The homes of the people who had loved.
I watched him for an hour. He did not stop. His fingers traced the invisible grain of an invisible log, and as they did, I felt something loosen in my chest. A memory I’d locked away—the smell of my mother’s apron, beeswax and flour—drifted past me like a petal. Then another. The sound of my father’s boots on the gravel path. The exact weight of a robin’s egg I’d found when I was seven.
It was not a name given at birth, nor a title earned in battle. It was a sound, a shape, a void in the shape of a man. Remsl .
The town of Hailsham-Under-Wood knew him as the woodcarver’s ghost. Children whispered that if you pressed your ear to the bark of the old sentinel oak at the crossroads, you could hear the shush-shush-shush of his knife, paring away the world one curl at a time.
My eyes burned.