“Quiet, Elara,” Mother mutters, but her dark eyes flicker with the
shadow of a smile. Grayed, tired, still beautiful in the lamplight. Her
wrinkles soften in the orange glow. She shoulders under the corpse’s ribs.
“Legs.”
“I’ve got them.”
The legs are mottled purple and black, marbled like spoiled meat. I
carry the weight onto the table, careful not to jostle the man’s jaw. We
haven’t wired it shut yet, and I don’t need his tongue falling out like a slab
of rotten eel.
Daron coughs behind his teeth—that quiet kind that means pain. Not
that he would ever admit it, my little brother, who towers over me like a
pine, not yet fifteen.
“Don’t faint,” I tease. “You’ll bring shame to the family business.”
“Break my heart.” He gives a dramatic pound on his chest and sets the
lamp down. “If I pass out, it’ll be from boredom.”
He leans in to help me strip the old man’s shirt off over his stiff arms,
his fingers deft, even with the missing tip. Another nail went yesterday. He
wrapped the wound with linen and lemon balm on his own, because
Mother’s hands shook when she touched him and mine shook worse.
Rot found my little brother.
Because we touch the dead every day, some say. Hands in the earth,
faces in the grave. And yet I’ve watched it take a child barely out of the
womb. A lord who never once soiled his boots. The oak at the edge of the
river that stood for two hundred years. The Henner’s entire crops, gone
gray-black by morning.
No one can tell us why.
No one can tell us how.
Mother lays out her tools: twine, needle, sponge, copper hook, little
spoons for the eyes, and the jaw threader. It matters, the jaw. People don’t
like when their dead gape. They’ll forgive a lot of things, but not an open
mouth. Especially not when something climbs out during the Last Watch.
She takes the hook and eases it into the nostril, cracking through
delicate bone so the rancid fluids drain. “Bucket, Daron.”
My little brother passes it over, nose wrinkled against the gut-turning
stench, watching me instead. “You’ve something in your hair.”
“Ah yes, my crown.” I tug out what might be a cobweb or a widow-
thread and flick it aside. “Do I look royal?”
