When Starling understood that he could not get to me, he set his sights on my husband. With paltry explanation, just before his forty-fourth day of birth, Avery was informed his services were no longer needed. He was asked to leave. They replaced him with a young armorer from the Perpatanian army. My husband came home that day nonplussed and depressed. He had only ever worked as a blacksmith. I exacerbated the problem by being irate instead of offering him succor.
I had always known I had married a bit of a drunk, and without his work to occupy him, Avery had nothing else to do. Nearly every night, for over a winter, he drank at The Pale Horse while I fretted. To some, it must have been no surprise that he drank himself to death. He stumbled to his end one night, tipped over into the Oberlong, his body kept from floating away by being caught in the waterwheel of my father’s mill.
Thane and Tessa collected him and brought him to me in one of Thane’s wagons. While I fell apart, clambering into the wagon next to him while Fox and Jade drew near and began to weep, my sister and daughter arrived on horseback. I was numb, withdrawn intomyself. Thane kept explaining that if I did not want him buried in the church’s graveyard, we had to act quickly. Tessa explained that Ecclestonians did not bury but burned their dead.
No one could get a reaction out of me.
“Let’s lay him to rest in Nyossa,” Jade said, reaching into the wagon to take my hand. “Thane is right, Robbie. We need to act now.”
I let them do it, let them clumsily put him over Zara’s back to take into the woods. I let them choose a fallen god tree, hollow and rotting. I let Tessa and Thane place him there, let my family cover him in flowers.
I only opened my mouth to speak his name, to kiss his chilled, blue lips one last time. I placed a single fiery lily on his chest, the same flower he had given me when he had first sought my forgiveness.
When we emerged from the tree line, Father Starling, Bertram Sheridan, and Ilsit’s husband, Gerard, were on the dust road outside my front gate, sitting atop their horses, watching our exit from the forest warily. Four guards were mounted behind them.
“They could not give you a full day,” Tessa snarled.
Rowena made to hush her, but Tessa went on, “I’ve had it with this bloody priest and his nonsense, sticking his fingers into everyone’s business. A widow has every right to her man’s body. It has nothing to do with a church unless he wanted burial at one.”
We gathered at the tree line, waiting between it and the fence on the garden’s side.
Thane walked around it to reach the men on the road and approached them, saying loudly, “Was the guard necessary, Bertram?”
“The man died, my lord,” Starling pronounced, and his calling Thane “my lord” had a distinct note of disrespect. “His body should be laid to rest in the graveyard along with any good churchgoer.”
Tessa gave an irate exhale and made to step away from us, to walk along the fence line to join Thane. She gave my twin an irked glare when she pulled on Tessa’s sleeve. “Let me go, Rowena,” she ordered.
Thane was closer to the men now, speaking in a lower register, and we could not make out the words.
“You cannot, Tessa,” Rowena was pleading. “You are clearly more than my lodger to anyone with eyes. Do not turn Starling’s gaze on us.”
“Let me go,” growled Tessa. There was a note of distaste in her command, as if her wife had offended her.
“It’s true,” said Jade. “We should stay back, not draw attention?—”
But Tessa, so much stronger than Rowena, had easily pulled away and was following Thane’s path along the fence. “We burn our dead in Eccleston,” she called out.
She was a sight to behold. Her tunic was stained with sweat and dirt. Her hat was askew, and her braid was half undone. Her loose trousers tucked into boots would have been the most presentable thing about her had she not been a woman.
She rounded the corner of the property to where Thane stood and crossed her arms, glaring up at Starling.
“We burn our dead in Eccleston,” Tessa repeated. “Avery was buried as he wished, by fire. His body burns even now in Nyossa,” she lied.
Starling looked so angry he could be ill, like bile rose in him, threatening to spill forth. “That is not the Rodwin way, madam chandler. You had no right?—”
“Roberta had every right,” she said to cut him off. “That was her man that died. Not anyone else’s.”
Gerard said, “It is a priest’s duty after a man’s death to see to his proper resting place. The church is who handles?—”
“Avery was no believer,” Tessa interrupted again.
Before Starling or the captain of the guard could respond, Bertram said, “The only reason we’re not reclaiming that body is because you’ve taken it into a heathen place. I’ll not risk our souls going into that foul goddess’s lair.”
“Foul,” Jade seethed. “A kindly old woman isfoul?”
The words “that body” resonated in my head, like the echo of a slap after it has been dealt and the pain has been felt, the memory of a sound that hurts as much as the blow.
That body.
