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limp plugs of sweat and blood around her
eyes, around her frozen expression of agony and fear, in that last moment when
she knew that no one could save her now, not even her Auntie Renda.
    Her pale white hands and feet had been spread wide and
pinioned to the stump with a single rope.  Her blood swamped the ground below
the alderwood stump and clung to the bark in sticky clotted streamers below
what was left of her body.  So much blood...
    Renda planted the blade of her sword in the soil and sank to
the ground beside it.   No words came, just a guttural rending shriek of rage
and loss that filled the glade and echoed through the foothills beyond.  Her
empty stomach convulsed, and she gagged wretchedly on the ground before the
strange altar.
     
     
    Gikka knelt beside Renda and said nothing, letting the sobs
of anger and shock drain out of the knight.  Soon, Renda would be ready to find
Pegrine’s killer, but not now.  Not while the shock of her niece’s torture and
death still bled from her eyes.  Meanwhile, their quarry moved farther and
farther away, and the trail cooled.  Time was their enemy.
    The thicket surrounding the clearing had been silent when
she approached it, so quiet in fact that she had been inclined to ride past. 
But the nesting birds and the tiny scurrying creatures of the night, even the
crickets had made no sound at Zinion’s approach.  They seemed too frightened
even to call warnings to each other.  That curious silence had been enough to
pique her curiosity and lead her into the glade.
    The silence had told her something else, as well.  She had
frightened no one away, nor had she heard the sounds of horse or man in the
surrounding hills.  The killing had been done hours ago, most likely well
before sunset, and the killer or killers were already well away.  The best she
could hope to find, then, would be some fragments of a trail.  She hoped it
would be enough.
    She squeezed Renda’s shoulder once, then rose, picking up
the lantern to look around the clearing.  She would look over the glade again,
this time with the calculating eye of an assassin, of one used to dealing death
and concealing it. 
    She picked up handfuls of the soil here and there and looked
along the borders of the glade for broken branches. Almost immediately, she
found two marks that might have been partial footprints near the edge of the
clearing.  With her finger, she completed the outlines of the two prints and
sat back on her haunches, staring at them. 
    The steps had been very heavy, as of an armored man, with
the familiar crenelations of a knight’s salleret.  The two prints were not just
alike, though they were both left feet.  Different weights, different stances.
    Knights, she thought bitterly, a brace of treasonous
knights.  But to what end, she wondered, brushing the dust from her leggings as
she stood.  To what end, killing the sheriff’s granddaughter?
    She frowned at the peculiar growth of the ancient trees
lining the glade, the way they bunched and crowded at the edges of the clearing
like the duke’s vassals at tournament, crushed together in no comfort and each
straining to see, aye, but not one to cross the cordon.  No cordon hung in this
clearing, at least none that she could see, but the boundaries were keen and
even, she saw, and likely lined up along the stars as well. This glade was
witched, that much was sure, and the way Peg had died spoke of ritual
sacrifice.
    Gikka pushed aside some bits of dried mud with her nail and
frowned. Nights spent huddled for warmth in one Brannford temple or another had
educated her in the ways of most of the gods—Bremondine, Syonese, even
Hadrian.  This glade, this ritual, matched nothing she had ever seen.
    Had it been blood alone, it would have made little enough
sense.  Human blood would desecrate the altars of most gods.  And the
rest—Rjeinar the Hadrian god of vengeance, Cuvien the Torturess, and a few
others—held to strict observances,