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Justin nodded to them both, snapping the reins before she could reply, and took off at a quickened pace back to Saints’ Road, Finian hot on his heels.
“I guess that’s decided, then.” Jace laughed as Bryn grabbed the ankles of another man Jace was trying to lift. Placing the lost soul onto another wooden board, they secured him with rope before moving the cart to the pyre.
“If I go, no one will have a good time. There is a reason I keep to my apartment and the night as much as possible.” What she meant was it was better for her friends if the town forgot she existed. They only allowed her father in because they were promised healers in doing so.
They got that in Jace, but not her.
“Bryn”—Jace turned, stopping to lean against the cart— “these people are nothing but scared little sheep. They think only what Scrios Arioch tells them to think. Just stay with us and enjoy yourself for once.”
Shaking her head, she pushed past her cousin to grab the board needed to slide the body into the fiery pit. Wiping the sweat from her brow, the sun beating down in all its midday glory, she was thankful when they were down to the last body.
Her heart hurt that these people were not given funeral rites just because they came from another place. Bryn felt like maybe, if there were a heaven of some kind, they would go there regardless of the actions taken here and now. That in not honoring them, they would not walk this earth in anger and loss.
The scrios wouldn’t help with funeral rites for the strangers, always claiming he owed desert rovers and traders nothing. Blessings were for believers. Bryn guessed his god was pretty choosy about who he allowed to die with dignity.
Taking a moment, she prayed to her own imaginary deity. A deity who was just and looked upon humanity as a mother might her child, fierce in her protection.
One that, in her own mind, was strong and capable and nothing like the Church of Baleros’s god.
Jace waited, not saying a word as she bent over next to the pyre in prayer. She wasn’t sure what Jace believed since he, too, found excuses not to attend services, but they never said anything about it. Especially not around his devout mother where they were guaranteed the punishment of nonbelievers.
Bryn opened her eyes, the prayer lost to the wind as she took in the slackened face of the last man lost to death lying on the wooden board.
Readjusting the cloth to cover his face, she moved into position, and she and Jace placed the board along the rails to the pit where the fire burned. The stucco walls continued to contain the fire as they pushed the body into the flames. The man’s hair and linen wardrobe caught well before his skin. The linens he had worn reminded her of some of her friend Sage’s clothing that she still had from her mother.
Perhaps they were from Tanwen, the closest city to their own in the Drystan Territories.
Bryn watched as the flames took the soul to the other side of death, leaving only the burning remains of its worldly vessel.
Lost in thought, Bryn only noticed that Jace had pushed the cart back to the chapel when he yelled back over his shoulder to be ready in a few hours and then disappeared around the corner of the chapel.
Looking back into the fire, tingles ran along her skin so abruptly that she feared a predator was nearby. The sensation felt so much like ants crawling on her that her fingers curled and twitched to claw at her skin.
Trying to ignore it, Bryn walked to the end of the row of pyres and reached down to grab the torch from the rusted metal ceremonial stand.
The sense of someone watching her had her swinging around, her heart pumping blood faster as her extremities went cold, her body readying to make a run for it if needed, but only the pyres and dead trees were around her. Nothing and no one to account for the feeling of being watched.
Walking back toward the chapel, she extinguished the flame of the torch in the blessed water near the church before placing the doused torch in the box outside the building for someone to cleanse with prayers.
All while keeping her eyes and body on alert.
Another chill moved over her skin. This one was odd enough to raise the hairs along her arms and the back of her neck in a way that felt out of place in the stifling heat of the desert sun.
A sudden sense of doom made the sweat on her skin turn cold.
Shaking her head, she chastised her imagination as a headache started in her temples that had her groaning. It felt like the beginning of a migraine, yet something deep in her bones yelled at her to pay closer attention. To what end, she had no idea, but the sense of foreboding was intense.
A sense that the fear she had felt earlier that morning when Jace had left the gate to attend to the bodies was not to be ignored.
Bryn had learned the long and painful way to trust her instincts, so she knew better than to ignore them now.
Chapter 3
“Forsomeonewhonormallylooks like they were run over by a herd of buffalo, you look nice,” Bryn greeted Jace as he finished tucking his button-down shirt into his jeans, his hair wet and combed from his face as he moved out from his apartment into their shared hallway. Each of them—Jace, Aunt Mallory, and Bryn—had their own apartments above the town clinic where her father, and now Jace, worked.
The apartments were nothing more than rooms of an old house refurbished into individual living quarters. They all shared a bathroom and a kitchen much like the places called “dorms” that she’d read about in some of the Pre-Collapse books.
A glitter in his blue eyes warned her before the words left his mouth, but she enjoyed the brotherly ribbing and teasing with the closest person she had to a sibling.
