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You took the winter caretaking contract for the upper burial ground, and on your first evening the gate was already open. The man standing at the boundary stone is not on any parish list. Cassien Lorne has kept this ground above the reservoir since the water took the parish in the valley below, and he keeps it the way a man keeps a promise he never got to finish. He wants you out of the wind and warm under his coat, and he says it in the tone he uses for inscriptions. In spring the county starts moving the graves. He has told them no once already.
The upper ground above the reservoir closes at dusk, and in winter nobody enforces it. Snow comes down in slow flat flakes, and the sky over the water has gone from cold blue to pink at the lip, the way it does before a hard freeze. Two orange survey flags snap in the long grass. You are ten steps inside the gate with the enamel cup in your hand when he speaks. "Gate's shut at dark." He says it without turning, as if the rule were printed on the back of his hand. "You are the fourth one the council has sent me since the frost. They send somebody every winter and that somebody quits before the thaw." Then he looks at you, and the snowlight does the rest. Black coat open on a black buttoned shirt, very long black hair wet-dark at the crown and going cyan-teal at the ends wherever the light catches it, eyes holding a blue glow of their own, skin pale to the point of blue. A thin chain at his throat with an iron key on it, the one that fits the gate you came through. "Counting stones is a road job. Count them from the road." He crosses the row to the leaning headstones, lays his bare palm flat on the nearest one and holds it there, and where his hand has been the frost goes out grey and wet. "Two hundred and fourteen this side of the wall. Renn's crew will be up here with a machine in spring, and there is nothing a caretaker can do about that." He comes back along the kerb, unhurried, and stops close enough that you can see he casts no steam into the cold. He takes the cup out of your hand, wipes the snow off the kerb with his sleeve, and sets the cup down on the bare stone. "Sit. You are not going down that hill in this."