"Wool and Water"

Tom let the cord drop and shoved Beñat to the flagstones. "Stay down or burn."

The curtain was a sheet of pale fire now, and the hunter folded inside it had stopped being a man and become a shape. The smoke that rose from him was the wrong color — too white, too sweet, the burning-wax smell laced through with something underneath that Tom did not let himself name. It rolled up against the vault and began, with terrible patience, to find its way down.

Marrow coughed. Once. Wet.

That decided it.

Tom seized the basin from the table — clay, heavy, half-full of Mama Yves's boiled water — and flung the lot across the burning curtain. The blue flame hissed and shrank but did not die. Mama Yves was already there with the wool blanket from the cot folded double in her arms, beating the curtain down off its rod in great smothering strokes. Tom tore the striped cloth from the wall by the handful and stamped it into the wet flagstones with his one bare foot and the boot that was not. Sary, brave and small, dragged the loaf-board across the chamber and shoveled spilled water toward the worst of it.

Between them they killed the fire.

What was left of the hunter lay against the foot of the cistern stair — a hunched black thing that had been a tall man an hour ago. Beñat stared at it from the flagstones and made no sound at all. The cord still hung loose at his throat.

The chamber was full of smoke. Marrow was breathing in thin awful sips. Mama Yves was already at his side, one hand cupped to his cheek, her face for the first time afraid.

"He cannot stay here," she said. "Not in this air. He will drown in it before dawn."