Chapter Five
This was all a dream, a mad hallucination of some amorphous consciousness.
Briar sensed the impending snowstorm hours before it hit and set about finding shelter for the rest of the day and what was going to be a cold, merciless night.
She and Rune had been trudging at a slow, sad pace, keeping away from the roads.
In this rhythm, the journey to the convent would take twice as long, but she wasn’t sure what she could do about it.
Once outside the walls of Schloss Ewigheim, Briar had dragged Rune into the forest. Beyond the tree line, in a clearing, her dark bay horse, Nettle, was waiting.
He’d neighed and hit the frozen earth with his hoof at the sight of her, and she’d run to him and pressed her forehead to his neck, inhaling his familiar scent.
For a moment, she forgot about all the aches in her body.
It didn’t last, as she soon realized she couldn’t walk anymore.
She’d planned to get Rune onto Nettle, since he was blind and Seraphina’s walking stick was useless in his hand.
All he did was trip on every root, slip on patches of ice, and slam face-first into trees if she didn’t direct him.
Was Nettle strong enough to carry them both?
It turned out that he was. Briar didn’t push him, hence the snail’s pace.
From a copse of trees, she was watching the windows of a forester’s lodge, the only standing building she’d seen since skirting around the last village.
She would’ve liked nothing more than to stop at an inn, but they were still in the Harvester’s territory, or right at the edge of it, and she couldn’t risk anyone recognizing what Rune was.
When he had his wits about him, the man could be inconspicuous enough, but he was disoriented, miserable, and a liability in his current, disabled state.
He waited a few feet behind, next to Nettle, his hands sunk in the horse’s mane as if he needed the animal for support, or he would collapse.
It was a small mercy that Nettle tolerated him.
She’d had him since he was a foal. The Mother Superior had gifted him to her because she seemed to be the only human he let close.
Since then, they’d been Briar and Nettle, both prickly, common, and growing wild around things nobody tended to.
“I don’t think anyone is home,” she whispered.
Rune didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure he’d even heard her.
“Abandoned, perhaps?” She pursed her lips and clicked her tongue. “No. The grounds look well maintained.”
She watched and waited for a few more minutes, then shrugged and touched the crucifix that rested just above her breastbone.
“Only one way to find out. Stay here.”
She trusted Nettle to look after Rune. She wouldn’t be long.
The lodge was made of timber and stone. Everything was under one long roof, including the stable and a storage loft above, under the gable.
It was a basic structure, built to be uncomplicated and serviceable for a forest warden living alone.
If the man was inside – something that Briar doubted – he wouldn’t be too hard to handle.
Not if she took him by surprise. So, she approached the house from the side and looked through each window, her frown deepening with every room she found empty.
Could she be so lucky? Was she allowed to be? For once.
The fact that the window shutters weren’t closed and barred from the inside, as they should’ve been in such weather, gave her pause.
In the kitchen, no fire burned in the hearth.
She looked through the parlor window last. On the wooden bench built around the side of the stove that shared a wall with the kitchen, she saw a man’s form huddled under blankets.
Briar held her breath. She narrowed her eyes and pressed her nose close to the glass.
He wasn’t moving. She watched for the rise and fall of his chest, for a twitch of his limbs.
Nothing. She released her breath and the glass fogged up.
In a bout of recklessness, she knocked on the window and held her breath once more, only to let it out with a huff when the result was… still nothing.
She walked to the front door. Locked. It was a heavy thing, made of three oak planks joined vertically, and certainly reinforced on the inside.
Out here in the wilderness, miles from the nearest village, it had been made with the purpose of keeping animals out.
Briar put her good shoulder into it, but it didn’t budge.
Time to bring in the master of tearing things down. Or apart.
Nettle followed her happily, Rune less so.
He was quiet and morose, only speaking when she asked a direct question.
Since they’d escaped the castle, he’d barely said five sentences to her.
She’d counted. Riding on Nettle together, him at the back, he’d angled his body away from her and touched her as little as possible.
Which she’d appreciated, because she didn’t want to touch him either.
“Be careful, though,” she instructed after she’d managed to position him against the door by tugging at his cloak from different directions. “We still need it to close once we’re inside, so don’t obliterate it.”
Rune murmured something under his breath, then without even a grunt of effort, pushed where the lock should’ve been on the other side.
They heard the crack of iron giving way as the door shifted in its frame and the hinges groaned.
There was a clatter as pieces of the broken lock hit the floor.
Rune took a step back, and the door swung outward a few inches.
Briar had her hand on the hilt of her dagger. She waited, muscles corded, but there was no movement from the inside. She nodded to herself and made to step over the threshold, but her path was blocked by Rune’s extended arm.
“You don’t want to go in,” he said simply.
“What? Why?”
He just shook his head.
Briar rolled her eyes. “It’s not like we have a choice.”
Another beat, then he conceded, letting his arm fall to his side. The second Briar walked in, she understood what he’d meant.
The smell.
She pressed her mouth and nose into the crook of her elbow and breathed shallowly through the fabric of her wet cloak. She advanced, now certain the man wasn’t going to jump off the cot and attack her. On the floor, half hidden under the cot, was a gray, shaggy dog, just as dead as his master.
As much as she hated doing it, she had to. Briar stepped close enough that she could reach out and pull the blankets off the man.
“A week at most,” she said.
After the last fire he’d made had died, the house had turned into an ice block. The cold had slowed the decay, the body was stiff, gray, and sunken.
“He was old,” she told Rune. “Maybe ill. And his dog didn’t want to leave his side, probably stopped eating and drinking.” She dropped the blankets and moved away, already making strategies about how she could move the bodies and where to put them. “I wonder if airing the place will be enough.”
She stepped outside and looked around. The storm was nearly upon them, daylight was fading fast, and she had not a minute to spare.
A forest warden would have animals, so she walked around the back of the house, her boots crunching in the snow.
Behind her, Rune’s crunched harder, attesting to how much larger and heavier he was.
Fortunately, there were no obstacles he could run into.
Briar found a chicken coup built against the wall, tucked under the eaves. Inside, all the birds were frozen dead, so she touched her crucifix and went to check the stable.
“Oh, thank God,” she whispered at the sight of the skeletal horse that only by a miracle was still standing. “It’s all right, I’m here now.”
The horse didn’t look up when she approached.
It had no strength left and no will to live.
She rubbed its neck and was glad to notice the warden had covered it with a blanket.
The manger was empty, but the hay rack still had some hay in it.
The water bucket was frozen solid. Briar saw that the horse’s lips were cracked, and its muzzle was raw and scabbed from licking and nipping at the ice.
“I have you.”
She got to work fast. As fast as she could without losing her composure in the face of all she had to do before the snowstorm made it dangerous to be outside.
She made the fire in the hearth first, then filled a bucket with snow and hung it over the fire to melt. Snow was the immediately available option, as she didn’t have time to go looking for the spring that must’ve been God knew where. Not in the worsening weather.
Rune helped her move the body. Briar guided him to the tool shed, where he placed the man on the ground, wrapped in a blanket. Next to him, she laid down his dog, wrapped as well.
Back in the house, she scolded Rune when he closed the door.
“We have to air the room even if snow gets inside,” she said.
The stench of death still lingered.
“We don’t.”
He clumsily found his way to a table and started emptying his pockets. Out came a heavy tome that he set down with a thud, then a ridiculous number of folded pieces of paper as he turned the pockets of his cloak and trousers inside out.
Briar watched him with a raised eyebrow as she added more snow to the bucket above the fire.
Snow melted down to surprisingly little water, so she needed to be on top of it if she wanted to produce two full buckets for the two horses.
She’d taken Nettle to the stable and filled the hay racks for both him and his new friend.
The poor horse who’d barely survived its master’s death was a mare, and Briar was thinking of calling her Rose. A bit on the nose, but it fit.
After a few minutes of frantic searching, Rune sighed in relief and placed a small object in the middle of the table. Briar wiped her hands on her trousers and approached, her curiosity piqued. The object turned out to be a piece of cut bone.