“I will not pretend it does not answer. It answers, and every man who has stood a watch over bad ground knows it answers, and that is precisely why the Church must go on saying what it says. A thing that works is not thereby lawful, and a people who have learnt that fire settles the question will stop asking any of the other questions.”
As it is told in the half-held country
A man was buried at Candlemas in ground that had been too hard to dig properly. In the thaw his widow saw him at the gate. He was not at the house door: he was at the gate he had leaned on every evening for thirty years. He said nothing and did nothing, and he was there again the next night and the night after. The dogs knew before she did.
The priest came and said the office again, and on the fourth night he was back. So the parish did what the priest would not put his name to, and by morning there was nothing at the gate and a black patch in the churchyard. Nobody wrote it down.
That is how the country tells it, and that is why a manor in the half-held country pays its dog handlers in the same line of the accounts for wolf season and revenant season.
What is known
Most troubled dead never walk. The unquiet grave makes up most reports, and a priest with a bell settles it for eleven shillings. The walking dead come a distant third, after the unnamed dead. What rises is slow and not clever, does not speak, and goes where it went in life. It rises after a bad thaw, on bad ground, at boundaries and in the belts at the edge of half-held country. In the settled shires a parish may go a lifetime without one.
Burning is the surest preventive, and the Church has written no service for it. Sarrum has burnt its dead within the day since 4590, and its dead do not walk. Elsewhere the remedy is a Black Lantern suppression, at two pounds four. A revenant written in a house book was required by the form, and may only be a tired man’s guess.