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My thumb stills against the seam of my glove. “Blue?”

“Yes, blue. That light you were pulling out of Alice Fletcher.”

Ah. That is rather more troubling than I expected. There was a time when I would have known if somebody so much as breathed on the other side of a door. Yet Ophelia Harrow has managed to watch me harvest a soul without my noticing her at all.

Three hundred years spent guarding what I am, and I am growing careless in a village of two hundred souls.

How irritating.

“You’ve been watching me,” I say.

She raises her chin. “Not intentionally. I was called to the Vances’ a few nights ago. Well, you were called to the Vances’, but Arthur said you wouldn’t wake, so he came for me instead. I was passing the Fletchers’ when I noticed the light coming through their shutters.”

“And you stopped to watch.”

“Well, of course I did! There was blue light pouring through the gaps and spilling beneath the door. What exactly was I supposed to do, carry on walking?” Her expression darkens as she looks at me. “No, actually, don’t you turn this around on me! You’re the one going about stealing people’s souls!”

“Only when they are already dying, as I have explained.”

She opens her mouth to argue, then hesitates, her eyes narrowing. “Hang on. What about Nell Mercer? You did something to her with that blue stuff, except it went the other way. It came out of your hands and went into her, and she dropped like a sack of turnips. So if you’re supposed to be taking souls from dying people, what in God’s name were you doing to her? Demon magic?”

I had assumed she was too occupied with Nell’s condition to notice the blue slipping beneath my fingers. Evidently not.

“That,” I say, “is an entirely different matter.”

“Oh, of course it is.”

“If you would allow me to explain, Ophelia, you might discover that there is rather more to what I do than stealing souls and murdering innocent villagers.”

“Then explain!”

“Very well.” I straighten, smoothing a crease from my glove. “What you saw with Nell Mercer was not a harvest. Quite the opposite, in fact. I was giving her something.”

“Giving her what?”

“A little of what I had previously taken from the dying. Once a soul leaves the body, much of what made it a person goes on without me. What remains is a sort of essence, which I can retain and, when necessary, return to a living body.”

Her brow furrows. “You put somebody else’s soul inside her?”

“No, Ophelia Harrow. I have just explained that it is no longer a soul in the sense you understand it. No memories are attached to it, no lingering thoughts or feelings. Merely the essence of what once sustained a living person.”

“And you put that in Nell without telling her?”

“She was rather occupied with vomiting at the time.”

“That doesn’t—” She stops, her eyes widening. “Wait. Are you saying you can heal people?”

“To an extent. What I gave Nell is called a soulglimmer. It lends strength to a body that still possesses the means to recover, encouraging the flesh to mend itself where it might otherwise fail. A wound that will not close, for instance, or a woman labouring with a child that refuses to turn. There are a great many things it can accomplish, although I would hardly call it a cure for every ailment.”

“But you’ve been letting people die.”

“Not quite.”

“How is that not quite? You can put life back into people, but you’ve been standing there watching them die of the pestilence!”

“Because the pestilence is not a wound, Ophelia. I can encourage a body to recover, but I cannot restore what the sickness has already destroyed. If the flesh is too far gone, no amount of essence will persuade it otherwise.”

She looks down at the pestle, turning it slowly between her fingers. “And Alice Fletcher?”