Elara walked.
The first section had been the doll, the lemons, the spices, the blood message. She had handled all of that. She had improved the handwriting on the blood message, which she was aware had broken something in the watching crowd's collective psychology, and she had stepped over it and continued.
What came next was different.
The path between the first section and the central tomb passed through the oldest part of the cemetery — the part where the trees were so large their canopies blocked even the thin moonlight entirely, where the roots had broken the ground into uneven terrain that required attention to navigate, where the tombs were older and the stone had weathered into shapes that the dark turned into suggestions of other things. This section of the path was perhaps two hundred meters long.
Someone had spent a great deal of time on those two hundred meters.
