The fisherman's name was Declan, and he owed Brigid two debts. One for the tonic that saved his daughter's lungs. One for the charm that brought his wife back from the edge of childbed fever.

  Aoife found him mending nets on the dock, his hands rough and salt-cracked, his face older than she remembered. A year older. Everyone here was a year older.

  "I need passage to the western isle," she said.

  He looked up and squinted. Something flickered in his expression. Recognition, then confusion.

  "Ya're dead," he said.

  "I'm not."

  “Sure ya’re. What’s yar name, Tifa? Aine?”

  “Aoife.”

  “Eva?”

  “Ee-fe.”

  "Aoifa! That’s it.”

  “Why would I be dead?”

  “Brigid’s girl, aren’t ya? We saw the fire from here. Looters claim they found bodies up there, but left them be. Been about two days now."

  Aoife’s stomach dropped at the news, but she was also confused. The timing didn’t make sense. The fire should have been a year ago. She had hoped something had changed, but it seems that the only change was when the fire happened.

  "I need passage."

  She held out the silver coin Brigid had stitched into her trousers. More than the trip was worth. Declan looked at it like it might bite him. He took it without meeting her eyes.

  The crossing took most of the day. Declan didn't speak, and Aoife didn't make him. She sat at the bow and watched the grey water pass beneath her, the salt wind pulling at her hair. She thought about the last time she'd made this crossing. Years ago. With Brigid, going to market. She'd been twelve, maybe thirteen. Brigid had bought her a ribbon for her hair and told her she was growing up too fast.

  That felt like someone else's life now.

  The western isle rose out of the mist in the late afternoon. Declan dropped her at the old dock.

  "Yar silver is good for a round trip, but I can't dawdle. I can give ya two hours, then I head back to Ballinacor."

  She nodded. That was fair terms, and she never expected him to come with her. The isle felt like death. She didn't blame him for staying with the boat.

  The path to the orphanage was overgrown. Weeds had pushed through the stones, and the hedgerows had gone wild. No one had walked this way in months.

  She smelled it before she saw it. Char and ash and something underneath. Something worse.

  The orphanage was a skeleton.

  The walls still stood in places, blackened stone holding up nothing. The roof was gone. The windows were empty eyes. A threadbare bed sheet still fluttered in the wind. She could see through the building to the grey sky beyond.

  A child's shoe lay in the doorway. Small, and the leather had curled from the heat. She stepped over it and forced herself to feel nothing.

  The tragedy that occurred in this house was temporary. She told herself that. She would fix it this time. Brigid had to have some other way.

  She climbed through the wreckage. Careful steps over fallen beams and shattered glass. The dormitory was gone. The kitchen was gone. Brigid's room was a cave of black timber and collapsed stone.

  The study was still partially standing.

  One wall had held. The desk was ash, but the floor beneath it remained. Aoife knelt and brushed away debris until she found the opening in the floor.

  Empty.

  The Hound had taken everything. The locket was gone along with whatever else Brigid had kept hidden. All of it gone.

  Aoife had hoped the Knot had returned here after it had dissolved in her fingers, but no. If it still existed, it wasn't here either.

  She had used the Knot to escape, had been dragged forward through time against her will, and for what? To come back and find the same ash. The same ruin, and the same result.

  She stood and turned. She found a half burned pouch containing Brigid’s lifetime savings and tucked that away. That was when she saw the body.

  It lay in the corner of the study, half-buried under fallen timber. The fire had done its work. The flesh was blackened, the features gone, but the hair remained in patches. It was blonde and long.

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  It was hers.

  Aoife walked toward it without meaning to. Her legs carried her. Her mind was somewhere else, somewhere far away, watching this happen to someone who wasn't her.

  She knelt beside the body. Looked at the shape of the skull. The length of the bones. The scraps of cloth that still clung to the torso.

  The corpse's left ear had four piercings. Aoife's hand went to her own ear and checked. One, two, three, and four. Brigid had given her the first, but Aoife kept adding. She had planned to have seven in the left by the time she moved out. The melted studs in the corpse were the same that hung on Aoife now.

  Aoife's vision blurred. The ground tilted. She put her hand out to steady herself and touched the corpse's shoulder and jerked back like she'd been burned.

  No. No, no, no.

  She scrambled backward, her breath coming fast and shallow. Her back hit the wall. She couldn't look away from the body. From the blonde hair. From the ear.

  That was her. That was her body. That was her lying dead on the floor of the study where she had stood yesterday, holding the Knot and thinking of Brigid.

  She was here. She was alive. She was breathing and her heart was pounding and she could feel the stone wall against her spine.

  How could she be dead if she was alive?

  How could she be here if she was there?

  She pressed her hands against her face. Her fingers were shaking. Her whole body was shaking. She couldn't make it stop.

  He killed me, she thought. The Hound killed me.

  But she wasn't dead. She was here. She had escaped through the Knot, and she was here, and she was alive, and that body wasn't her. No, it couldn't be her, except it had her piercings and her hair and her bones, and it was lying in the place where Brigid always made her study.

  She didn't know how long she sat there. The light changed. The shadows lengthened. Eventually, the shaking stopped. Not because she felt better. Because her body ran out of fuel for panic.

  That's when she saw the charred knife on the ground. Her knife, the one she had left in the hollow nook behind her bed, but now it was here in the study.

  She stood on legs that didn't feel like hers and walked to the knife. She picked it up and felt its weight. Familiar, if scarred. The wooden handle was black, but besides that, it had survived. She placed it into her boot.

  She walked to the body and made herself look at it again.

  Me, she thought. That's the real me…

  The thought didn't make sense. It sat in her mind like a stone in water, heavy and wrong.

  She couldn't think about it anymore. If she kept thinking about it, she would break apart and never come back together.

  The Hound had done this. The Hound had answers. The Hound knew something she didn't.

  She would make him talk.

  She turned away from the body. Her body. She walked out of the study and through the ruins and didn't look back.

  The light was fading. Declan's two hours were almost gone. She could collapse here, in the ash of her old life, or she could move.

  She moved.

  The path back to the dock was longer in the dark. The mist was rolling in, and the western isle had nothing left for her. When she reached the water, Declan was already untying the boat. He didn't ask what she'd found. He didn't look at her face.

  She climbed in and sat at the bow and watched the ruins disappear into the grey.

  The crossing was quiet. Declan worked the sails and kept his eyes on the water. Aoife sat with her knees pulled to her chest and tried not to think. The effort lasted maybe half a mile.

  The corpse was waiting for her behind her eyes. She tried to animate it in her mind, but it just lay there. Lifeless. With patches of her hair and piercings in her ears.

  That was me.

  The thought came without permission, and once it arrived, it wouldn't leave. She turned it over the way she might turn a stone in her hand, looking for the angle that made sense.

  That was me. That was the real Aoife. The one who grew up here, who learned Brigid's recipes, who slept in her bed and studied in that room and never got out. The Knot was a dream. I never used it.

  The boat rocked beneath her. The sail snapped in the wind. Declan muttered something about the current, but his voice came from very far away.

  I'm just a copy. The thing the Knot spat out onto a beach...isn’t me.

  She pressed her palms against her eyes until colors bloomed in the darkness. Her chest felt empty, carved out. As if something essential had been scooped away and she was only now noticing its absence.

  Brigid. She was like a mother to me, and now that person is dead, along with the orphanage and the real Aoife. I'm just the echo. The ghost wearing her face.

  The word sat with her. Ghost. It pulled her down as only despair can. For a while, she looked at the black water around her. The lantern at the bow rocked along with the waves. She felt like its light, being swallowed up by the dark waters below. Her eyes stayed on its sway for a long while. The boat kept moving, and the water kept passing. Aoife sat in the bow and let the grief wash through her, grey and cold and endless as the sea.

  Then they hit a wave just right, and the spray hit her. She flinched and felt something in her lurch. The thought began to turn.

  I'm the ghost.

  Not a victim. Not a copy. A ghost.

  Brigid had told her many ghost stories growing up. In them, they never stopped. They never worried about what came next. They had one purpose, one direction, and one unfinished thing that kept them anchored to the world.

  The real Aoife couldn't finish this. She died on the floor of Brigid's study with a knife at her feet and a fire that raged around her.

  Aoife uncurled her fingers from her knees. Her hands were steady.

  I'm still here. I'm the part of her that got out. The part that slipped through the gap.

  Brigid's voice came back to her, distant and warm.

  She'd found the gap and come out the other side changed.

  Now she was what she had always been good at finding. A girl who existed in the space between worlds, between the person she'd been and one who died.

  The grief didn't disappear. It settled into her bones like ballast, heavy and permanent, something she would carry from now on. She looked back at the waves and how some of the light from the lantern bounced off them instead of sinking to the depths. She had a choice: be swallowed by the despair, or use it for what came next.

  She was going to find the Hound. She was going to make him answer for Brigid, for the children, and for the girl on the study floor who should have had a life.

  If she died doing it, well, she was already a ghost. Can ghosts die? None of Brigid’s stories had even mentioned it. Maybe she would be the first.

  The western isle had vanished into the mist behind her. Ahead, the lights of Ballinacor flickered through the grey.

  "Any chance anyone saw a boat leave the isle after the fire started?"

  Declan eyed her. She could see he was thinking of how to respond. "Aye, Fiachra is said to have seen something."

  "Lord Tighearnán's man?"

  "The same."

  She knew Fiachra, and she would see what he knew.

  “Can you take me to Corrán?”

  “Nay, not for one silver.”

  Aoife reached for the charred purse she pocketed.

  “I have more.”

  Declan eyed her.

  “I’m tired, lass, but I know another. He’ll ferry you.” The fisherman smiled. “I’ll accept a small finder's fee, however.”

  She smiled. It was a small price to pay to hunt the Hound.