Across the Long Sea by Sarah Remy Page B

wiggled her fingers over the open sarcophagus. “Who put all this up?”
    â€œI wasn’t, till you told me his name.” Everin reached into the tomb, selected a clay jar, and twisted it a full turn. There in the sealing wax, directly opposite the thumbprint, were the initials JS .
    Avani folded her hand around the barrow key.
    â€œAnd why didn’t it burn?” she wondered. “Like all the rest?”
    Everin knocked the tip of his boot against the side of the sarcophagus. “I’m not certain, but I imagine it has to do with the container. The top was sealed tight as a desert lord’s coin purse, the lid weighed well more than two of you, black eyes. You’ll note the rock didn’t melt; most of the graystone did.”
    â€œWhy?”
    Everin rolled his shoulders, then blew out the candle. Light fell in a scattering of midday from the cellar opening; the contents of the tomb gone once more, shadowed and invisible.
    â€œI don’t know. Stone’s not one I know, black like that. Mayhap it’s resistant to flames. Mayhap it’s spelled. The vocent might have a thing or two to say about it. Whether Smith knew his luck in it or not, I couldn’t say.”
    â€œI’m keeping the key,” Avani said.
    â€œI’ll not argue with you,” the big man replied. “But if you have take it in your head to make use of it, I’d appreciate fair warning.”
    Avani nodded. He’d quickly learned she disliked being managed, shepherded like an errant ewe, and she understood it was in his nature to do exactly that. They’d fought frequently that first spring, using words and silence as blade and club. He resented her solitary wanderings below ground, imagined every exploration her last. She hated that he coddled; she’d thrived for so long on her own, she couldn’t imagine any different.
    They’d settled on an uneasy compromise. So long as she remembered, she’d give him notice before she went wandering, and unless she was unduly late back, he resisted the urge to shadow her through underground caverns.
    â€œI’ve started the kitchen,” Everin said.
    â€œHave you?” Avani asked. “I’d like to see it.” She tucked the barrow key into a pocket, and offered him a companionable hand up the slope and into fresh air.
    E VERIN , WHO AS far as Avani knew had never laid eyes on Stonehill before its destruction, was managing to put back the pieces of the Crooked Creek Inn with such exact a hand that Avani was a wee bit suspicious the Widow didn’t somehow have her part in the reconstruction. She’d gone as far to accuse him of consorting with ghosts, but Everin had only laughed.
    â€œThere’s no need to resort to necromancy,” he’d promised. “Most of it I can see in the lines of the foundation; the rest I hear from your own tongue.”
    And it was true the big man asked her endless questions about details Avani wasn’t sure she could remember: the number of paces down the length of the east wall, or the span of the ceiling in the commons, the number of windows in the kitchen. Avani, who had spent most of her time at the Crooked Creek shoving bartered food into her mouth and then escaping the Widow’s disapproving eye as hastily as possible, could help Everin little when it came to the kitchens, or the bedchambers on the second floor.
    â€œIt won’t look the same, not from the outside,” he’d said that first winter, as he’d watched snow fly beyond Avani’s tapestried curtains, and sketched his plans on borrowed paper with seamstress chalk. “Graystone isn’t native, not to the Downs. Someone, some age ago, I’d wager, paid to have an entire village-­worth of stone hauled up from the valley. Frivolous, when there’s perfectly good clay for bricks on hand.”
    Avani, in the throws of putting her battered house back to rights, had paused and