Page 24

The glow of torchlight swayed, wobbling from side to side, and then plunged into the dark like a shooting star.

“Get that torch back up!”

Remin shouted, moving at once into the new pool of shadow and smashing his shield out, sending three ghouls flying.

The devils were streaming into Tresingale like a river, with the larger debris of the wolf demons surging in the flood, and Remin and his men were the riverbank trying to contain them with shields and spears, channeling them into the killing ground of the archers.

Unfortunately, the stranglers were learning to go for the torches.

Tomorrow, they would have to find a way to brace them somehow, Remin thought, moving into position to guard the men working to get the torch tower up and lit again, defending that darkened patch of ground as the devils rushed toward them.

They did not fear the light, but they were strongest in the dark, and he went at once for a charging wolf devil, using his own shield as a break wall to smash it up and aside, heaving the beast into an open space in the nearest knot of men.

A dozen spears stabbed it at once.

“It’s lit, my lord!”

called a man behind him, and the line of shields moved at once back into position, bracing for the next wave of devils.

It was not a constant stream of the creatures; not yet.

They burst through gaps in the palisade or the wide open stretch in the middle of the east wall, a gap that was shrinking every day, but not quite fast enough.

The diggers were working frantically to advance the deep trench, which was nearly as good a barrier as the wall itself would be.

There were the torch towers, discouraging the devils from the hills and slopes.

There were shield walls on the ridgelines, shoving the devils onto lower ground, where they were slaughtered in their dozens.

Knowing the devils could not be kept out of Tresingale altogether, Remin had arranged the defenses to allow them strategic entry, and placed himself at this critical juncture, a place where the land sloped down between two hills, and the road rose toward the cluster of buildings around the cookhouse, including a certain small cottage.

The devils were not going to go that way.

“Ortaire, push the line forward! Move the wolf toward the archers!”

He boomed, half the command lost in the deafening howl of another approaching wolf demon.

It was accelerating toward them, shouldering ghouls aside as it charged the lines of armored men.

But for the heavy wolf demons, Remin had invented the restrati formation, named for the multilayered fishing nets that Capricians used on the Amati Sea.

Instead of blocking the wolf demon, the line of soldiers folded inward to isolate it, shields smashing into its sides to slow it down rather than facing the full force of its charge.

Behind them, the second rank of soldiers slowed it still further, enough that the third rank could slash out with their swords, leaving the crippled monster to limp into range of the archers.

Even as Remin watched, the rest of the remaining devils reached the open, well-lit killing ground behind him, and there was a whirring chorus of heavy beechwood arrows, slamming into the survivors.

The squires moved among them with their own swords, mopping up.

All the defenses of Tresingale operated on this principle.

Slowing the advance of the waves of devils, blunting their momentum, winnowing them down so none of them reached the soft vitals of the town: the masons in their cloth tents, the craftsmen and laborers sleeping in fragile wattle-and-daub cottages, or the princess that would be mother to House Andelin.

Remin could not see their house from where he stood, but he felt her presence as keenly as if she were sheltered directly behind his own shield.

“Good, good!”

Ortaire called from the line, the voice of a young man who was still not entirely confident in his own command.

But he was getting there.

“There’s a break in the devils ahead, my lord, should we thin them out?”

“Left rank, right rank, forward!”

Remin ordered at once, and the two shield walls moved inward, narrowing the gap until the remaining devils were scrambling over top of each other.

The spears plunged inward, and the devils died on a hundred points, churning the earth to mud with their blood.

And then, silence.

On the distant palisade, torches winked, signaling that all was clear.

Devils tended to come in mobs.

And though the night was quiet now, the howling tide of ghouls and wolf demons was only cover for the stranglers, who could eel through the thinnest slices of shadow, as evidenced by the constant threat to the torches.

It was hard to credit them with a plan; Remin had never heard any evidence of intelligence in the creatures, only malevolence, a hatred of lights and men and men’s things, a determination to kill.

They came in mobs because they were strongest in numbers, and even wolves had the cunning to hunt in packs.

“Get some weight on the bases of those torches,”

he ordered, taking advantage of the lull to shore up the defenses.

“Ortaire! Have your boys clear those carcasses out of the way.”

“Yes, my lord!”

They swapped ranks in the lull between the devils, letting the first rank rest and the second step forward to take the next wave.

The rear ranks were not idle.

There were archers that needed more arrows, fresh torches to be lit, and the rear ranks swept back through the shadows to make sure nothing was creeping in the dark.

They turned up a dozen stranglers that might have otherwise come on them unaware, and Remin almost stepped on one of the creatures himself, crouching in a clump of bushes.

His sword lashed out on pure instinct, severing that loathsome head from its neck.

“I’ll take it, my lord,”

said one of the soldiers behind him, dragging the corpse away to be counted with the rest of the devils.

Every night, they counted the dead.

The corpses would burn by daylight, all evidence of the creatures blazing away into ashes, and they must know if there were more of them, to better prepare for the following night.

Every morning, the last thing his soldiers did before they sought their beds was to quarter every inch of the village, combing the fields and forests to make sure they had accounted for every single devil.

It was grueling work, and all too soon, the torches waved in a different pattern from the palisade, signaling that another wave of devils was coming.

Hour after hour.

Night after night.

Remin stood watch at the east wall, on the palisade, on the hill by the north gate.

His men began to fall in twos and threes as the number of devils swelled, cutting away sections of the line and overwhelming them with sheer numbers.

Men in armor were hard to kill, but wolf demons could take off a whole limb at the joint, and cackling stranglers dragged the downed men out of the light, yanking at their gorgets with long, thin fingers until they found the bare throat underneath.

“Seven wounded, two seriously,”

said Jinmin when they convened at Remin’s command tent one morning in the gray light before dawn.

“Two dead.

Stranglers.”

“One dead on the east wall, two wounded,”

said Tounot, ducking under the front flap of the tent and pulling off his helmet.

His curly hair was matted to his head with sweat.

“And the masons were pitching a fit again as I went by.

Could be they’re hoping to renegotiate their contracts.”

“I don’t think that’s it this time,”

said Miche, sighing.

He was as bloody and sweaty as the rest of them, his long blond hair caught back in a messy ponytail.

“They’ve been grumbling amongst themselves for a few days, and it’s not just the masons.

They don’t think the camps to the east are getting as much protection as the ones to the west.

Maybe a few nights of personal attention from the Duke of Andelin would quiet things down.”

“That will cost them you and Tounot,”

Remin replied, his shoulders jerking with irritation.

His commanders were every bit as capable as himself, so this looked to him like an irrational indulgence, but Juste was continually reminding him that the craftsmen did not have three years of experience with devils.

“They ought to count themselves lucky,”

said Huber, who had been listening quietly.

The copper in his eyes flickered.

“I wonder how well the rest of the valley is sleeping at night.”

That was the real question, and it had been gnawing at all of them.

It was one thing if the devils were just appearing a little early; that was inconvenient, but easy enough to overcome.

But all those small villages had nothing like the defenses of Tresingale, and no trained, armored men to guard them in the night.

Huber had been all over the valley during the war, commanding the mounted scouts that had been Remin’s eyes and ears, one of the most effective warfighting tools in his arsenal.

Huber had stayed in those villages.

He knew better than anyone else what they were facing.

“It might just be us,”

said Tounot into the silence.

“I saw devils pass a small camp if there was a larger one nearby during the war, and more than once.

There are more people in Tresingale than in the rest of the valley combined.

I expect the devils can sniff us out all the way from the Berlawes.”

“Send word to the border forts and have them look in on Raida,”

said Remin, his black brows lowering in thought.

“It’s just as well we’re supplying them by sea.

Where’s the map of the Medlenne? We might get a fair distance by river.”

“Not for much longer,”

said Tounot reluctantly.

He oversaw most of the supply to the rest of the valley.

“The water level will be dropping by now, and there’s long, rocky stretches. Here,”

he said, tracing the section of river on the map as Miche spread it out on the table.

“You’d have to drag the boats out of the water off and on for about fifteen miles, and I wouldn’t swear that the bottom is deep enough to keep the devils off at night.”

“And this is solid marsh for four or five miles,”

said Huber, tapping another place further downriver.

“Fucking nightmare, that was.

We lost two wagons and almost lost a horse in that bog.

You might get a man or two to Isigne or Selgin, but then they’d be just as trapped as everyone else.”

It would be the same in all the other villages.

The old roads of the Andelin were overgrown, and most of the bridges had been destroyed in the many wars.

The remaining villages had survived because they were inaccessible.

“A small party to each village is better than nothing,”

said Miche.

“A small party to each village is a large party removed from Tresingale,”

noted Tounot.

All of them understood the problem.

Every morning, after he took the numbers of dead and wounded, Remin went out himself to examine the lines of defenses.

The blood on the ground, the toppled barriers, the trampled places in the grass where men had stood, fought, and fallen.

Every day he examined and improved his own defenses, searching for weaknesses, noting the places where men had died.

Those lines were being pushed back.

“We’ll start someplace closer,”

he said.

“Ferrede.

There’s no cover for the devils in the Iron Hills, and we need to know if Rollon made it.”

It was cowardly to wait for someone to volunteer.

Remin made the decision.

“Jinmin,”

he said, turning to the big man.

In his armor, Jinmin could withstand a horde of devils, as obdurate as oak.

“You will go.

Take three others with you.”

“Rather go alone, m’lord,”

said Jinmin, after only a moment’s pause.

“If there’s enough devils to kill me, there’s enough to kill anyone with me.”

And Jinmin would fight better if he wasn’t having to defend his companions.

Remin nodded.

He had made the offer only as a sop to his own conscience.

Men were not so different from devils.

Everyone liked to tell stories about Remin Grimjaw, about Lomonde, about the Charge of the Gresein, but there was no single act of heroism that won the war, and no single act of heroism was going to save his people.

Just as the devils threw themselves at the barricades of Tresingale, it was the nature of men to throw themselves at the world, each one spending their lives to move just a little further than the last.

Not every man died a hero.

Many men died to be planks in a bridge, or stones in a wall.

Only the stars could see where it would end.

The stars were fading in the sky when he finally went home, still arguing with himself.

He knew he was doing the right thing, the prudent thing, but he had visited all those villages, too.

He knew his people.

If they needed help, they needed it now.

Ducking through the low door of the cottage, he quietly shut it and went to wash away the blood.

It wasn’t his.

The devils’ blood got everywhere, even drying in stiff flakes in his hair, and it was hard to tell the princess not to be afraid when he came in the door crimson to his elbows.

Setting a kettle over the fire, he dragged his sweat-soaked shirt off and ducked his head into a bucket of cold water, scrubbing.

“…Grace?”

said a soft voice behind him, so quiet it was almost lost in the splashing of water.

Remin glanced back to find the princess was already awake, sitting up in bed with a pillow clutched in front of her like a shield.

“You can sleep a little longer,”

he said, resuming scrubbing.

It just figured that she would wake up early today.

“I was already awake,”

she said.

“Is…is everything all right? I heard…”

“Everything is fine.”

It came out sharper than he meant, and he huffed to himself.

This situation was in no way her fault.

“You are safe, Princess,”

he said, snapping a towel over his shoulder.

“If all the valley sank into the sea, every man here would be carrying you to a boat.”

* * *

Under the circumstances, it was incredible to think anyone would be trying to break into Tresingale.

The first survivor of the Brede crossing arrived in the beginning of June, and Ophele heard the commotion at the south wall as she was refilling Eugene’s water barrels.

Now that there were three wells dug in places that did not interfere with Master Ffloce’s plans for the artisan quarter, she made three long loops along the length of the wall over the course of the day, rather than multiple trips to and from the same well.

The people on the southern end of the wall were doing the finishing work of building tower houses and stairs, since twenty-foot ladders were not something anyone wanted to climb multiple times per day, and certainly not with packs of ghouls running around the base of the wall.

It was incredible to think someone had actually swum across the Brede for the privilege of hearing the devils personally.

“What happened? Is someone hurt?”

she asked anxiously as a couple men raced up the hill from the bridge construction site.

She was still forbidden to go near it herself, but Sir Miche had taken her to see the massive walls of the caissons stretching all the way to the bottom of a very deep river, so deep in places that men became ill if they ascended too quickly.

It was a monumental undertaking, more impressive than a dozen walls.

“No, lady, for a wonder,”

said one of the engineers.

“Lad just dragged himself up on the bank, he swam the width of the river.

He’s fine, but tired, as you might expect.

Says he’s come to be a page for the Knights of the Brede.”

“I can go get Sir Miche,”

she said, wide-eyed at the feat.

She couldn’t swim a stroke herself, and she had seen exactly how deep the river was.

“Would you? That’d be kind of you, lady.”

Sir Miche was just as happy to have an excuse to abandon his digging.

“I suppose our first successful swimmer deserves some notice,”

he said when Ophele hurried to the other end of the wall to tell him.

Normally pages were the business of squires, but the shortage of pages made any prospect worth considering.

“Of course, it’ll be up to Rem as to whether he gets rewarded or punished.”

“Why would he get punished?”

“Don’t want to encourage this kind of thing,”

Sir Miche said bluntly.

“He’s lucky he survived.

The river’s not just wide.

The current is fast and uncertain, you never know when it might yank you under.

We tried it ourselves, believe me, before Rem finally decided to charge the Gresein.”

Remin Grimjaw, hero of the Gresein Bridge, had become so separate in her mind from the duke her husband that it was always a shock when someone reminded her they were the same person.

“Because other people who try to cross might not be as lucky,” she said.

“We’ve already found some who tried,”

he said grimly.

“It might sound cold-hearted, but we’ve got our hands full right now.

We don’t have men to spare cleaning corpses off the riverbank.”

She shuddered.

“I want to see His Lordship,”

a high-pitched voice was saying stubbornly as they approached the river.

“I come all the way from Caillmar to be a knight, I ain’t leaving ’less Remin Grimjaw tells me no himself.”

The boy was bedraggled and dripping in a too-large jerkin, his skinny arms bare and his hair plastered around a rather pretty face.

It was a source of consternation to Ophele that a boy whose voice hadn’t even broken yet could be so much taller than herself.

“You’re leaving if I tell you no.”

Sir Miche had an uncanny knack for finding the perfect cue to enter a conversation.

“What’s your name, boy?”

The boy’s head tilted back, and his nostrils flared.

“Jacot,”

he said.

“Jacot of Caillmar, as I ain’t got no father’s name to bless me.

I know you, you’re Sir Miche of Harnost, the one what they call the maidenslayer.”

Sir Miche’s hard hand clipped him across the mouth.

“You’ll keep a civil tongue,”

he snapped.

And to his credit, the boy glanced at Ophele and blanched.

“Sorry, m’lady.”

He sounded like he meant it.

“Ain’t you the princess, eh? Or Her Grace now, sorry.

They’re still singing songs about you in Celderline, I thought they was all lies.”

Songs? About her?

“Pages do not address a noble lady until spoken to,”

Sir Miche said, as if anyone in the valley had once enforced aristocratic etiquette since Ophele had arrived.

But the boy nodded as if he were inscribing the words on his soul.

“I won’t forget.

Didn’t mean no offense.

But I still ain’t going back ’less His Grace tells me so himself.

You can chuck me on the other side of the river and I’ll just swim back again.”

“I appreciate your enthusiasm, but His Grace is only accepting guests by invitation.”

Sir Miche crossed his arms and glanced back at Ophele.

“This is likely to take a few minutes, if you’d like to get back to Eugene, my lady.

Let Guisse know I’ll be along, would you?”

Ophele nodded, sparing another curious glance for the boy before she climbed back to the top of the hill where Eugene was napping.

The little donkey was an efficient creature; he ate and napped at every possible opportunity.

It wasn’t often she saw someone younger than herself.

Most boys her age were squires and far too busy working toward their knighthood to spare her more than a bow.

The stable boys were a few years younger, usually around fourteen, and while rank was less strictly observed in the Andelin than anywhere else in the Empire, it would still be unthinkable for them to speak to the duke’s wife no matter how young she was.

This boy certainly knew how to say what was on his mind, though.

Ophele wished she could be so fearless.

Stopping Eugene by the next well, Ophele dropped the bucket and then cranked the windlass to draw it back up again, her slim body swaying with the effort.

It took a while to fill all three barrels; she saved herself some walking with the water wagon, but she still had to pull and pour all those buckets, fifteen per barrel.

Once they were full, she had to sit down and rest a bit.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you,”

she told Eugene gratefully, stroking the donkey’s nose as he lowered his head to investigate her.

“Maybe one day I can introduce you to my friend Anzel.

You could talk together about donkey things.

Like carrots.

And whose wagon is heavier.

You’d hate Rou’s wagon, I bet. He says he doesn’t mind the rattling, but I think he’s just gone deaf from hearing it for thirty years.”

Thirty years.

She would still be here in thirty years.

The duke had been explicit that even if the river rose up and swallowed every other person in the valley, she would survive, so she could bear his children.

On this side of the Brede, she was trapped as effectively as if she were in prison.

No one even needed to guard her.

There was the river on two sides, Valleth to the north, and the Berlawe Mountains to the east, filled with wolf demons and ghouls and stranglers. The question was, which death did she dislike least. And she was still not unhappy enough to die.

“I wish you could pull me in a wagon,”

she said, pushing herself back to her feet.

She kept a small store of carrot pieces in her pocket and fed Eugene one, stroking his ears as they walked together.

The route along the foot of the wall was a familiar one, and if she hadn’t been so tired and sore, she wouldn’t have minded this part of her life at all.

It was a good thing to bring water to thirsty men, and all of them were so nice to her.

They greeted her as they passed, offering gruff compliments, silly jokes, and terrible puns.

She was happy to fetch and carry when needed, or even—when Sir Miche wasn’t looking—return the odd dropped tool.

There were usually a few of those each day, and even as she watched, one of the scaffolders dropped his hammer and cursed.

Ophele had finally learned what word started with fu-.

“I’ll get it,”

she said, hurrying forward to retrieve it and scampering easily into the scaffolding.

There was an unspoken conspiracy between her and the workers; she pretended she had never climbed anything in her life, and the men thanked the kindly spirit that had come to dwell upon the scaffold and returned trowels, hammers, chisels, and similar small objects.

“Thank you, O Lady of the Wall,”

the man said loudly to the sky, and Ophele giggled as she slid easily back to the ground.

She didn’t see why she shouldn’t help, if she could, and climbing in the scaffolding reminded her of climbing the old and beautiful trees of Aldeburke.

“My lady,”

said a stern voice behind her, with an emphasis on lady.

She turned guiltily.

“Oh, Sir Miche,”

she said, too cheerfully.

“What happened with the boy?”

“I threw him back in the river.

You know if Rem ever catches you up there, there may be actual bodies dangling from the scaffolding at the end of the day.”

“I was just helping.”

“I know.”

Sir Miche fell into step with her as she led Eugene on to the next set of buckets, the small wagon creaking.

“Why doesn’t he want me to do anything?”

she asked plaintively.

It had been bothering her for weeks.

“In this particular case, he’s afraid you’ll get hurt.

And I agree with him.”

“He’s not afraid of anything,”

she said, looking at her feet.

No doubt he didn’t want his princess to get hurt; he wanted heirs from her.

But she objected to the word afraid.

That implied a level of emotional engagement that did not exist.

“You’d be surprised what scares him,”

Sir Miche said dryly.

“Here, let me do that.

I’ve never seen a spring so hot, no wonder every devil in the Berlawes has decided to come out early.”

“It’s almost summer,”

she pointed out, lifting the masses of hair off the back of her neck and fanning herself.

Dark clouds had been hovering all day, like a lid on the steaming stewpot of the valley.

“You don’t have to tell me,”

he agreed, winching up a full bucket with such ease that she sighed inside.

Thunder rumbled.

“Stars, it’s going to rain again,”

he said, frowning up at the sky.

“Best get under cover, my lady.

I’ll start getting the men off the wall.”

Sir Miche often said he was useless, as if he wanted to make it clear up front that no one should expect anything from him.

But it wasn’t true.

He had quietly taken over many of the practical complexities of the wall, and he had an eye for detail that spotted disasters before they could occur.

It was oddly…comforting to watch him.

Charming, handsome, with that long golden hair, he was like a knight from a storybook.

For all the men’s jokes about his reputation with women—Ophele could guess what maidenslayer meant—Ophele had never seen the least sign of it.

He had never been anything but kind and considerate of her.

“What did happen with the boy?”

she asked when he returned, handing her an oilskin to keep the rain off and stretching out beside her in his usual lazy sprawl of limbs.

She didn’t believe Sir Miche had really thrown him back in the river.

“Sent him up to Rem.

Not that I want to reward bad behavior,”

he drawled meaningfully, rolling his hazel eyes toward her, “but we do need pages, and squires.

Dozens of them.

But no nobleman is going to send his precious spawn to the Andelin right now, even if it is for the Knights of the Brede.”

That thought was sobering.

“Is it really so dangerous?”

“Not for you,”

he assured her.

“I’m not just saying it to make you feel better, my lady.

Your cottage is near the southernmost bend of the river, any Andelin devil that goes that far has gone through an awful lot of people to get there.

Not that you should take it lightly,”

he added.

“There’s more this year than we’ve ever seen before, and it’s a worry.”

“I just wish there was something I could do,”

she said, low.

“His Grace keeps saying it’s safe, but I hear them and I don’t know where they are and…”

Her throat closed and she cut off the rest of the sentence.

It felt like whining to complain about being afraid when she knew she was better protected than anyone else in the valley, and especially in front of Sir Miche.

He always listened with every sign of sympathy, but he was a knight and a hero and he must have seen so many terrible things, her fears could only seem trifling and cowardly.

That was what she told herself, when she was tired and so worn out from working that it seemed like she couldn’t walk another step.

The duke and his men had surely been more tired than this.

More frightened.

More lonely.

“Would you have rather stayed in Aldeburke?”

Sir Miche asked quietly, and her eyes flew open in surprise.

It was a dangerous question.

But the downpour was kindly and muffled their conversation.

“I’m not blind.

I know you’re unhappy here.”

“I was unhappy there.”

She wrapped her arms around her knees and propped her chin on them.

It didn’t matter what she wanted.

In her short life she had already learned that there was nothing to be gained from imagining things she couldn’t have.

So instead, she pondered his question as a hypothetical.

It was all very well, after she had been trapped into her marriage, to rationalize it as destiny and a chance to atone for the crimes of her parents.

Would she have preferred to stay in Aldeburke with the possibility of one day escaping, instead of marrying the duke, even if it meant that the crimes of her parents against him and his whole extinct House were never paid for?

It was impossible not to think of everything they had done when she could see the scars of it on his body.

Every day when he stood at the wash basin, she could see the evidence of his suffering: sharp, straight lines from stabbings, curving slices from glancing blows, divots from arrows, and multiple dark and ugly gouges where whole chunks of flesh had been torn away.

Even her fertile imagination couldn’t guess what might have made those.

But she had seen an assassin come through the window in the dark of night to try to kill him.

Her parents had done that to him.

Didn’t she owe him something for it? If she had had a choice, would she have voluntarily delivered herself into bondage, to make it right?

“There must be some parts of it you miss,”

Sir Miche said gently.

“The connection with your mother.

Do you remember her much?”

“A little bit,”

she said, grateful that he hadn’t pressed her.

Grateful that someone, anyone, cared about her even a little.

“I always think of her in the library, and in the woods.

We would go walking when it was nice out, and she showed me what things were safe to eat, and how to climb trees.”

“Unusual pastimes, for a noblewoman.”

“She said that that was what she used to do, back home,”

Ophele explained.

There was a flickering of a memory in the trees, the sensation of being lifted up onto a branch and cuddled in a green bower.

“At…Murewood? I think.

She said she ran wild there when she was a little girl, and her mother always had to come hunting for her for lessons.

But after…everything, the Emperor dissolved their House and took back their lands.”

“And so she taught you to run wild at Aldeburke.”

“I guess so.”

She smiled to herself.

She had mostly been hiding from the Hurrells, but it was nice to think that something of her mother lived on.

“I am sorry for that, though,”

she added.

“Making all of you look for me.

I didn’t know who you were, and last time…well, I was afraid…I wasn’t trying to embarrass His Grace,”

she finished lamely.

“I wanted to tell him that, before.

But I could never find the right time.”

“I knew that.

I found your fire,”

he replied, making her eyes widen.

“Did you? I thought I’d hidden it.”

“You might have, except that terrifying cook told me to look in the trees.

Aside from the pines, there wasn’t much to the Aldeburke trees at the time.”

“Azelma,”

she said fondly.

“I miss Azelma.

And her pastries.

And her cookies.

She cooked for my mother too, you know.

I wonder if Sir Edemir could spare some paper so I could write to her. I know it’s dear.”

“We’ll see about it tonight.”

He stood, offering her a hand up.

“Looks like it’s clearing.

We’d best get back to work.

Though I wouldn’t like to see another appearance from the Lady of the Wall today.”

“I can’t help it if the men ask for her help,”

Ophele said primly.

“The good spirits always show up when you call.”