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)