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Show me one person who wasthathonorable.

We reached the border of the birch graveyard, just beyond the citadel walls. Because the upper classes buried their families in there, townsfolk and villagers were prohibited from entering, although no gate blocked the trees. People simply respected this private, sacred ground.

I decided to stash the wagon nearby. The highborn wouldn’t venture to this place so late, and I didn’t have to worry about anybody else.

The mule’s rusty bray alerted me to a horse grazing in the pasture. I felt myself frown. What the hell?

It was a stunner of an animal, with a glossy coat, intuitive eyes, and a brown-braided mane and tail. Not that I considered myself an expert, but that gorgeous piece of horseflesh couldn’t be a Royal’s ride. Not without the additional presence of an entourage or escorts or bodyguards.

Maybe it belonged to a noble? But why would someone come here past dusk?

Shit. I might have company.

I yanked on the mule’s reigns. Turning toward the woodpecker, my hat tipped sideways. “Punk, will you please fly and see—”

But that’s when my sidekick noticed the hat’s felt rim. The headpiece wasn’t new, but the feather decoration was.

I raised my hands, innocent. “Punk, it’s not what you think—”

With an offended squawk, the woodpecker swooped into the air, jostling my hat and then flying off. I reached up and grappled around my head, verifying that the plume was gone.

Scrambling out of the wagon, I hastened after Punk, crashing through the trees, into forbidden territory.

4

Honesty

I knelt, bowed my head, and whispered, “I am here.”

Yet the grave did not answer, as it never had, because it could not.

Within the womb of a birch copse, the tombstone’s chill seeped into my bones. The surface scraped my forehead as I rested against it. My lungs sought a familiar scent, a whiff of the past, of memories dearly collected. The hard-won moments, as well as the simplest of things: a touch, a laugh, a shout, an apology.

I inhaled only the land itself and other dry things within reach.

A vine bisected the plaque, shrouding the letters etched into it. It hid the words from me, though I knew them without needing to see them.

Pulling off my leather glove, I swept aside the vegetation, revealing her to me.

Beloved Wife

The cursive drew my palm to it, my ringed finger landing on theB. My thumb brushed the stone, the way my digit had once brushed aside her hair or ran across her grinning lips. I wiped a smattering of dust from the finale, then withdrew to smooth over the soil and plant a spray of her favorite straw flowers.

I hadn’t meant to go this long without visiting, and I begged her forgiveness, foreboding having delayed me. A nameless yet anticipated peril had been laying siege to my thoughts, disturbing my waking hours, so as to set my days off course.

“Yet I am here now,” I repeated.

Would that I might come here every day. Would that she might recognize my face, my voice. Would that she might answer me.

In the beginning, when I first lost her, I’d clung to the illusion of an afterlife. Now I knew better. The afterlife was a hoax meant to comfort the living more than the dead, no more real than a cursed fairytale.

Seasons, she would have detested this line of thinking and loathed to see me question the divinity of nature. Imagining the tongue lashing she would have given me, I grinned. If we’d had an argument about it, I would have made amends with a kiss.

The hilt of my sword nudged my ribs. It did me no favors to get comfortable, to forget the night sky, nor to forgo the slumber that I’d earned. Perhaps I might dream soundly after having seen her.

Leaning back and arranging myself to better advantage, I draped my arm on bended knee, my wrist hanging off the side. The moon peered down at my ring.

This morning had been a crisp one, the clouds a contemplative gray, a signature of Autumn. By noon, it had glided into a hopeful slate blue.