“Over here!” The boy’s voice rises from the scrub and brambles where he has vanished.
I scan our surroundings for telltale marks of violence. A few broken branches are all I can see so far. We are not at the same site where Hugh’s body was found, the site where my father died and I was attacked.
Rylan follows my gestures with her gaze, but she moves no closer. “Anything?”
“Nothing yet. No corpse or monster tracks or scent or ...”
A rustle of branch and leaf has me holding a hand up to my sister. Some creatures wait in trees. I listen and watch for others in thearea—everythingis so much more vivid since Father died—but the moment passes. No birds scatter. No rodents scurry away.
Everything has already scattered,experience reminds me.
Whatever is awaiting us in the brush is such that the creatures of the forest have no interest in being here. The silence is only broken by the crackling of dry leaves under foot.
Then the boy’s head pops up again out of the thick underbrush of the forest. “This way.”
He leads us deeper into the maze of twisted trunks.
“Are you certain?” Rylan asks in a voice that shouldn’t be audible, but this, too, has changed.
“Found him!” the boy calls again.
The ground is trampled down in the center of the brush, as if wild boar had decided to frolic in ever-widening circles. The branches are cracked, and the undergrowth is flattened. The clearing looks almost idyllic at first glance, a picnic spot suitable for ladies, but a bitter scent wafts up from the ground: death and fear.
Human death.
Clatterbuck refuses to go any deeper into the shadows.
“Stand here,” I attempt to order my horse.
Clatterbuck snorts. The odds of the mare’s obedience are low. Honestly, I rather like the surly beast’s personality.Mostly.
Stepping in front of Rylan again, I lift the edge of my skirt and underskirt, trying to avoid collecting the leaves and thorns that are ubiquitous this deep in the Brimmond Wood. “Trousers,” I mutter again. “I shred more gowns in these brambles than any sensible person should.”
“Ladies Fleuriste! Here!” The boy waves at us. “He’s here.”
“Is this one like the others?”
“Eh. Probably?” The boy shrugs. “Poked him with a stick ...”
Rylan winces.
The boy gestures at the body as we close the final distance. “He seems like them other bodies your father was asking after a few weeks ago.”
Rylan twists her hands together, still not looking at the body only a few steps away. I realize that this might be her first fresh dead body, and again, I want to send her away. “You’re sure he is ...”
“Dead? Couldn’t be alive without his head, now, could he?” The boy grins at us.
“Stay far from here,” I order, passing a handful of coins to him. “Report to the manor and only do so in a group.”
Before I can say anything else, ask him to wait so we can escort him, he darts into the forest with a cry of, “Yes, Hunter!”
Rylan stares into the shadows, ostensibly watching him leave, but she’s covering her mouth and nose with a lavender-scented cloth.
“Gabri?” Rylan says my name softly. “What do you need?”
“Notes, sister. I need you to write things down aboutthisdead man that I might think on them later.” I found talking to the group at the Dancing Goose helpful last night. Solving puzzles is not simply about gathering evidence to study under my microscope or compare at the archive. The biggest tool I have is my mind, and talking helps me think about the evidence in new ways.
As I begin to catalog the injuries—lacerations and bruises mostly—Rylan’s quill scratches across the paper she brought for this reason. The man has minimal bruising, probably due to a lack of blood. However, his skin looks like torn chicken or fish. Jagged. Angry.
