1: Rabbit and Goat

I’m standing on my porch, smoking, when the rider appears on the hilltop.

I hear the drumming of the hoofbeats first, competing with steady patter of the autumn rain, but by the time I raise my eyes from my garden, the horseman’s backlit up on the ridge. An ugly and irregular shape suspended against the gray sky. He’s there for an instant then plunges over the rise, coming on with the kind of speed that breaks necks and cripples spines.

From personal experience, no one with good news moves that quickly. And there’s really no hope that he’s on his way to anywhere else either. My small cabin is the only building around for miles. I lean up against the porch’s battered railing and burn through the rest of my twitch in one hard, pleasureless drag, because call me prophetic, but this doesn’t look good.   

The rider’s much closer before I realize my mistake. Without distance to confuse things I see that what I’d originally taken to be man and horse, is in fact boy and pony. They shrink in size and stature with each stride, dwindling as they come, and by the time the kid has reined up hard in the road outside my cabin, a part of me is all in favor for heading back inside, locking my door, and not wasting my time. I’m not quite sure why I stay on the porch but I do, flicking the tiny burning nub of twitch out into the rain, and cracking my neck loudly to the right. Waiting.

The pony’s barely stopped moving before the rider swings himself out of the worn saddle and squelches down into the muck of the road. He lands in a deep puddle, splattering both himself and the pony’s shaggy legs with mud, but he lurches into my garden without faltering. “Arbiter!” he calls, and now he’s got his right fist clenched and raised over his head, like he’s saluting or waving, fingers curled around something small and hidden in his palm.

He’s young. Barely fifteen if I have to guess, and wrapped in stinking gray wool that’s soaked and running with homespun dye. The only thing on him that’s got to be waterproof are probably his boots, but he’s tried to keep the worse of the rain from his face by winding a scarf around his nose and mouth. It isn’t helping.

“Arbiter!” he cries again, waving that upraised arm around idiotically as if I need help seeing him. His clueless flailings are upsetting the plants in my garden, mainly the sacral in their double rows between house and track. It’s probably because I haven’t fed them in a while but also because, as the boy approaches, he’s splashing mud onto their splayed white leaves. I see a tremor go through the plants in response, a whisper as they react, a soft murmur, rising to join the noise of the rain.

Settle, I tell them gently. They don’t, and as I watch, the boy stumbles and almost loses his footing on suddenly uneven garden ground, As he catches himself, looking wildly over his shoulder for what’s tripped him I repeat myself again- Settle- this time with more teeth in my tone.

I’ve raised the sacral up from seeds. Coaxed them out of the vertebrae of their deceased host, fed them through the winters, kept them safe when they were still small. That means sometimes they listen to me and, for whatever reason, they listen to me now, this second time that I tell them to stop. The plants quiet. The garden soil, which has started to stir between them, subsides and stills. And by the time the kid’s edged onto the first of the steps everything has indeed settled.    

“Arbiter?” he says again, for the third time, but now it’s a question rather than my title. He tugs the soaked scarf down from around his head, revealing a face pockmarked by the deep scars of an old harvest fever. “There’s been a murder in Barrows,” he blurts after I say nothing and do nothing but continue to eye him. The more I look at him, the more he reminds me of a rabbit. A pinch-faced, half-drowned rabbit.

“Captain Fel’s asking for you to come sort things out in the village,” the words gout from him like arterial blood, unstoppable once started. “Says to give you this so you know he’s not asking idly. So you know it’s one of Pandion’s asking and so you know it’s about the Peace.”

He holds his right hand out to me and uncurls his fingers from over his palm. I catch a flash of silver in the rain. Not a coin, but a pin. A brooch. Wide-winged, spread-clawed. Recently polished to shining by some sad, sentimental, little fuck.

The silver joins the ice in my head and this was obviously a shitty roll of twitch because the burn is slow creeping and fails to thaw either from my thoughts. I shake my head a little, as if I have water in my ears that I can just tip out at the right angle, but of course it doesn’t work that way. I blink. Shift my crossed wrists on the railing and look again at the boy, really look. Dig my gaze into the old fever scars that pit his mouth and chin as if I can rip the information from him by working him open along the seams.

“He sends you here citing the Peace,” I hear myself say, “But you cry murder like this is Carnassial and some whore’s been found in the gutter.”

The kid frowns in confusion. It starts and spreads across his wet forehead, creasing his features and pulling his brows down.. He opens his mouth and says something, but the lines in his skin remind me of the cracks I made in the ice, fracturing, propagating, and for a long moment that’s all I can hear- the harsh, violent crack of ice, breaking beneath my fingers.

I come back to the last half of his sentence.

“-pra’s been killed!” he’s half-yelling.

“What?” I ask, more out of reflex than a genuine desire to know, and regret it immediately when it sets him off again.

“It’s a Capra that’s been murdered, sir. Cut up all over, throat slit, head all but hacked off. Someone in the village took a knife to her last night and left her in the fields!”

He stares at me, panting and upset, eyes still wide in his wet face like my lack of reaction is just as distressing as the news he’s brought.

“Mm,” I say.

And we look at each for a long moment. He stands there, getting wetter and wetter and more and more desperate in the rain. I can see the exact moment he starts to doubt himself-is this the right house, the right place, did I go the right way, is this even the right person?- but the less I have to hear him wail away, the happier I am so I speak before he works himself up for some clarification.

“Fel’s sure he wants me to come?”

The kid’s ensuing relief is almost palpable. “Don’t know what he wants, sir, beyond your opinion. He told me to fetch you so you can have a look at the…” ‘Body’s’ obviously too human a word for him to feel comfortable using to describe the dead Capra and I watch as he casts around for another. “Corpse,” he finishes to my raised eyebrow. “Maybe figure out who killed her and why. That falls under the Peace, doesn’t it?”

“Mmm,” I say again.

It’s been half a year since someone’s last solicited my help under the Peace and even then, it hadn’t been like this, not wrapped around the idea of justice for the dead. It’s not like I need any more proof that Fel’s a nostalgic old bastard after the pin, but I get it anyway and it’s almost funny. Was pretty sure people like Fel didn’t exist anymore.

My eyes have wandered past the uneasy messenger and on to the treetops behind him. I re-focus.. “Barrows.”

“Yes sir, Barrows. Northwest on the Chain for about seven miles, left at the old signpost and another mile down the track.” He curls his fingers back around Fel’s glittering brooch and fumbles around in his coat, wrapping the metal in a bit of wet cloth and then pocketing it close to his chest. He raises his head back my way, once it’s safely stowed. “Should I tell Fel you’re coming?”

I don’t answer immediately. I’m distracted by something at the edge of my vision, by a ripple, a flick-flash of black, here one moment then gone the next, so fast I have to check that I did actually see it, that it’s not up there in my head with the ice and the cracks. But no, it’s not.

Interesting.

I don’t even realize I’ve spoken aloud until the kid asks carefully, “What’s interesting?”

I uncross my wrists. Straighten up on the porch. And the Barrows boy moves backwards a few steps, like he needs to create distance between us even though the distance hasn’t changed. For a split second, something very un-rabbit like goes racing across his rabbit-like face, a heartbeat of calculation, like he’s measuring space, like he’s assessing how quickly we both can move. And that’s interesting too. Rabbit’s don’t assess. They just run.

I could say nothing. I don’t have to go. I don’t know this Fel, don’t give a single solitary fuck about Pandion’s sigil in silver, don’t really give a fuck about the murdered Capra either, if I’m being honest. Don’t like how this kid’s looking at me, at the way that flash of shadow caught my eye just now. This morning feels weighted somehow- heavy, like the clouds overhead- but maybe that’s just the shit roll of twitch talking because the burn was awful but the residual ash seems thick and it lingers behind my eyes.

And this rabbit’s still waiting for an answer, still there, wet and shivering in my garden blinking at me with big prey eyes. This boy’s gone ahead and broached the Peace with me, on behalf of another sure, but still the word fell from his hesitant lips and he’s hanging around waiting to see if he’s done it right, if the word is the goad that gets me moving, like that’s all it will take and look, how easy.  Look. How simple.

I inhale, nice and deep and the sacral plants whisper my own word back to me. Settle. Settlesettlesettle .

Crack my neck once to the left.

“Sure,” I tell him, casually. “Sure. If that’s what he wants, run along and tell him I’m on my way.”

Both because I want to give the kid a head start, and because he’s riled up the plants, I decide to feed my garden before I leave. Earlier this morning, I shot a twelve-striped weasel, and I retrieve the corpse from where it’s hanging against the back of the cabin. I’ve just hauled its weight off my shoulders, when Nerith appears in the rows of sacral. As always, the not-wolf doesn’t arrive so much as wanders in, bit by insubstantial bit, until he’s gathered in one place, ready to be noticed. My vision re-adjusts and I nod a greeting to the hulking shadow that manages to fit, impossibly, between the plants.

“Long time no see.”

Nerith flickers. His ears lengthen, his body wavers into and out of solidity. Only his grinning, skull of a face remains intact. Hunting, he breathes. His voice reminds me of the sound of a child scribbling furiously with a charcoal stick.

“ Just decided to stop in and say hello, today of all days?”

Nerith looks at me for several extended seconds, his empty eye sockets fixed on my face. I stare back but it’s the same as all the times before - his vision extends past me into someplace I can’t follow. It becomes too disquieting to hold his gaze for long, and I kick the weasel deeper into the plants and turn back to the cabin. Behind me the sacral whisper as their roots tear the corpse to shreds.

It’s dark inside but I find everything I need in short order. I really just came for her guns and I sit on my cot and reload them both. As I’m working, I see that Nerith has wandered inside and is watching me chamber the bullets. He never really looks distinct, not even outdoors, but he looks even less solid here in the gloom. He considers me as I finish with Nail and then fades away without comment as I stand up and sling the long rifle over my back. I holster Tooth at my side, collect the pile of tack on the crude table in a corner, and let myself back out into the rain.

As I walk around to the stable on the far side of the cabin, I realize that I’d been right. That last roll of twitch was absolute shit. I’m already coming down and it’s a messy crash. By the time I’ve started saddling my horse, I’m sweating beneath my clothes and I have to pause and exhale hard before I can finish cinching up the girth. My trembling fingers make it hard work. The gray shies as I start to bridle him and I have to stop and lean up against the wall of the stall, waiting for the worst of the shaking to pass.

Burnt, Nerith says. I raise my eyes to see the not-wolf regarding me from outside the stall. I didn’t even hear him arrive.

“One way of putting it,” I tell him. It’s actually pretty apt but I’m not going to let him know.

I take a deep breath and wipe my watering eyes with the back of a hand. My gray sidles up and noses me, whuffing against my shoulder, and I pat his muzzle as I ride the last of the tremors down.

The cracks are still there, Nerith observes. Still there and still deep.

I bridle the gray and work through the buckles. When I turn from my horse, I find the not-wolf sitting across from me, inside the stall now. He’s almost one with the shadows except for the white of his skull. That skull grins at me.

Almost a year without a visit from him and then he does this shit? “Really, you fuck?”

Nerith shifts so that he gives the impression of rising. A warning.

“Oh, is that what this is meant to be?”

Uneven ground beneath you. His skull face remains unchanged but, somehow, it looks less like it’s smiling than it just did. Uneven, listing ground. Fractured. Step too hard and you’ll go through, yes?

I’m silent for a long time.

Slippery footing, tenuous hold, he presses and I don’t know if he means my current situation or my mental state but either way it’s accurate to reply, “Been that way for a while, Nerith.”

Go with caution, yes? Go with care?

He looks at me and this time I meet and hold his gaze. “And if I don’t want to?” I finally ask him.

Nerith’s body-zig zags into and out of existence. Then it breaks. It all breaks.

“Let it. It’s only a matter of time. Might as well see how the Peace holds up these days.”

And then I have to pause to breathe through another round of tremors. When I raise my head again I see that Nerith has disappeared. I’m alone in the small stable except for my patient horse and the weight of Pandion’s guns pulling at back and hip. I take a moment to recover but the not-wolf doesn’t reappear and I know better than to wait for him.

I tug the oilskin hood over my head and lead the gray out into the rain.    

The horse isn’t overjoyed to be outside in the rain. He fidgets as I swing myself up into the saddle, snorting and flicking his tail, until I gather the reins and urge him forward. Late morning and it’s dark enough to draw a few nocturnal beetles out of their nests in the old pines. They buzz past me, whirring ponderously through the downpour.

I let the gray stretch his legs up and down the first incline. At the bottom of the hill I put my heels into his flanks and we open into a canter for the first mile. By the second, the gray wants his head so I give it to him and by the fourth we’re soaked and mud-splattered.

The road dips and weaves and the horse is finally blowing as we top one final rise. Before us, our goat path veers and joins the Chain, and we follow it, surging onto the largest road in the North. The monstrous straightaway links every Pale mining post together, and even though Pandion had kept it serviceable, it’s Divinters who devotes the labor to its maintenance and security. Even from here I can see the dim glow of a new guard outpost about a mile south. Behind it, somewhere in that direction, is Carnassial, an unapologetic heap of stone and timber, sitting at one end of the Chain like the world’s heaviest anchor. But Barrows is in the opposite direction, north by northwest, so that’s the way we go.

For several miles the road is dark and empty. I walk the gray for a bit but the horse is in good shape and I’m able to run him again before too long. Eventually the smell of some unseen bog rises through the drizzle and the trees start receding, the forest flinching back as if in pain, until I ride past a scraggly half-wood that disintegrates into marshland. The stench of the swamp reminds me of the carcass of a pig I’d once discovered as a boy exploring Carnassial’s alleys. And I know that if I look with the intent of seeing them, I’ll find tall shapes far out in the marsh, deeper than any human would go, moving heron-like through the mist and the mud. But I don’t look. I keep my gaze fixed between the gray’s ears and I ease Tooth a little in its holster.

Another mile later, and a dark shape appears on the side of the road in front of me. I have the flintlock half-drawn and am pulling my horse in before I realize that the misshapen form is actually two separate figures - a badly limping pony and a boy leading her along by the reins. The gray’s already slowed so I stop next to them. By the way she’s walking, the pony’s lame and the kid is just as soaked and wretched looking as he was earlier. Maybe even more so

I take my hand from Tooth. “How much farther is it?” I ask him.

“Barrows? Another mile on the Chain, maybe,” the boy replies. “Clear the swamp and then the road splits. Left at the fork and you’ll know you’re going the right way because the path gets real bad.”

I nod. Flick my eyes out over the bog to either side of us. “Unwise to go slowly down this stretch of the Chain.”

“I can’t leave Snow,” the kid protests. “She’s not even mine. I borrowed her from Settsi’s brother when Captain Fel asked for a rider.”  

Something doesn’t sit right with me. I look at him, down there in the mud of the road and wonder what’s rubbing me wrong about this scene. But before I can figure it out, somewhere out in the marsh something inhuman screams.  

The horses hear it; their heads go up and the gray sidesteps uneasily. The kid’s refusing to let go of the pony’s bridle even as it balks and tries to wrench itself away from him, eyes rolling and ringed with white. And if he won’t leave the crippled beast after what we just heard then I won’t waste my breath trying to convince him. The gray responds immediately when I release the tension in the reins and it doesn’t take much more than that to coax a gallop out of him.

This isn’t a part of the Chain where we can linger.

Even my horse is smart enough to know that.

(7/20/16)

Barrows, as I suspected, is a chicken-scratch town, the smallest of small nicks on the surface of the North. Like others of its kind, it’s a backwater village made up of the stubborn, the shit-poor, and the soon-to-be dead, all daring their luck outside Carnassial. Here one day and gone the next, are towns like Barrows. No one will be found and no one will be missed.

The road has faded to a thin rut in the earth by the time the first buildings loom up out of the mist. Hearthsmoke rises from the crude houses and, even though I’ve put some distance between me and the swamp, Barrows still smells like marshland. There’s something peaty in the air, mingling with the scent of burning wood and wet animal. A clump of three muddy sheep watches me pass and before I’ve made it into the village proper, the town dogs start barking. Nothing new there - dogs are uneasy around me after one of Nerith’s rare visits. I swear they can smell the not-wolf.

I count as I walk the gray down the track. Barrows is twelve shrunken buildings in total, eleven houses huddling close to each other as if for warmth, and one modest barn in the center which looks to be in the best condition of all of them. I head for it, ignoring the villagers appearing in ones and twos at their doors, gaunt souls with sunken eyes and calloused hands. They watch me with faces about as animated as the sheep’s, but what they lack in liveliness the dogs make up for. They’re everywhere between the buildings, a ragged pack with torn ears and scarred bodies, baying and flashing their teeth at me from a safe distance.

A man’s waiting outside the barn. He’s standing alone, but there’s something formal in his posture and his straight back that looks completely out of place here, in this village surrounded by mud and sheep shit. I rein in next to him and he greets me with a fist-to-heart salute that’s so archaic it’s tragic. He’s as plain as they come, a solid chunk of a man with an utterly forgettable face, graying hair, and a body that’s going to seed. In fact, if not for his stiff back and the air of old discipline that clings to him like a second skin, he would have blended in with the rest of the villagers.

“Welcome Arbiter,” he says after enough time’s passed that it’s clear I have no intention of returning his salute. “I’m Captain Fel.” An unnecessary introduction because who else would he be? but there’s a story in here somewhere, about how one of Pandion’s old officers wound up in a place like Barrows. Before I can reply however, Fel looks past me at the empty space behind the gray. “Where’s Crespen?” he asks. “He didn’t return with you?”

I shrug. “He’s on his way back. You cost Settsi’s brother a pony, telling the kid to run it that hard.”

“I told him to pace himself,” Fel counters. “To go slow and be safe.”

“Well it seems like the message got a little lost in translation,” I say mildly.

Fel looks at me and I look right back. The old officer’s worried and this kind of concern is personal. I wonder what the boy is to him. “Is he close?” Fel wants to know.

“Close enough.”

Fel shakes his head in resignation and straightens his back. I can almost hear him, telling himself the kid will be fine. He’ll make it. “He told you why I asked for your help, Arbiter?” He asks, steering the conversation back to business with a visible effort.

“You have a murderer in one of these houses.” I glance at the cluster of huts, letting my eyes flick over the gathered villagers, some of which have come outside and are now listening in their yards. I don’t make any effort to soften my voice and my words carry. There are a lot of dark expressions, a lot of sullen stares directed our way. An old man sees me looking and he turns his head to spit something black into the mud at his feet.

Fel flinches and manages to look both furious and guilty all at once, but before he can say anything, the spitter hawks loudly and mutters, “You don’t call a man a murderer for taking an axe to goat.”

Murmured assent from the rest of the villagers and I twist around in the saddle to watch as the Barrows men and women nod and clap in agreement. “You don’t judge a butcher,” someone else calls out. “You don’t take the goat’s side!” another someone adds.

Fel has paled when I turn back to him, an eyebrow raised in silent inquiry. The old Captain lifts his hands in the face of the growing roar, and steps out from behind my horse to confront the villagers. “Now listen to me!” he snaps. “The Capra wasn’t a goat. She was a thinking, feeling being who lived in harmony with us.” The angry mutters intensify but Fel cuts them off with his own baritone shout. “Yes! She was! She spoke to us, traded with us, dare I say it - even helped us when she was able to. She was a sentient soul, not some dumb animal raised for slaughter! And the sick fuck who killed her violated the Peace, when he hacked her into bits outside of her own home!”

“Fuck the Peace,” one old woman snarls.

“Look at what good the Peace did for Pandion!” another adds.

And I sit there, on the gray, as Fel defends the Peace on my behalf and on his, words like ‘forgiveness’ and ‘mercy’ and ‘cooperation’ drifting past me like dead leaves. “Now,” Fel says after he’s shouted at them for a bit. “Some of you might be content, living in the same village with a murderer like that. Some of you might be fine raising your family up around the same demented soul who sliced our neighbor into ribbons. But I’m not and I won’t ever be, and mark my words, you’ll all think me later for stopping this before it escalates.”

Silence meets the Captain’s words but it isn’t a good quiet. Or a nice one. I consider the crowd and see the anger still there on their faces, the muted rage that simmers just below the surface. Fel’s got to know that things are a stone’s throw away from going to shit. My eyes play over the tools in the villager’s hands: a pitchfork here, a broad flat-headed shovel there, one rusty rifle about Nail’s length in the crow fingers of the older woman in the back. Ugly through and through.

But before the tension can gestate into something worse, Fel shakes his head and turns away, like he’s dismissed the scene entirely. “Follow me Arbiter,” he says. “The body’s where we found it. I made sure it hasn’t been moved.”

And without another glance at the villagers, the older man squares his broad shoulders and strides through them, walking back up the road. I turn the gray around and hold the gaze of the woman with the long gun for a moment, giving her the chance to be civil with her violence and shoot me in the face instead of the back, but she looks away and that seems to be that. Dogs and villagers alike part around my horse and I follow Fel through Barrows.

This time, the sheep don’t even glance at us as we go by, heads down and bodies pressed together. A fog’s starting to come up off the forest now and it rises around us as Fel turns and starts walking across the pitted fields towards the woods. I would’ve bet on the Captain being the talkative type but he’s all locked up after his speech in front of the barn. I can see the tension in his shoulders, the way the weight of the Peace rides on his back and drags him down.

Fel leads me all the way across Barrows’ withered fields, half-tilled and scarred by failed plantings. He takes me to the very edge of the forest where the pines rise from the dark earth like a silent host and now I can see that there’s a hut there, almost lost at the feet of the watching trees. The Barrows’ houses had been hovels and this dwelling isn’t much better, but it is Capra, which means it’s completely circular: a ball nest like a mouse would use, only blown up large enough for a human. It’s made of long planks of wood that have been warped into interlocking arcs, as spherical as the woven baskets traders sell in Carnassial’s markets. I’ve seen these structures before, but always in clusters and groups - little blisters stacked on top of each other deep in the forest. Capra are so communal it’s difficult to find a clan as small as three and almost unheard of for a single individual to persist alone.

“Was it always just this one?” I ask as Fel cuts through the last field.

“Just one what?” the Captain’s distracted answer drifts back over his shoulder and  he’s probably thinking about the kid, still out there somewhere on the Chain.

“Capra.”

“Oh. Yes. She was here when we started building, if you can believe that. We didn’t even find her until Barrows was almost done, but she said she watched the houses go up.”

“She speak to you often?”

Fel snorts. “Hardly. Made sense even less frequently but that isn’t surprising. Still, she could be damn useful once in a blood moon. Couple of winters ago a nasty case of blacklung came through here, dropped the beasts in the wood, but she did something to save what few sheep we had. Didn’t lose one.”

The Captain stops a few feet away from the hut and turns back to me as I rein in the gray. He looks older now, as if the short trip through Barrows has aged him irreversibly and stands there, hunched and miserable in the rain. Waiting.

There’s a dark shape in an even darker puddle in the grass.  I swing myself off my horse and land in the mud and fog. The smell of the storm and the earth and the wet gray rises around me as I walk the last few paces to the body and crouch down next to it.

Hacked her into pieces, Fel had said to the villagers, but I think that he might’ve been downplaying it a bit. The Capra’s been mauled. Riddled with so many holes it’s almost impossible to tell which ones killed her and which ones were inflicted post mortem. Laska might be able to figure it out, but it all just looks like one giant mess to me - a snarl of blood and bone and savaged skin. There hadn’t been much to her to begin with either. She’s the smallest Capra I’ve ever seen, probably less than four feet tall, her body so gnarled by age that she wouldn’t have been able to stand straight. I run my eyes down her corpse, from the tips of her cloven hooves, up the length of her mangled, furred body, to her head where it hangs from her neck by the grace of a single flap of skin. Like all Capra, her face is an ugly composite of human and goat, but the look of terror frozen in her horizontal pupils is all too recognizable.

The wound in her neck is the worst of all of them. Not just because it’s almost decapitated her, but because the edges are ragged and uneven where the other lacerations are much cleaner Whatever weapon had killed her, had quite the point on it, but much duller edges. When her murderer went to hack off her head, they’d had to resort to sawing through the larynx and spine.

I consider the wound for a moment longer, then rise with a hiss of oilskin. Fel’s looking at me, waiting for our gazes to meet, and when I glance his way, he shrugs and nods at the carnage at our feet. “Some people can’t get past the skin,” he mutters. “You know how it goes. Us against them. Out here, towns like Barrows, Pandion’s Peace never really meant much even while she was alive and now…” He shrugs. “I try. I do. I told them today that the Peace still holds, still means something, that we need to abide by it. And you coming here’s proof enough of that because you of all people would have reason to turn your back on it after...well, after what happened. But here you are. And for a Capra of all things…”

The old Captain trails off. And that’s smart of him because I’m not discussing this with him. Not here. Not now. Not ever.

He’s contracted me to find a killer, so let’s hunt the bastard.  

“Are any of your sheep milk-bearing?” I ask him and the question’s so unexpected it freezes Fel in place.

It takes a moment before his mind catches up. “Wha-no. No, they aren’t.”

“You keep goats? Pigs? Cattle?”

The ex-soldier shakes his head at each inquiry. It feels like he’s still scrambling to catch up and it’s probably not helping, me staring at him like I am.    

“Chickens?”

“A few, in the big barn.”

“Egg-laying?”

“Yeah.”

“Collect as many eggs as you can find, and bring them back here with other things that were made or laid or built in Barrows,” I tell him. “Little things - household items or tools that the villagers crafted. Well-used and well-loved objects like knives, toys, wood carvings, blankets from your sheeps’ wool if you can find some.”

Fel stares at me but I’ve already turned back to the body and settled down on my heels next to it again. I draw the hunting knife from my belt and turn the Capra’s head with the blade, one way then the other. Her long ears flop with the motions of her head. The clotted gore in her neck shines in the rain almost as if the deep cut is fresh and weeping.

“These things will help you how?” Fel asks.

I pause in sliding my knife under the Capra’s chin and Fel holds up his hands in a no-offense-meant kind of gesture that I can just catch over my shoulder. “I’ll tell you when you’ve got them,” I say. The Captain hesitates behind me, waiting as if there’s something he wants to say but can’t quite force out, before he drops his arms, turns on his heel, and sets off across the wet fields without another word.

I start cutting.

(7/27/16)  

When the Capra’s been properly beheaded and behooved, and all her parts are stacked in a neat pile in front of her house, my oilskin sleeves are red halfway to the elbow and I’m craving a smoke like nothing else. The old Captain isn’t in view yet so I take a seat on the ‘doorstep’ of the ball hut and go fishing in my pockets for the inch of twitch I know I have on me somewhere. I find it in my breast pocket with three damp matches, and coax a flame into life now that I’m sheltered from the rain.

The smoke fills my lungs, poison and welcome. I burn my fingers on the tiny plug of twitch but I pull from it anyway and the smell of it drowns out the reek of Capra which wafts from the building at my back. It has less luck dispelling the scent of her guts in a ruptured, leaky mess a few feet away but that’s fine. You can’t have everything.

I sit and smoke and watch my horse trying to graze in the untilled field. I’m tired and I don’t want to be here. I chose to come - and I have to remember that - because this is what I do. And I don’t trust Eathen Divinters to do it for me.

I burn through the twitch and haul myself to my feet. I can’t seem to sit still and I find myself wishing for a shovel so I can dig the old goat a grave. Not for her sake, but for mine. I want something to do with my hands. I think about checking Pandion’s guns but it seems unsatisfying, so I pace back and forth back and forth in front of the dead Capra instead. I don’t know how long it takes to fetch the few things I asked for, but the answer is obviously ‘much fucking longer than I would’ve guessed,’ and I’m just starting to wonder if Fel hasn’t been turned on by his own village, when the bulky shape of the old officer appears descending the slope of the field. As he nears, picking his way over the uneven ground, I can see that his arms are full.

My horse lifts his head at Fel’s approach and we watch as the Captain lumbers up to me. I reach out to take some of the detritus he’s gathered from Barrows, but he lurches to a stop and his eyes go past me to the quartered Capra. He freezes like a spooked deer. “You took her apart?” he asks, half-incredulous, half-disgusted.

“This is going to work better if everything is in a neat pile,” I say. I take some of the things out of his unresisting arms as he stares. A wool blanket that stinks now that it’s wet. A small wood axe, long past its prime, the blade almost completely blunted. A child’s top carved out of a dark piece of pine. I shift them to my left hand and hold out my right. “Eggs?”

Fel looks at me. Then he opens his hand and offers up two tiny brown eggs on his palm. I take them and head back to the body. Kneeling down, I place the items around the corpse, the blanket folded up on the forest-side, the axe to the east, top to the south, hemming in the gristly stack with the Barrows objects. As I stand up, eggs still in my hand, I glance over at Fel whose edged forward a little, curiosity winning out over everything else. “If you stay, you don’t speak. And you don’t interfere.”

“With what?”

I think about leaving him in the dark but I get the impression that if I don’t let him in on this part he’s going to botch it and this isn’t something I want to do twice. So I tell him about the Nisse that’s trying to coagulate around his left shoulder and he mimics the kid’s rabbit stare and shies away from the spot like he can actually feel what he can’t see. And now he’s eying me like they all do eventually, like he hasn’t eyed me up until this very point, not even when he saw how I arranged the Capra’s remains.

I wonder what he expected with all his talk of skin and Pandion’s Peace. Whatever it was, it wasn’t this, I conclude as I break the eggs in my fist and let the yolks run through my fingers. They splatter on the upturned face of the Capra. They splash into her eyes and her mouth and then we wait.

They’re a lot more common than you would think, the Nisse, and they’re drawn to us like vultures are to carrion. It’s part of what they are, I think. I would call it ‘instinctual’ but I don’t know if spirits have instincts like things of blood and flesh, so I settle for saying it’s in their nature. Not like that makes a whole fucking lot of sense either, but I work with it.

Fel can’t see the Nisse when it manifests and comes up burbling silent question marks at me, and he can’t feel it either, even though he’s technically standing in it. It passes through him and drifts towards me and towards the small pile that’s baited it to this one bloody little patch of ground. As it nears, it slips into my head, filling the space between my eyes with voiceless inquiries that are as cold and wet as the falling rain.

I ask it to stop.

It doesn’t.

Fel starts and mouths, “Me?”

I ignore him.

The Nisse is drawn over to the small cairn I’ve made and it stops at the edge of the gory, yolky mess. It waits, flickering and bobbing in place like it’s caught underwater and in the currents.  I take a moment to study it.

Fuck knows why, but Nisse gravitate towards little towns and villages like Barrows. Where there’s a tiny human settlement up here, there’s usually a Nisse that’s wandered in to share it. They don’t like Carnassial, as far as I can tell, and I’ve never seen one at any of the Pale mines, but a half-dead, half-rotten, miserable collection of shacks like this one might have several. Don’t know why and I’ve never asked. They just seem to like us.

At their worst they’re harmless. At their best they might be bothered to push some good luck a villager’s way - small things like stopping that bucket of milk from tipping over or burrowing a stone just before a horse’s hoof comes down on it. Most people never even know they’re there and I’ve never had much to do with them myself. They normally don’t say or do much.

But, and this is something I’m going to test right now, I’ve long suspected that Nisse notice death. I’ve seen several gathered around freshly turned graves before, whispering and humming to each other. And, a couple of times, riding through shit holes like Barrows, I’ve also seen them congregated around one house out of the many as if pulled there by something. The last time I saw them gathered around a home like that, I stopped to ask who lived there. “Asher,” one of the farmers had grudgingly told me. “But not for much longer. The veinrot’s got him.”

And the Nisse were there to keep vigil.

Death fascinates them. It reels them in, draws them out. They react to it, and the glum curiosity of this one is making my nose bleed with just how much pressure it’s putting on the inside of my skull. I snort out a spray of red droplets and try to wedge a bit of myself between its ceaseless confusion.

“Listen,” I try to tell it, but the spirit ignores me. I can feel it slithering around like a grave worm in the back of my sinuses, or at least its cold, unhappy thoughts, as it tries to make the connection I wanted it to make. Things from the town. A body. Its peoples’ things, carefully made. An unmoving corpse of one who lived here. Toys and axes and eggs. Blood. And screams.

And pain.

A red-hot knife of it through my head. I see crimson then white for a moment and when I come back to myself, I’m on my knees in the dirt and my ears are bleeding now too. Fel’s stepped forward cautiously, like he wants to help but doesn’t know how, but I shake my head at him and clamber back to my feet.

The Nisse hasn’t moved but when it flickers now, its wispy form is shot through with bright flashes of red that pulse like a panicked heart.

“So you did see what happened,” I say. I can’t even tell if it’s heard me but I press the point. “One of yours did this. One of yours is a murderer.”

The Nisse wavers. It doesn’t have eyes, this ragged shadow thing, but I can still see it, staring down at the Capra’s head all the same. I worried that it wouldn’t appear for a dead non-human but, as I’d hoped, its villagers’ things stacked so close to the Capra’s brutalized corpse have baited it here.

“One of yours did this to another of yours,” I say. I can feel the warm seep of blood dripping from my ears down my neck. The Nisse trembles at the edges and pushes back at me, its wordless thoughts pressuring hard into mine. Fuck. I should’ve stayed on my knees because I don’t think I want to be standing for what’s coming next.

“One of yours lied.” I back up onto the Capra’s doorstep and sit shakily once again in the entrance to her hut. “They aren’t what they seem.”

A scream. The bright, thick spray of arterial blood hot in the rain and these aren’t my memories but they flash into my head anyway, bright like incendiaries. Like gunfire.

“And one of yours will do this again to someone else,” I force out through the disorientation, teeth clenched and head pounding as the Nisse leans its desperate consciousness into mine.

A heavy knife. White knuckles curled around the crude hilt, a two-handed grip- inexpert and furious and terrified.

“And you will lose another if - “

Something breaks.

I’m pretty sure it’s something of mine.

Fuck.

I’ve heard the noise but I don’t even get to open my door to see what it is because it opens before I get there and he’s standing frozen in the entrance. We’re both standing frozen for a second. Trapped in the moment, like he’s just as surprised as I am that he’s there.

But then I see what’s in his hand and I see the look that comes rushing in to fill the space behind his empty eyes and as I turn to run, he starts forward. I scream. There’s nowhere to go. If I had been Clan, there would have been other huts stacked and connected to mine like tiny rooms, and I could have fled into them. But I haven’t been Clan for many lifetimes and there is just me and I am trapped and he is between me and the door.

I know he is fast. I have seen him before, running errands for his people, working the bellows, shoeing the pony. I know he is quick. We have never met but I know he is strong and young and angry. Always angry and sullen, even though the old one, the tired fighter, seems to provide for him. This I’ve seen. This I know. But I do not know why he is here now, in my home, with a killing knife.

And there is nowhere to go.

I know a few of their words. Friend. Please.

I say, “Friend. Please. Please. Friend.” And no. “No. No. No. Please, no.” But I might have been talking to the thoughtless dark. He is just as merciless. And I am old and crumbling and I cannot move quickly but I try. I try to escape but he lunges at me - a wild grab  that catches an ear and half my face and his fingers tighten and I can’t see and he’s moving, dragging me with him outside.

I scrabble for purchase, still screaming past his fingers. My hooves slip and I go for his wrist with my own fingers but they are gnarled things that can barely lift the walking staff La’Teyn, Clan Mother, gave me all those many winters ago.

I can’t stop him and now we are outside. Flare of light from my home behind me, swinging and blurring as he throws me away, tossing me down hard onto the cleared ground. I slam into the stones and the mud. Mother, I do not want to die! I’m crying as I try to kick myself back to my feet. The rain is cool but my tears are warm down face.

La’Teyn, Mother, please - I beg but I cannot stand. My old spine i screaming at me so I start crawling instead, my pale fingers digging into the dark earth in front of me like twisted worms. I raise my head to the sky. Oh Mother, please!

His footsteps behind me and the stink of him, thick in my flared nostrils.

A twitch of rage-fear. The real me fights to stand. Get up, I tell myself. Unease. This wouldn’t happen to me. But I’m not me. I’m her. And she dies.

She dies after the ninth stab. The fourth gets us between a rib and would’ve been fatal on its own but the boy keeps going at it from where he straddles our back. His weight crushes us down into the black mud and he’s holding the hunting knife in two hands, raising it high above his head before thrusting it down over and over again.

We feel it plunge into us. We feel it hit like a spike into our body. Damage. Pain. Over and over again. The dull thud of metal into flesh, into our flesh, and the wet whisper as he pulls the blade out. Over and over again. The panic never fades. Screams that start raw, spike and bloody our throat then die, drowned out by a surge of blood into our mouth.

We go with the screams. We crest from visceral agony, spilling over into a place where everything is white and bright and devastatingly hot, where it hurts to even have your eyes open and what happened to the rain? We think, burning up in there, until the white swells, combusts, explodes and rolls us over like a wave that tumbles us end over end. And when it recedes in fading agony and dying light, there’s just the dark of the wet evening, the soft patter of the rain, and one last quiet breath.

And we are gone.

But I can still see his face.

I’m half in my saddle when I feel Fel grab me by the arm. It’s unwelcome contact at the best of times - right now it feels like being attacked and I fall back from the nervous gray, stumbling but reaching for the pistol at my belt. I have no memory of standing up and making for my horse and no memory of Fel moving to intercept me but here we are and that’s how I find us when I come back to myself.

Fel looks like he’s been trying to reach me for some time. His face is pale and unnerved and he’s staring at me with this desperate kind of intensity, the Nisse still wavering unseen behind him. His eyes drop down to Tooth at my side and even though I stop going for the flintlock, he stays on edge. And it’s something in my face, I know, something in my eyes that the old Captain doesn’t like.

“What happen-” he starts to ask but there’s a rush of dark red across my vision and he’s momentarily gone, replaced by another image of the Capra’s ancient fingers (mine? No they’re not mine but it’s still hard to tell) clawing feverishly into the wet earth as she tries to escape. There’s another violent phantom lance of pain and my breath clots in my lungs even though I know it’s not real, and it’s not mine.

This again.

The Ri’s agony had felt very similar, six years ago when I killed those soldiers at the Crossroads. It sat in my head close to the same way.

And a part of me says, Walk, Lain, walk away from this, but I can’t walk, I can only drag my battered body across the ground because the fucker’s thrown me hard enough that several of my ribs have cracked. Like ice. And I can hear his footsteps behind me once again. Quick. Purposeful. And I’d know his face anywhere.

Old harvest fever scars. Pinched features. And rabbit-eyes that are still rabbit-eyes even when they’re wide with murder and blood.

I’m in the saddle before Fel can grab me again. I kick the gray harder than I’ve ever kicked him before and he spooks and takes off in an explosion of mud, pounding over the uneven field as I spur him into a gallop. Fel shouts in alarm behind us but I don’t slow and we don’t pause at Barrows. There’s no point. I know he isn’t here. He wouldn’t have come home.

Another residual pain-memory nails me square between the shoulder blades as I race the gray back past the huddle of sheep. My head feels both too light and too heavy and I bare my teeth against the Nisse’s lingering recollections of Capra agony. Fuck, but this hurts. My body knows I haven’t been stabbed but my mind isn’t so sure, and I wipe blood from my nose and do my best to convince myself I’m not dying.

It’s a lot harder than it sounds.

Thoughts come painful and fast, flickering like tongues of lightning through my skull. And then there are blackout moments too, when I lose track of myself for several long heartbeats. I come out of one of these just in time to catch myself as I start to slide out of the saddle, hauling myself straight and blinking away a dark haze, putrid crimson at the corners of my eyes. My horse has found his way back onto the Chain and he’s slowed, maybe sensing my near fall, maybe because he’s tiring and won’t run without reason. I regather my slack reins and drag my left shoulder across my face.

I feel like shit. I know if I unclench my fingers from my reins they’ll be shaking. Who the fuck would’ve thought Nisse could do the same emphatic bullshit that Ri can? But it worked. I have my killer and - the blade slips between my vertebrae, sinking into my twisted spine - and I come back clinging once again to the gray’s neck.

I snort out more blood and realize I’m smiling as I pull myself upright. That little fuck. That butcher, that liar, that cold-blooded little bastard who looked me in the eye as he passed on Fel’s message. “There’s been a murder in Barrows.” Big false fearful rabbit-eyes and that pathetic dripping wool scarf that he’d gone home and gotten after he’d cut us up like a flank of sheep, no, not us - I shake my head but the afterimages refuse to fade and I know it’s going to stay us for a while - after he sliced us up so he could stay warm when he volunteered to ride out and give us the news later. Covering his tracks. Playing the helpful innocent.

That. Little. Fuck.

And I realize I’m still smiling because I rode to Barrows this morning with every intention of fulfilling the Peace down to the last letter. With making a point of it because Divinters wouldn’t. And, as things turned out, I really couldn’t have asked for a better person to make a point of than this fucking kid.

I urge the gray back into motion again. He seems eager to run and that would be fine by me except falling from the saddle at a gallop if I black out sounds shitty. But, in all honesty, what do I stand to lose? When the answer comes, I snug the oilskin collar closed around my throat and give the gray his head.

(8/4/2016)

(Click "Older Posts" for the end of Ch. 1)