Our War

Part 1

She was an older woman, white-haired and hawk-nosed and dressed all in black, with two large eyes as dark and mysterious as a forest glade.

That was all well and good. That was all just fine. What Treeny was wondering, mostly, was how the hell she came to be behind the pig sty.

So far, she hadn't said a word. Treeny had led her back to the farmhouse, which is what her ma had taught her you were supposed to do with strangers caught outside in a gale. She'd given her a flagon of last harvest's beer and a bowl of soup. The woman had eaten the soup as though she was starving, drained the beer as though she was dying of thirst.

And now she just sat there, speechless. Staring with those shadow-dark eyes at Treeny.

Treeny had stared back for a few minutes, but that hadn't seemed to do much. Besides, she still had chores to take care of, before she could get ready for bed. She had taken the slop out to the pigs, but she still needed to see to the oxen, and the kitchen table needed a good scrubbing. She couldn't spend all night locked in a staring contest with a strange lady.

In this part of the world, no one had time for that.

She went out, tended the oxen. When she came back in, the woman hadn't moved. Those dark eyes still stared into the kitchen fire. Her hands still rested, knit loosely together, on her knees.

"D'you need anything?" Treeny asked, speaking loudly and slowly, in case she was foreign. "You should bed here for the night. It's too dark to travel on, and the wind's pretty fierce."

There was no answer. Not even an eyeblink. Not even a flicker. Treeny sighed and ducked out the back door, where the pail she'd left by the steps when she first scented rain was now half-filled with water. She took her soap-end from the towel it was wrapped in and lathered up the towel.

She started scrubbing the kitchen block. She glanced, occasionally, at her companion--nothing registered there.

"My husband'll be back any day now, you know," she said. "He's not nearly so accommodating to strangers as I. He'll want to know where you hail from. I hope you can find the energy to at least answer him."

No answer.

Treeny sighed. It was funny, she thought--funny, how she just assumed the woman would be sticking around. She could kick her out, after tonight. She had the funniest feeling the woman would be led out of the house just as easy as she'd been led in.

But these were hard times, sure. What with the war on most of the folk were gone from the village. Treeny felt her husband's absence in the air every day--felt it in the emptiness of the big farmhouse bed, the dust that formed in his favorite bowl, his workboots by the door.

Felt it, most strongly, in the space in the barn where the machete had rested. Where the old helmet, a relic from wars of their grandparents' day, had once held seeds for the coming year.

Treeny didn't much care for war, herself. She understood the need for it--this one, especially. She understood why Barin-Jan and his Bonemaker should never be allowed to take the Borderlands, and she understood why living under the Empire would be a death sentence to ladies like herself, who had inherited property from family, and men like her brother, a Necromancer whose very brains chafed at the thought of life under the Pact.

She understood. She wasn't a fool.

But she didn't have to like it.

"What happened to you, I wonder?" she said to her unresponsive guest. "Did you lose your man to this war, too?"

She clapped a hand over her mouth.

Where--where--had that 'too' come from?

Jackem was alive. Of course he was alive. If he wasn't, they would have sent her notice. A man from the front would've shown up, dressed in the local Coven's colors, and presented her with the helm and the machete, shined and oiled, dents hammered out. No trace would be left in the helm of blood and hair and brain matter.

Peaceful. Antiseptic, memorial death.

Treeny wiped away her tears with the corner of her apron.

The visitor did nothing.

"Come," Treeny said at last. "The block's scrubbed, and it's time for bed. I can loan you a shift, if you need one for sleeping. Let's get you cleaned up."