The Knife at Her Neck

[Before They Are Hanged]

Life had slipped from the gnome perhaps half a day ago, left her lips an icy blue, a match to the sky. The sun leaked around the mountains, dripped to the valley floor, twisted and tugged at colours until the world was sharp as broken glass, made the corpse into a thing unreal, white as porcelain, lifeless as a tailor’s mannequin. Impossible, to imagine that it had one lived any more than the stones the dwarves pulled from the mountains, high above. Impossible, to forget that it had.

Larinillyn tugged at her bowstring, felt the ice fall away with a crack. It was a fine morning, she supposed, if your tastes ran to winter and corpses. Hers never had. She turned her eyes upwards instead, following the stiff trunks of old pines, stretching into the sky like the ribs of some great beast, long swallowed by the snow. Found them wandering back to the gnome again, like a child picking at a scab. One boot was missing, a sleeve torn away. Bare feet, half-covered by the snow. Odd, that the bare flesh seemed somehow more obscene than the death.

“It’d be nice, to bury her properly.” Kira. A head taller than Larinillyn and clad in a deep blue tunic that would have been death to anyone without the fire of magic in their veins. The hedge mage was wrestling with the corpse’s coinpurse, and golden sparks flashed where her wards met the frozen drawstring. “It’d be nice.”

Larinillyn turned up a palm, a thin frown on thin lips. It would have been. Her pack was heavy, but it would have been the work of moments to empty it, to turn out her tent, her vials, her books. To replace them with that small, pitiable body, to carry it back through the caves, water lapping at her ankles. To return it to the dwarves, to offer a fallen stranger some small measure of peace. It would have been nice. She puffed out a breath, watched it fog the air. A shallow mockery of the mists of Semberholme.

Her honoured father would have done it easy as sunrise, she knew. Her father, who never left in pain a soul he could heal. Her father, who had mixed poultices and herbs with her, laughing as they popped and sizzled over the fires, each flickering ember a participant in the dance; all of them companions, privy to the great humour of the world. He would have turned out his pack and his gold and trusted to the Seldarine.

Kira was watching her, the gnome’s coinpurse cupped in her hands. Again, Larinillyn was struck by her eyes; narrowed, dark, uncomfortably small. Like an animal’s, like a fox’s. Looking at them left a niggling at the back of her throat, yet another sharp reminder that these were not her people. That this was not her place. She swallowed it. “I do not judge.”

The hedge mage made a sound that might have been agreement, and the coinpurse vanished into her pouch.

“Mhm. Be nice, I was saying, but the ground’s hard here, and -” Kira tugged her gloves back into place. “The bears’d dig her back up again before nightfall.”

What more was there to say? She took her share of the coin and they left the corpse in the snow and her waking dreams.