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“I think you need to winter in another house,” she said.
Those words hung in the silent air. Snow once again started drifting down, but there was no wind and it looked like just a flurry.
“I think you need to winter in another valley,” said a man.
There was a murmur of assent.
The murderer visibly sagged. “Do you even care that I didn’t do this?”
Rigg became conscious of the many eyes that were now glancing at him. Or openly watching him.
“You’re a kind of holy man,” said a sausagemaker. “Do you think we’d be doing a wrong if we held this man to account?”
Rigg did not know how to answer. So he just looked at the murderer. A long, steady gaze.
“You’ll believe a stranger over me?” he shouted. “He comes into the village and suddenly he knows where she’s buried! Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”
“Hard to guess his age,” said a woman, “but he’s young. I think he would have been under ten years old when she died. So no, I don’t think that’s suspicious. I think it’s the Sight. He said he sees the paths people take in their lives, and he saw where her path ended.”
“Did he do it?” another man asked Rigg.
“The boy is not a judge,” said Ram Odin. “He had a dream. You found the body that he saw buried in that dream.”
“But did he see who buried her?” demanded a man. There were open declarations of agreement.
“I would never accuse a man on the basis of a dream,” said Rigg. “I don’t know which dreams are true and which are merely dreams. I’m sorry this one turned out to be true.”
“You didn’t answer,” said a woman. “Was he in your dream?”
“In my dream,” said Rigg, “the cavity behind the wall under the window had already been dug out to receive the body before she died.”
“You can’t know that!” shouted the man. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about! And even if it’s true, somebody else could have done it!”
“We would have known,” said a woman, “if a man started digging in another man’s marriage house.”
The assent was resounding.
“Will you give him a night to pack his things?” asked his wife. “The man who did this murder deserves nothing, but my children will be uneasy if their father goes away empty-handed, with winter coming on.”
“You can’t believe I did this!” the murderer cried to his wife.
“I know she was the only girl you ever loved,” she answered him. “And never me. Even when you built a house for me, your heart belonged to her. I’ve seen you staring at this house over all these years and I knew who it was you had built it for, even though she was still too young. I knew who you were thinking of. But it never crossed my mind that you were looking at her grave. Her clothes were torn off. Did you have her the once before she died?” The wife was taking no pleasure in this. She was being more ruthless with herself than with the murderer. “When you stare at this house of a night or of a morning, are you grieving for her? Or remembering that you were the only man ever to possess that beautiful child?”
There was a growl of rage now among the men. Not at the wife, but at what the wife had seen and what her words meant.
Ram Odin strode to the murderer and put an arm across his shoulder. “Let me take you back home, sir. You have some work to do tonight, I think.”
He wasn’t out of earshot when other women offered to take in the children and the wife herself for the night. The murderer would have his own house to himself.
This much goes to his credit: He did not kill himself inside the house, or in any other place where it would be one of his children who found him. He went into the smokehouse during the night and hanged himself from a short rope tied to one of the hooks.
Rigg and Ram Odin left the next day, walking on toward the next village. “We thought you’d winter here,” said Onishtu’s father.
“We owe you much,” said Onishtu’s mother. “Winter with us.”
“We have a place farther on,” said Ram Odin, “but your offer is kind.”
Rigg silently agreed, for he could not bear the thought of staying in this place. Justice had been served, he believed. But he also knew the repercussions would be long and hard. He had spared the lives of the murderer’s children by not changing the past in such a way that they would never be conceived, but their lives would be forever altered by the knowledge of what their father did, and that it was their mother’s testimony that condemned him in the eyes of the village.
