side of the high street had their curtains drawn on the inside and a line of salt along the outer sill. Henrietta wrote all of it down without comment.
"They are trying things," she said.
"People always try things," Oz said. "It tells you what they are afraid of more than what they understand."
She wrote that down too.
The Maren ran along the eastern edge of the village, below a low stone embankment that the village had built sometime in the previous century to keep the spring floods manageable. Steps cut into the stone led down to the waterline at two points. Fishermen's steps, mostly unused this time of year.
Oz stopped at the top of the nearer set of steps.
He stood there for a moment. Not long. Fifteen seconds, perhaps twenty. He looked at the water the way he had looked at the bodies in Pembrook's surgery - not with curiosity but with a kind of flat, precise attention, as though the river were a document he was reading for the second time and checking his earlier understanding against.
Then he turned and kept walking.
Henrietta looked at the river herself. Dark water, moving quickly, running cold from the hills above the village. Ordinary. It looked entirely ordinary.
She wrote: He stopped at the Maren. Did not explain. Fifteen seconds.
She caught up to him.
"The residue on the bodies," she said. "River water."
"Yes."
"And the hours."
"The Maren runs low before dawn," he said. "Second to fourth hour. The cold comes up off the water then. The village is at its deepest sleep." He paused. "That is when it moves."
She absorbed this. "It needs the river to reach them."
"It needs proximity. The river is how it travels. How it finds people in their beds without walking through walls." He was looking at the road ahead, not at her. "It goes where the water goes."
"The flood," Henrietta said.
"Yes."
"Six weeks ago."
"Yes."
She wanted to ask more but the way he had said yes told her he had reached the edge of what he intended to give her this morning. She had learned that edge. Pushing past it produced nothing useful and cost something she could not define.
She wrote: Travels through water. The flood was the beginning. Six weeks ago.
The market was small - eight or nine stalls arranged in a rough square near the church, selling the practical things a village sold to itself. Henrietta and Oz passed through without stopping, though Oz's attention moved across every stall in the brief, comprehensive way it moved across everything.
Near the grain merchant's stall, they found the baron.
He was standing with a ledger open in one hand, a look on his face that suggested it wasn't telling him anything he wanted to hear. Corvin stood beside him holding a cloth sack with the specific patience of someone who had been holding it for a while. The baron ran his household accounts on market mornings. Henrietta had learned this the previous evening when he had mentioned, without particular reason, that he found it easier to do the ordering in person since Aldren died. He had not elaborated on why.
He looked up when he heard them approach. He closed the ledger.
"Dr. Ashford." He glanced at Oz. "I did not expect to see you at the market."
"We were walking," Henrietta said. "We did not mean to interrupt."
"You are not interrupting." He tucked the ledger under his arm. Something in his posture suggested he was not sorry to be interrupted at all.
They fell into loose company, moving toward the far side of the stalls, the baron folding his ledger into Corvin's already-occupied arms without looking. It was the gesture of a man so accustomed to having someone beside him that it required no thought.
It was near the far edge of the market that they encountered the girl.
She was perhaps nineteen. Brown-haired, fine-featured, with the quality of someone who had been pretty before something had taken the weight off her face. Dark circles beneath her eyes, deep ones, the kind that a few bad nights did not produce. These had been accumulating for a while.
She was carrying flowers. A loose bundle of them, pale and small, with the specific look of things pulled from soft riverbank soil rather than a cultivated garden - the stems were uneven, still damp, and a few had their roots still attached where they had been pulled rather than cut.
She had just come from the river, or near it.
The baron saw her first and lifted a hand. She changed course toward him.
"Miss Ashby," the baron said. He said it with the warmth of a man who had known her since she was young, and underneath that warmth, something more careful. The way people spoke to someone they had been watching over without saying so.
"My lord." She dipped her head, then looked at Henrietta and Oz with the polite, assessing look of someone encountering strangers in her own village. "You must be the ones who've come about the deaths."
"Dr. Ashford," Henrietta said. "And my associate, Mr. Oz."
The girl looked at Oz. There was the usual adjustment, the brief one. Then something else - she looked slightly longer than most people did. Not with fear. With something closer to recognition, the look of someone seeing a thing that reminds them of another thing without being able to name what the other thing is.
Then it passed, and she was simply a tired young woman holding damp flowers.
"I hope you can help them," she said. "People are afraid." She shifted the bundle in her arms. "My mother was the first, or near enough. Before the others started. I know what it does to a place."
"Your mother," Henrietta said gently. "I'm sorry."
"She drowned." The girl said it matter-of-factly, the way people stated facts they had already processed into something flat enough to carry. "In the Maren. Six weeks ago. An accident, the physician said. She went out early." A brief pause. "She always did. She said the river was quietest just before dawn. That she could hear it thinking."
She smiled slightly when she said it. The smile of someone repeating something they had found odd at the time and found precious now.
"She would have liked you to be here," Wren Ashby said. "She trusted people who came when they were asked."
She said goodbye to the baron, nodded to Henrietta and Oz, and moved on toward the far side of the market.
Henrietta watched her go.
So did Corvin.
He was standing three feet behind the baron, where he always stood, and his eyes had found the girl the moment she appeared and had not left her until she turned the corner at the far stall and was gone. It lasted no more than a few seconds. But it was not the look of someone noticing a stranger.
Henrietta looked at Corvin. He felt it and looked at her. His expression adjusted immediately to neutral.
He looked away.
She wrote nothing. Not yet. She waited until they had cleared the market and she had put a little distance between her pen and the moment, and then she wrote: Wren Ashby. Mother drowned in the Maren six weeks ago. Early morning. Corvin knows her. The flowers are from the riverbank.
She looked at that last line.
Then she drew a small circle around it and kept walking.
On the way back to the house, Oz spoke once.
"The mother," he said. "Ask the baron when."
"When she drowned?"
"What hour."
She turned to look at him. He was watching the road.
"You already know," she said.
"I want you to ask."
She understood, then. He wanted confirmation in writing, in a voice that was not his, from a source that was not his awareness. He wanted it on record. Documented. The way she kept everything.
She wrote: Ask the baron: what hour did Wren Ashby's mother die?
That afternoon the baron answered without hesitation and without understanding why she was asking.
"Early morning," he said. "Before dawn. Corvin found her - he was the first one down to the river that day."
Henrietta wrote it down.
She closed the notebook and sat with that for a moment.
Corvin had found the body. Corvin had been at the river before dawn, in the hours between two and four. Corvin had been the one who arrived first, at the waterline, where the entity moved.
That was where he had been marked.
That was where it had found him.
She sat in the small room at the back of the baron's house with the Maren making its low sound outside the window, and she thought about Wren Ashby's smile when she talked about her mother. The river was quietest just before dawn. She could hear it thinking.
She opened the notebook again and wrote, at the bottom of the page, in small letters: Does she know what she is carrying?
Then, below that: No. I don't think she does.