Break the Bells

In 1348, a widow who scrapes a living illuminating prayer books is ordered to join a mountain abbey after half the brothers die in a single week and the abbot goes blind. The dead are being buried with little clay bells tied to their wrists, because twice now the graveyard has coughed one back up at dawn, nails black with wet soil and teeth packed with wool from the burial shroud. While snow seals the pass and the ink in her horn freezes solid, she finds the bells were cast from silver shaved off the abbey’s altar, and the blind abbot is sending novices into the crypt each night with a hammer and a