by Rance » Sat Feb 15, 2014 6:39 pm
Well after they left, she lingered like a fixture in the loft, blood-stained and robust, waiting for the sounds of their footsteps to fade.
It took her near an hour's time to ensure the body's temporary preservation. She found the coldest corner of the stables, where the gaps in the wooden planks of the wall were the widest. While Caliir stared on with blind-stone eyes, occasionally bleating out his gruff greetings -- the sound was repetitive, as if each time he'd forgotten his seamstress was there -- she dragged the mother-wolf's corpse through the hay. Gloria covered the lump of a corpse in a swath of burlap.
When she finally made her way outside, her heels dragging tired canyons through the snow, she thought she was free. She had liberated herself of the stable's foul odors, had tried to shake away the night's violent and bitter memories. But like the quarrel perpetually poised in the wooden gutter of Dulcie Miller's crossbow, the girl's mind was tense, nocked, drawn to its furthest point. She could still hear the grinding crunch of wolf-teeth scraping against the edges of her brother's bones. Her senses were wildfire, and her stinging eyes burned inside of her skull.
Son's footprints were beacons in the snow. Large. Familiar. She didn't know why, she didn't know why--
(It was a long walk. A long following. And, at the end, there was what would be a fallow meadow in spring, and a dark spot against the snow, where both the phantom and the boot-tracks all lead. The carcass of a doe, stretched out in the snow, frost forming at the lips of her torn and empty skin and rugged, shattered bones, got not even the mercy of candles or chairs.)
An emptiness twisted its hollow curse in Gloria Wynsee's gut. And because she hadn't anywhere else to go -- not yet, not right then -- she wandered like a broken puppet toward Mister Catch's room. He ought to know about Cherny; he ought to know about wolves.
She did not leave until the Glass Sun was high.