“Has to be,” I said, sensing the chill creep into my cheeks the wider I grinned. “I’ll give you one of the smaller trout if you help me pull them to shore. The last thing I need is a cage to rip from the line once they hit that current there.”

She tossed the fish and knife into her basket, letting her arm brush a few auburn curls from her forehead where they’d escaped her wimple, and waddled over. “Would be a shame if you lost another cage. Better make it two.”

“Two then.” I nodded. “Now grab the rope. On three, we walk back and drag them all the way in. One.” I braced against the river rocks underfoot. “Two.” My stomach tightened. “Three.”

Gripping the rope tightly, I shifted my weight back for leverage. My heels dug into the shifting rock as I fought for every inch, ignoring how exhaustion blurred the edges of my vision. Against the chill lingering in the crisp morning air, sweat broke along my spine. Heavens, this catch had to be worth quite a few coins.

I needed them.

Desperately.

When the cages hit the current and the one at the end of the line bobbed and tossed on the white cap of the surface, I hung my entire weight on the rope. “Pull harder!”

“I am!” Rose heaved behind me as a handful of curses tumbled from her mouth. “Make that three fish!”

She could have four and the rest would still bring me enough money that I could finally haggle with Thorsten in earnest, and get the flea-bitten gray in his stables.

Three loud cracks threatened those hopes.

One of the cages broke apart, and pieces of wood first tossed in the air before they hit the water. The current swallowed them whole, sending them down the falls where it would sink to the ground next to the cage I’d lost four damn days ago.

But I wouldn’t let the rest go.

It was still heavy.

Against the tremble in my arms and the pain searing along my shoulder, I pulled, fighting backward against the current, until the first cage dragged over the rock. I counted two trout jumping in its belly. Another cage emerged with one more measly trout.

A knot formed at the back of my throat, but I swallowed it down. “Careful with the last one. An entire swarm must’ve caught in that one.”

One final pull and all resistance fell away as the cage tumbled to shore. I stumbled back, straight into Rose. We careened over each other, but she caught her balance while my knees hit the ground.

A rock cut through the cotton of my dress and scraped my skin, ripping a hiss from me. “Devil be damned, there better be an eel in there, too.”

Rose scoffed and circled a hand over her pregnant belly. “Not unless they grow beards now.”

When my eyes snapped to the last cage, my stomach bottomed out, sending a lap of bile onto the back of my tongue. “No…”

“I still want those fish you promised me,” she said. “I pulled, Elisa. Not my fault you caught a corpse.”

For a moment, I just sat there, listening to the treacherous sound of water lapping against the shore and how it distracted from the violent current hidden beneath its surface. A little over two weeks, and I was no closer to the Pale Court. Two weeks without a sign from Enosh, but all the more talk about how they’d captured the King of Flesh and Bone.

A sob built at the back of my throat, mixing with the acid that kept rising from my empty stomach. Three coins for the healer, two more for the tenancy on our little hut, and another for Pa’s herbs… At this pace, I would never make it home.

Behind me, Rose groaned, one hand pressed against the small of her back. “Augh, this babe is killing me. When it gets like this, I can barely make it down the hill.”

“Lean over and brace your thighs.” I got up and positioned myself behind her, letting my thumb press against the nerve along her tailbone through the cotton of her dress. “His head is coming into your pelvis. Not much longer now. Better?”

She straightened, shifting her hips this way and that, humming with relief. “Curse this place and how we have no midwife. We women could do with someone like you who knows how to make the aches go away. Where did you learn this?”

“Saw it somewhere once.” I walked over to the cages and pulled my knife from its sheath by my belt. “Idiot got himself so tangled during the full moon, I don’t even know how to cut him free without damaging the rope.”

Rose walked over and glanced down at the man, his blueish face waterlogged and swollen, algae woven through his red beard. “You’ll have to bring him to the cellar so they can lock him up. Magistrate said it’s the law now.” When I cut her a glare, she shrugged. “Don’t give me that look. Leave him here, and he might start twitching.”

Something corpses across the land had reportedly done after Enosh’s capture. They’d crawled from the dirt, only to collapse three steps later, and so it went on.

Rise. Collapse. Rise. Collapse.

“None of them have moved in at least a week.”

My guts tied into a knot. I couldn’t stomach what that might mean. That, maybe, whatever they were doing to Enosh was so gruesome, he no longer called the dead to his aid. Curse these lands and all these fools. I’d been so close. So close to fix this mess. And then they had to capture him, ruining everything! Perhaps Enosh was right about the depravity at our cores? Was there truly no fixing it?

“As if I could drag a grown man all the way there.” I leaned over, feeling the corpse’s arm for a joint to sever as I swallowed past a swell of bile. “My handcart’s too small—”

My stomach heaved. My chest convulsed, strangling that swallow of bile straight back up. It burned along my throat, bittered the back of my tongue, clenched my gums until—

I retched onto the rock to the sound of Rose shuffling away from me as she said, “By Helfa, you better brought no sickness here.”

Using the train of my dress, I leaned over and wiped the yellow strings from my mouth. “Just had no breakfast.”

“You said the same thing yesterday when you retched behind the bushes. No village as small as ours takes well to strangers, but even less so if they come with a pestilence.”

I took my starched wimple off, placed it on the rock beside me, and wiped the thin layer of sweat from my forehead. “It’s no sickness.”

It was worse.

For days, I’d woken nauseous, unable to keep much down, lest I nibbled on stale bread. It got better as the day grew older. Combine that with the fact that I was late on my bleeding, and you didn’t need to be a midwife to figure out just from what condition I might suffer.

Joy.

Dread.

Two emotions warred at my core, pulling my mood from cheerful to scared. For so many years, I’d prayed for a child. The answer couldn’t have come at a worse time. But how, if Enosh had sensed nothing? Perhaps it had been too small then?

“Maybe it’s a sickness after all.” Maybe I was finally going mad, my mind stuffed with head-spinning confusion about this entire ordeal. “I’ll have to cut the rope, then see if my father can mend it. Take your fish from the cages.”

She didn’t.

Rose only stood there, her stare fixed to the dark streaks and onyx discoloration painted across the white cotton on the inside of my wimple.

Sheathing my knife, I quickly grabbed it with my other hand. I placed it back on my head and shoved escaped black wisps into it, forcing my gaze to look at her basket, a nearby oak, the crow in its branches. I looked at anything but her, anything but how her eyes narrowed on me in the corner of my vision.

I took my knife out once more and ran the blade along the fraying rope. “You don’t want ’em?”

“Sure I do.” She blinked out of her thoughts, then retrieved three fish from my cages, leaving only enough behind to feed Pa and me for perhaps three days, four if I made stew again. “I better hurry. Nobody trusts fresh fish once the sun stands too high, no matter how cold it is.”