The plague killed faster than Veska Tallow could bury anyone. The marigold beds outside her workshop were full, so the new dead waited in the yard. By candlelight she pressed her thumb to a femur and the bone told her its truth, the way bones always did: fever first, then drowning in your own lungs. She had read ten thousand deaths this way. But the rib in her other hand stayed silent. No fever. No drowning. Nothing at all.

Veska held the silent rib to the candle and looked closer. A thin gray line was painted along the bone, almost too faint to see. She had never seen such a mark. Someone had touched this rib before it was buried and hidden how this person really died. She decided to find out who the body had belonged to.

Veska checked her burial ledger by name and date. The silent rib belonged to a young baker named Toll Hessen, buried six days ago. The ledger said he died of plague. But the bone said he had not. She pulled on her coat and walked through the dark to the Hessen house to ask his family the truth.

Toll's mother answered the door with red eyes. When Veska said the bone showed no plague, the woman broke down. "He was poisoned," she whispered. "By the man who buys our grain. Toll saw him watering down the flour with chalk. Three days later my boy was dead." She grabbed Veska's sleeve. "Please. No one believes me."

Veska did not wait for the law. She went to the merchant's warehouse and found him dumping white powder into open flour sacks. "Chalk," she said from the door. He spun with a knife already out. She threw a sack into his face and screamed for the watch. Two guards came running, and he slipped on the flour and went down hard.