"You burn her body, you even think of touching flame to her skin, and I will beat you all to within a hair's breadth of life. I will break out your teeth," she told them, even as one of the attendants tried to usher her out of the room -- the
room, where Niall the spearwielder lay dead on a table. "I will make porridge of your face. I swear to the Nameless, I swear--"
"Is she going to go on like that all evening," said one of the attendants hovering over the spearwielder's frame. "Who did this?"
"A boy," said another. "A boy did it. Cherny. The one that worked at the mill."
Across the room, Gloria Wynsee latched her blood-slick fingers like a vice around the edge of the doorjamb, even as one of the wellsmith's wrapped her sleeve in his fist and tried to pry the seamstress away. Between the shoulders of the attendants that gave their focus to Niall's body -- did the spearwielder even have a name anymore, did names matter when someone was deceased? -- Gloria could see the deflated ribs, the stilled chest, the otherwise completely stiff corpse of the other girl. The wide eyes had not closed, the lips were like dry slivers of rawhide, and one of Niall's hands dangled off the side of the table, a
pit-pat-pit-pat of blood trickling from her fingertip and pooling on an attendant's boot-tip.
Is this how debts are paid, asked a whisper in her mind.
Is this how problems are solved?A burly palm cupped the seamstress'. If she remembered anything about that night, it would have been the warmth of his hand, the jungle of blond hair grown on his knuckles. He was white-robed and out-of-place, a lump of a fellow draped beneath the robes of the Rememdium's loyals as if he were a stocky child hiding underneath a mother's skirts. "What's your name," he asked her, and she dragged her stare away from the blood, tried to swallow down a breath that wasn't sour with the heady, reeking stink of--
"Gloria," she said. "I'm Gloria."
"I'm Jule," he told her. His eyes were gentle, a little bland. His lips were not sure how to smile. "Was she a friend?"
"No."
"You carried her here? By yourself," he said.
"I owed her."
"For what?"
"Jule," said the seamstress, thinking it was
jewel, like he was a polished sapphire even though the world was nothing but rubies and rubies and rubies and-- "They can't burn her."
"It's custom, Gloria. It's what we do."
"They can't. They have to sew up the wound. If -- if they put her back
in, she can't leak out. If they leave her open all the parts of her that make a person alive are going to trickle out and it will be for nothing, it will be for naught."
"Gloria," Jule said.
"They have got to use a small needle, sew her not like a person, but like a baby's blanket. Soft and gentle. You have got to stuff her with all the right herbs and rub her with all the -- the proper salves. The one that smells of leaves, the one that reeks like animal piss. It's -- it's
easy, Jule. You cannot burn her. There has got to be something for her to go back to. When all is said and done, she has got to be like a cup, a cup that you're waiting to -- to fill right back up. You see? And we can just pour her right back into her skin.
"I hate her, Jule. I
hate her."
Jule managed to steer the stammering girl away from the room, where they still spoke over Niall's body like she was merely some conversation piece.
Did the boy know how to use a sword, one asked.
Chopped into her like she was just a side of beef. Might be better off working for a butcher. Jule spoke louder, his young voice a rumbling soothesay, his hand roughed from farmwork and cattle-brushing. He tried to overcome the voices filtering out of the lamplit room and urged the seamstress away from the doorway.
"Do you sing, Gloria?"
"I can sing songs," she said.
"You were singing when you brought her in. You were singing in another language."
"I am a maggot," the seamstress said.
"You're not a maggot. You're a girl."
"It was Jernoan," Gloria told Jule. "It was a lullaby. You put little babies to sleep with it."
"Was it for Niall?"
"Maybe she -- maybe she was scared. I bet you her mother would have sung to her. Did I kill someone's daughter?"
"It wasn't your sword that did it, Gloria."
"You don't know anything about swords, Jule. You don't know anything," she told him.
"It's best you go home. It's getting late. You can say a lot of prayers by morning."
* * * *
In a dark room in the Rememdium, Gloria Wynsee peeled a bloody blouse from her dark skin and dragged her petticoats off with a desperate tug from her fist. She'd lost her skirt somewhere along the path, her Storyteller skirts, her patchwork memories. An old woman's stories. Jule had given her an old bedgown -- the stitches were hers, she remembered each and every one of them, she'd worked them months, years, lifetimes ago -- and she dressed as if it were the first day after her
Odos, sliding her arms through the sleeves and adjusting the waistband with a few pinches from her still-stained fingertips.
…
sorry. I'm s-sorry.The attendants said the squire was with the knight, that the trapper was too. They said he'd been beaten, pummeled, bludgeoned by the
lunatick, whispers rolling through the halls of
What would the Lady say and
Did you hear the spearwielder's dead, dead, and the seamstress stumbled through the white-clothed bodies as the Glass Sun began to break over the horizon. She should have gone to Cherny, held his cheeks, cradle his head, apologize to him; she should have sought out Noura, to ask her once more to forgive,
ghe-doz, ghe-doz, she'd done this all, a girl was dead and a falchion that should only know oil had known sinew and agony and blood--
She could have sought out Mister Catch. They could run together. They could avoid the eyes of all the
posters.
The seamstress stood in the woods, bare feet amid the ferns, a quaking palm finding the crinkle of parchment in her gown-pocket. She pinched out the note and unraveled it.
Not all bodies need to be burned. There are other ways.
- Jule
Gloria Wynsee punched the spine of a towering tree until her knuckles were black with sweat and red, red, red.
And sometime in the day, she wrote.