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 set the silent rib down and reached for the next body in the yard instead. Work was work, and the dead kept coming. But when her thumb touched the new femur, it too stayed quiet. Same faint gray line. Her stomach turned cold. This was not one strange death. Someone was hiding many.

Veska followed the bodies backward. All eleven silent dead had passed through one place before reaching her: the town's free soup kitchen, run by a gentle old healer everyone trusted. She did not want to believe it. But the bones did not lie, and they all pointed to the same kind face.