Sybil
Ifind the livestock in the morning.
Three capra, all of them huddled in the far corner of the pen — which means they didn't run.
They died where they gathered, and whatever killed them wasn't interested in eating.
That's the part that turns my stomach, not the sight of it, which is bad enough, but the waste of it.
Nothing was taken. Something came in the night and killed three animals and left, and I have to stand in the morning light trying to make sense of a violence that has no hunger behind it.
Gran finds me there. Her eyes move from the pen to me, and doesn't speak for a long moment.
"How long has this been happening?" I ask.
"Since early spring." She folds her hands over her apron. "It was one or two at first. Dae coming in wrong. A fox that tore through the hen house and didn't take a single bird — just killed them and went." She pauses. "Your father was reinforcing the southern ward posts before he got ill."
"Wards." I turn that over. "He knew how to do that?"
"Your father knew more than he ever told either of us." Her voice goes quieter. "He was a private man."
Private. That's a generous word for it. But this isn't the morning for that particular argument with a ghost, so I let it go.
I spend the rest of the morning doing what I can — cleaning the pen, checking the storehouse, building a list of what needs replacing before the harvest has any chance of producing something worth selling.
The list is discouraging. Three months. I have three months to make this land profitable enough to satisfy creditors with dark elf financial backing and no patience for human sentimentality, and I am starting that three months with dead livestock, a broken fence line, and one very unsettling encounter with the town monster.
It's midday when I head to the square for replacement hardware, and that's when I see the children.
There are four of them, eight to twelve years old, trailing along the far edge of the square with the studied casualness of children pretending they're not following someone.
I track their attention and find Rolin at one of the trade stalls, exchanging coin for a twist of dried herbs, not appearing to notice anyone watching him.
He turns to go. The youngest of the group — a small girl with a gap in her teeth and dirt on her coat — shouts across the square without any apparent fear: "Beastkeeper! Did you see any fire-serpents this week?"
He stops walking.
Something shifts in his shoulders. A hesitation so small I nearly miss it. "Two," he says, without turning around. "In the eastern ravine."
The children erupt. The gap-toothed girl grabs the arm of the boy next to her.
"I told you!" she shrieks. They all start talking at once, and Rolin keeps walking, unhurried, but there's something at the corners of his expression — just barely, just for a second — that might be something close to a smile.
Hm. I file that away next to everything else I'm accumulating about this man.
Gran is waiting at the gate when I get back, and she has the look she gets when she's made a decision and isn't particularly interested in discussing it.
"I've invited Rolin to dinner," she announces.
I stare at her. "You've what?"
"He helped you. It's the right thing to do."
"Gran, the whole town already thinks—"
"The town has opinions about everything and is wrong about most of them." She turns and walks inside. "He'll be here at sundown. Try not to look like you're being executed."
He arrives exactly at sundown. No knock — he's simply at the open doorway when Gran goes to it, like he materialized from the shadow of the eaves, and Gran greets him like she's known him for twenty years.
He comes inside. He fills the kitchen in a way that has nothing to do with his size, though his size is considerable. It's the stillness of him — the way everything in the room seems to quiet and orient itself around his presence, like a compass needle finding north.
His amber eyes find me across the table. "Sybil."
"Rolin." I make my voice pleasant. I'm very good at pleasant when I'm working for it.
Gran makes him try everything she's cooked, which is an alarming quantity of food, and I watch him slowly, gradually, lose some of the stone from around his posture.
Gran asks him questions — not prying ones, just conversation — and he answers.
Full sentences. Complete ones. I suspect this is not something that happens often for him.
He's describing the rune-carved posts he placed along the northern tree line when I realize I've stopped pretending to eat and am just watching him. I pick up my spoon again.
"The attacks are escalating," he says, when Gran sets down her cup, "because something has been disturbing sacred ground within two miles of this boundary.
Creatures that were never meant to be touched have been harmed.
" He pauses. "The imbalance spreads outward from those violations.
The animals closest to the orchard boundary absorb it first." Another pause.
"It will get considerably worse before anyone stops it. "
"And what's being done?" I ask.
His eyes cut to me. "What I can manage."
There's something underneath that — something worn, and old, and unsaid — but he doesn't offer it and I don't push. Not tonight. Gran changes the subject with the skill of a woman who has steered a hundred uncomfortable dinners, and the conversation moves somewhere easier.
I'm helping clear the dishes when I hear Celia's voice outside. Loud and purposeful. I go to the window without thinking.
She's at the end of the lane, talking to two of the market women, and she's looking at our lit window. She smiles as she talks. That warm, practiced smile.
I can't hear the words, but I can see cursed in the shape of her mouth. I can see dangerous and Sybil, and don't you think it's strange?
I stand there and watch her work. She's good at it — that's the honest thing, the thing that makes it worse. She's very good at this.
Behind me, Rolin says nothing. But when I turn back to the kitchen, I find him watching the window too, and his expression has gone flat.
Shuttered. The version of his face the town gets — the one that gives them something easy to be afraid of, something tidier than the complicated truth of whatever he actually is.
"She's been saying that for years," Gran says quietly. Not to either of us in particular.
Rolin sets his cup down and stands. "Thank you for the meal, Elspeth." He says her name simply, without ceremony. Gran gets a real look from him then — something almost warm — and then it's gone.
He nods once at me on his way out. Not unfriendly. Not much of anything, except his eyes linger for just a fraction of a second longer than they need to, and then he's gone, his footsteps silent on the lane.
I pause at the kitchen window and watch the tree line swallow him up.
The lonely man, I think, hiding behind the legend they made of him.
I don't say it out loud. But long after Gran has gone to bed and the house is quiet, I'm still thinking it.