Chapter 4: A Vial of Sleeping Herb, Miscounted

The inventory was Caelen's idea, and it was a sensible one.

She proposed it in the flat, administrative tone of someone who had dealt with deaths in the field before and understood that grief, however genuine, did not excuse a company from the practical necessity of knowing what remained to them. The body would be attended to first. Then the supplies. Then they would move, because remaining stationary in uncertain country was a luxury Sir Aldous's murderer had already collected on their behalf.

I helped with the body. It was not a thing I had done before — I had attended funerals in Millhaven, but funerals in Millhaven consist primarily of standing in a churchyard in moderate rain while old Alderman Petch says something interminable about the Eternal Cartography of the Soul, a metaphor I have always found theologically strained — but the Fellowship needed hands, and I had two, and wrapping a man in his own cloak and laying him in ground that required considerable effort to dig with a camp spade in half-frozen earth was the sort of task that wanted more ceremony than it received. We had no time for ceremony. Aldrath stood at the head of the grave with his hands on his staff and his eyes closed, and spoke three words in a language I did not recognise, and the frost on the mounded earth glittered briefly as if lit from within, and then it was done.