By the time I deliver the plate, I’m recovered enough to trade the breakfast I’ve pulled together for the baby she birthed.
“Good morning then, little one…” I stroke the soft cheek and turn a finger over the downy sprinkling of dark hair.
Abruptly, I frown as it dawns on me Lena isn’t eating. “Have I burned the eggs?”
The new mother doesn’t appear to hear me. She’s staring at her baby, her brows down, her mouth in a tense line.
“Are you not feeling well?” I prompt as I go on high alert.
“There was a slaughter last night.” Her voice is soft, the words murmured absently, as if she’s speaking to herself. “In the sheepling pasture.”
“Ah… yes, I heard that there was a badness with some animals—”
“It was more than that. There was a death, of a man.”
Putting the bairn up on my shoulder, I try to keep my expression neutral. “Who was it?”
“The cook.” Lena shakes her head. “From the pub.”
When she goes no further, I prompt, “What happened?”
She looks away from her daughter when she answers. “The men who went down to look at the body said… it was a demon.”
SixtyGoodbyes.
“‘Field-dressed’ is the term, I believe.” Lena rubs her eyes, and drops her hands into her lap. “One of the herders found him and the sheeplings in the morning when he went to let his animals out to pasture. The cook’s stomach… had been cut open—torn. Desecrated. In life, that man had a horrible reputation, but nobody should die like that.”
I picture Merc as he came into our room last night. No blood on him. No bruising. He wasn’t breathing hard. Whatever “work” he performed to prevent things from being traced back to him certainly did not include staging a messy body to look as though it had been savaged by evil.
Assuming Merc caught the cook somewhere outside after I saw the man leave… a demon must have come along afterward.
Fear tightens the back of my neck as I imagine Merc out there, in the darkness… with one of those things.
“There have been attacks in other territories,” Lena says. “We’ve had travelers in the last weeks come here with such reports. And a settlement was burned up north, we heard.”
“Yes,” I whisper. “We saw it on the way here.”
I don’t want to go into the symbols and what really happened.
“What world have I brought her into.”
Lena’s eyes seek my own, but I dodge them and stay focused on the plate I prepared for her. I can’t bear to know what awaits her, not just because I don’t want the bairn I hold to be left an orphan as I was. The truth is, I was hoping what I saw of the horse’s future was evidence that everything in Anathos would be okay. I thought the chestnut gelding had years until its peaceful end and that meant we were all going to survive somehow; the farrier and that maid might have only had days, but our steed… he promised me a horizon.
Or so I thought.
“That’s why all the wives came.” Lena shakes herself and brings the plate onto her lap. “They’re looking forastrato ward off evil.”
“What is that?”
“Just folklore. There is naught real to it, but if the lie calms them in the near term, let them buy what I have of the weed.”
“I believe you’ve sold out of it.”
“Ronl should just give them something else. They won’t know any different.” Lena sighs. “Sometimes, the only way we can help people is by reassuring their minds, even if it changes not a thing. As healers, we must do what we can.”
“Yes.”
We are silent as she starts to eat, and then she pauses between bites. “You have come to say goodbye. I can tell by the way you look at her.” She reaches out and clasps my hand. “You mustn’t go. Even if the flooding lets you pass in a couple of days, even with your husband, it’s not safe.”
