The girl was only fourteen. How could she be so calm?
Katerina’s hands would not stop shaking. Blood ran from the cut on her arm, dripping onto the earth. She took the stone, weighed it against the flimsy blade she still held. The enemy had come from a foreign land with a foreign weapon, and Folegandros, her island, had provided the only tool required to defeat him.
She heard the crunch of wheels. Phaedra was back, pushing a small cart.
“Take his feet,” Esther said. “If you drag him from his head, he will soil himself.”
“How do you know this?” Katerina asked as they moved into position. It was difficult for her to maneuver around her bump, but she managed to grab Lio’s boots.
“My father was an undertaker,” Esther explained. “I would help him sometimes with the bodies.”
“Is it best that we bury him?” Phaedra asked.
The girl shook her head.
“If there is no body, there is no crime,” she said firmly. “A buried body can be discovered. No, we must put him into the water. Let the sea take him.”
It took them some time to lift Lio into the cart and longer still to make the slow journey out to the highest cliff point. Esther ran ahead, checking for patrolling soldiers, but the island was theirs, clear but for the scraggly outline of trees, the humpbacked line of low walls.
Katerina threw the rock in first. She did not hear it land. It wasimpossible to hear anything but the roar of the water, the whistling of the wind, the irregular beat of her frightened heart.
“We tell nobody,” she said, turning first to Phaedra, then Esther. Each gave her a solemn nod.
“Not even our families.”
“What family?” Esther said. She kneeled beside the cart and began to unbutton the dead man’s coat.
“What are you doing?” Phaedra asked in alarm. “Leave him.”
Esther tugged hard at something, rocking back onto her heels.
“Take these,” she said to Katerina.
Dogs tags, a gold cross on a fine chain.
“Hide them, bury them, burn them—do whatever you must. They cannot remain on the body. If the tide brings him back to shore…”
“I understand.” Katerina slid both into the pocket of her skirt. She had planned to throw the saber off the cliff, though that seemed foolish now. It had been his, just as the other items had been his. She would keep it. Bury it in the garden of the house that the brothers had abandoned. Nobody would find it there.
“Should we say a prayer?” Phaedra murmured.
Katerina looked at Esther.
“No,” she said.
Another hour passed before Katerina made it home.
She had left the house as one woman and returned as another. Would her sister know? she wondered as she hung up her father’s coat. Would she take one look and see her for what she was now—a killer?
But Leni did not look.
She did not speak.
In the time Katerina had been gone, her sister had died.
Fifty-five
The mood on the hillside was one of giddy frivolity.
