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.
