Page 37 of Swordheart #1

“It’s my fault,” said Halla. “If I hadn’t fallen…”

“No, it’s my fault,” said Zale. “If I hadn’t been so stubborn about the Motherhood not having the rights to search the wagon…”

“But if I hadn’t tried to head them off by crying at them…”

“Far be it from me to interrupt the mutual self-flagellation, but Brindle and I actually did the killing.”

“A gnole doesn’t mind if a human wants to take the blame for a gnole.”

Zale wrung their hands. Sarkis looked over at Brindle. “Good shot, though.”

The gnole shrugged. “Shouldn’t have annoyed an ox.”

“Well, what do we do now?” asked Halla. “Do we… um… hand ourselves in? Or hide the bodies?”

They looked at the bodies. They looked at each other. They looked at Zale.

Zale raked their hands through their hair, twisting their braid. “What? Why do I have to decide?”

“You’re a lawyer,” said Sarkis.

“And a priest,” added Halla. “I think that makes you the closest we have to a legal and moral authority.”

“Yes, but I handle property cases, not murder!”

Halla rubbed the back of her neck. “Would praying help?”

Sarkis snorted, but Zale seized on it. “Prayer. Yes. It’ll clear my mind, anyway.” They slid off the wagon, walked a little way away, and were suddenly, violently ill.

“Sounds like it’s clearing something,” said Sarkis.

Halla gave him an annoyed look and went to the priest, holding their hair back from their face.

“All right,” said the priest a few minutes later, looking pale but resolute. “I’ve prayed.”

Sarkis said, “That sounded more like puking to m—” and then Halla elbowed him in the ribs.

“This was all a very regrettable misunderstanding,” said Zale, blotting the corners of their mouth on the back of their hand.

“Sadly, the Motherhood is not likely to be forgiving about it. Those men did not deserve to die, but at the same time, neither do we. And nothing we do is going to make them any less dead.” They nodded firmly, as if settling the words in their mind.

“So we’re hiding the bodies, then,” said Sarkis.

“I think it’s for the best.”

“The ground’s frozen,” said Halla. “I’m not sure we could bury them. And we don’t have a lot of wild beasts in the area to eat them.” She chewed on her lower lip. “If the hogs hadn’t all just been slaughtered, I’d say we take them out to an acorn wood…”

Sarkis had been expecting Halla to sob, cry, or perhaps be as sick as Zale. Her remarkable calm in the face of two dead bodies was simultaneously heartening and a trifle alarming.

“You’re taking this well,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow at him. “I’ve laid out the bodies of my sisters, my mother, my husband, one of the field hands, my great-uncle, and Old Nan the cook, when her heart gave out in the kitchen. Dead bodies don’t worry me. It’s the live ones that get you.” She went into the wagon.

“Well, I’ve been put in my place,” muttered Sarkis.

“Good to be humble sometimes, sword-man. Helps the digestion.”

Halla came out with two blankets. “Let’s wrap them up and put them in the wagon.”

Zale sighed heavily. “Corpses in my wagon…”

“Well, we can’t very well put them on top. People would notice.”

“Yes, it’s just the principle. What do we do with the horses?”

“I’ll ride them out of here and strip their tack,” volunteered Sarkis. “Once I’m out of range of the sword, I’ll get pulled back to it, and there won’t be a trail for anyone to follow, if they do come with dogs.”

Zale nodded. “Clever.”

“I have my moments.”

Halla was, in fact, not quite so calm as she was pretending to be. She had seen plenty of dead bodies, she hadn’t lied about that, but seeing someone—two someones—killed in front of her had been a shock.

She was grateful that Zale had been so upset, because it meant that she didn’t have to be.

Most of what she’d said while the priest was throwing their guts up had been soothing nonsense—it’s not your fault, it’s not anybody’s fault, it will be okay—but she found it had soothed her own nerves as well.

This comes of always being the practical one, she thought, a bit wearily. Nobody will comfort you, so you learn to do it yourself.

Sarkis had actually rolled the bodies in the blankets. She was grateful for that. Looking at the wounds would have seriously tested her calm.

He and Brindle hauled the two bodies into the back of the wagon and then Sarkis went off on the horses and Brindle drove the wagon onward. Halla kept looking back at the bloodstain in the road, but eventually it vanished around a bend and that was that.

Well, except for the matter of the two bodies.

“What are we going to do with them?” asked Zale. “It would take all day to bury them in frozen ground.”

“Can we take them back to your Temple?” asked Halla. Zale was clearly out of their depth, but she had a suspicion that Bishop Beartongue was not a stranger to disposing of the occasional corpse.

“It would take days,” said Zale. “And they’d be in the wagon… er… smelling. And if the Motherhood stops us again and demands to search the wagon…”

They both shuddered.

Halla chewed her lower lip. “What about frozen water?”

Zale glanced at her, puzzled. “I don’t follow.”

“Look, we’re freezing at night, but the water’s still pretty slushy, particularly in the woods where you get a lot of oak leaves. We could chop a hole in the ice easier than we could dig a grave. They’ll freeze under it, and probably no one will find them until spring.”

Zale considered this. “That… might work. Clearly you have a fine criminal mind.”

“I’m flattered. Wait, should I be flattered?”

“I don’t know anymore,” sighed the priest.

“It’s not like I’ve hidden a body in a pond before. It’s just that one of the goats drowned one fall and we didn’t find the body until spring.”

“It’s a good idea, anyway,” said Zale. “They’ll know that they’re missing once the horses show up, and they’ll probably guess they’re dead before long, but there’s no reason they’ll suspect us over anybody else on the road.

And by the time they find the bodies, it’ll be months from now and everyone’s memory of when they went where will be hopelessly foggy. ”

They stared at their hands. “Rat’s bones, I can’t believe we’re hiding bodies.”

“I’d feel a lot guiltier if it wasn’t the Motherhood,” admitted Halla. “They were just awful to the hostelkeeper’s wife about a year ago. Really nasty.”

Zale nodded. “The Hanged Mother attracts a certain kind of mind, I fear. An unkind one. I have met a few among them who were not so bad, but it is a faith for those who value power and punishment. And—”

They cut off abruptly as the wagon rounded a corner, revealing a goatherd moving his charges down the road.

“Act natural!” hissed Zale.

Halla plastered a smile on her face and hoped it did not look as horribly strained as it felt. Zale had a much better poker face, probably because of their legal training, but they gave away so little that they looked more like a statue of a priest.

“Lovely day, isn’t it?” said Halla.

The goatherd looked at her, then at the cold drizzle surrounding them, and said, “Eh?”

“I mean, not lovely. Very not lovely. Lousy weather.”

The goatherd allowed as how it was indeed lousy. Zale sat stiff as a poker, gazing down the road at nothing much.

The sword on Halla’s back moved suddenly, hilt clicking down into the sheath. Halla jumped as if she’d been kicked and let out a yelp.

The goatherd inched over to the side of the road to give the wagon a wide berth. The goats eyed them all maliciously, but this probably didn’t mean anything, since in Halla’s experience, goats eyed everything maliciously.

They vanished around the bend. Zale relaxed. Halla rubbed her forehead.

“That could have gone better,” she said.

“I doubt he suspects we’ve got bodies,” said Zale. “He probably just thinks we’re in a cult.”

“Is that better or worse than bodies?”

“It’s fine as long as he doesn’t want to join our cult.”

Brindle stared straight ahead, shaking his head slowly. He muttered something under his breath, fortunately not in a language that either human understood.

Halla looked both ways for observers, then carefully drew the sword, and Sarkis appeared beside her.

“The horses were running when I dematerialized,” said Sarkis. “They’ll… ah, you two look a trifle tense. Is something wrong?”

“There are rather more dead bodies than I find acceptable stowed under my seat!” said Zale.

“How many dead bodies would you find acceptable?”

“Ideally, zero.” The priest chewed on their lower lip. “One would be bad, but I feel like I would handle it better. Two is really an excessive number.”

Halla made a strangled noise that might have been a laugh or a sob or a sigh. Even she wasn’t entirely sure. Sarkis pounded her on the back for a moment, apparently fearing that she was choking.

“Well, at least the horses will keep going for a little bit, I expect.” He scowled. “I don’t like to spook a horse, but the farther away they get before they stop, the safer it’ll be for everyone.”

“Better not try it with an ox, sword-man.”

“I would not dream of it, Brindle.”

“That’s the horses sorted then,” said Zale. They sighed. “And now to sort out the bodies…”

Finding a pond was easier said than done.

It had to be far enough off the road that nobody would notice them lugging bodies and close enough to the road that they could lug bodies.

It had to be a pond that nobody was using to water their stock, because neither Halla nor Zale wanted to risk fouling someone’s primary water source.

And they definitely had to have some kind of tree cover so that no one would be strolling by and notice a pair of corpses frozen under the ice.

And of course, nobody would have put such ponds on the map, preferably with convenient notes like, “Perfect for body disposal!” or, “Dump unwanted enemies here!”

The bodies stayed in the wagon that night, which meant that everybody else stayed outside. Brindle generously offered the ox’s body heat, so there were three humans and one gnole huddled against the side of the large, bemused, but basically good-natured ox.

Sarkis resigned himself to not getting much sleep. Zale curled themself into a neat ball, not unlike Brindle. Halla dropped off immediately and then began trying to wedge herself into the space between his back and the ox.

Well, it’s the warmest spot around, I suppose …

He wondered how on earth she’d shared a bed with her husband. Had the man simply brought his own blanket to wrap himself in?

The thought of Halla sharing that other man’s bed woke an unexpected jealousy. He surrendered to it, and gathered her up so that she was across his lap with her back to the ox’s warmth.

This was not the best idea, he realized a moment later. It was all too easy to imagine her waking up, turning to straddle his hips, looking in his eyes and saying… saying…

Probably, “ Oh no, are your legs asleep again? I’m sorry! ”

He stifled a sigh. Brindle reached out and poked his shoulder with one clawed finger.

“Hmm?” He looked up into the gnole’s striped face.

“Twisting your whiskers, sword-man. A human should go to sleep.”

“A human’s trying.”

“A human should try harder.”