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 followed the gray mark to the one shop that ground marigold into powder. The owner was already packing to flee. Cornered, he spilled it all: a rich man paid him to paint the dead so the bone-reader would call each murder plague. Veska took his written confession straight to the magistrate, and the arrests began that very night.