“No, Skirra,” I whisper, but I may as well tell the breeze to stop blowing.
I’m at his side within seconds, retrieving my fallen knife along the way.
As we draw nearer to the curve, I struggle to make sense of what I’m seeing on the ground.
Strips of white material. Odd protrusions rising up through the surface of the snow.
We turn the corner and my lips draw back.
Pure horror freezes me to the spot.
Ahead of me, the ravine is deeper and its sides are more sharply inclined.
Human bodies lie beneath a thin layer of ice, each one wrapped in white cloth that doesn’t appear to have kept their arms or legs tight enough to their sides. Hands, knees, even heads protrude up through the powdery snow.
It’s a dumping ground.
A fucking pit into which bodies have been thrown.
My stomach is empty of food and thank the gods for that.
“Fuck,” I whisper, trying to process the cruelty I’m seeing.
The bodies look thin. Many have scars. They appear to be all ages, from children to the elderly.
This can only be the work of Blacksmiths.Fucking Blacksmiths.
From what we know of them, they keep humans as servants and frequently work them to death.
A deep rage sparks within me, a blind heat that threatens to darken the light in my heart, but I clamp down on it.
I need to get the fuck out of here.
This pit is far enough from the city that the snow falls here, freezing the bodies and alleviating the stench of decay. But it’s close enough that it must be only half a day’s travel by wagon.
Far too close to their city.
It’s also a place that the Blacksmiths must frequent and that makes the risk of discovery even more dangerously high.
I’m backing away when Skirra suddenly falls silent, his soft snarls coming to an abrupt halt.
His ears prick up and he edges closer to the bodies.
“What is it, Skirra?” I whisper, wishing I had his sense of smell and hearing.
With a soft yip, he prowls ahead, skirting around the parts of the bodies that protrude upward and navigating toward a lone tree that grows out of the right-hand side of the ravine.
The tree’s trunk is situated at the point where the slope meets the ground, the wood thickly curved at the bottom as if it began by growing outward before it turned upward toward the sun.
I trust Skirra’s instincts, so I follow him, although I can’t deny that my own instincts are telling me to leave as quickly as possible.
Keeping my eyes on our surroundings and staying alert for the sounds of anyone approaching, I pull my fur sleeve over my mouth and step carefully around the bodies. The snow seems to be smothering some of the odor, but not all of it.
Closer to the tree, I make out what looks like silver threads caught in the bark partway up its trunk.
My forehead creases.What are they?
Up ahead, Skirra takes the final distance to the tree at a run and starts digging at the frozen earth beside it.
