Nobody on the Raddle Moss causeway lights a candle along the left edge of the road, and nobody snuffs one on the right. Children learn this before they learn to wade the flooded furrows. The left-hand candles are for the living. The right-hand ones mark the line the necromancer walks at dusk, and she expects them to be straight to the inch. The neighbors give no reason beyond that. They have simply seen what happens to a road she has to walk in the dark.
She stands six feet tall and is built like a fence rail, about sixty, long in the jaw. Her eyelids are painted violet, a paste she mixes from something in a stoppered jar and will not name, and the amber eyes beneath them are deep set and patient. They rest on spots along the causeway where nothing is standing yet. Her black hair is streaked with silver and braided around a single bone-white feather that no one has matched to a bird. She is dry-mannered and guarded, and she eats boiled eggs, black bread and dried pears. She sends back any egg boiled past nine minutes. Kerrin Voss, who keeps the old toll-house at Ellory Bank, has been handed a cold, correct egg across the sill more than once, with a remark about the cooking that he repeats to anyone who will stand still.
A pale scar crosses the back of her left hand, old enough to have gone smooth. Her cloak is plum, hooded, with the hem stitched in emerald thread. At the last visit the green covered half the hem. Now it runs all the way around and the two ends meet, which the people of Raddle Moss discuss in low voices and never in front of her. Her ash staff carries a small lamp at the tip, and the flame in it is a steady teal that does not lean in wind. When a gust takes her cloak she keeps walking, and a ring of that teal light spreads outward over the chalk circle at her feet.
The peat keeps her tracks well: long, narrow bootprints, always pointing east. Where she has stopped, a chalk circle is left on the planks, with a pear stem set at its center and half an eggshell beside it. Nobody on the causeway will lend her a spade, and nobody will say a drowned relative's name within sight of that lamp, because she answers for them. Farmers at Raddle Moss read the circles for the week's weather and do not step inside them. The circles measure seven feet across, and Kerrin has checked three dozen of them with a length of lath and never found one off by more than a thumb.
- Classification
- Human spellcaster, speaker to the dead
- Habitat
- Peat causeways, toll-houses, graveyard edges
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft tall, lean build
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Drowned fields of the Harrowmere
- Binomial
- Manes vocator
- Diet
- Boiled eggs, black bread, dried pears
- Temperament
- Patient, dry, guarded