He does not steel himself with platitudes against fear. He does not argue himself out of his shocked torpor with reason or logic. He does not tell himself lies about dignity or duty or respect.
It is the
insult of it which eventually goads him into moving, standing, acting.
Since his first visit - as a scrawny child in an outsized coat, led stubbornly through the winter woods by a great and faithful hound - he'd known this place as a sanctuary, a redoubt against the threats and horrors of Myrken Wood. A place of kindness and patience and wisdom, untouched and unstained by the wider world. A place where he might feel entirely safe.
The grisly scene within is intolerable to that memory.
Profane.Still chilled and shivering with the shock of it, but at the same time mercifully numbed, his thoughts rendered dull and foggy. The ruined remains at the hut's heart are a thing out of place, something that does not belong, a wrongness, a
wound to be washed and bound and set right.
Even so, his steps are hesitant as he creeps back into the single-room abode, cautious, and his breath catches as he looks once more upon the table.
Too much to consider, too much to let himself understand, so he clings to the simpler and more immediate matters which he might readily address. Practical. Pragmatic.
The room is dark and chill, but he knows where to find tapers and sulphur-matches.
* * *
"It's just meat."What had slumped at the table was barely recognisable as once-human, a meaningless jumble that not long before had walked and breathed and spoke gentle words. That it no longer possessed a discernable face was perhaps a mercy - no head to speak of, though perhaps one might have recognised teeth here and there if one were to look closely,
which the boy does not. Impossible that those fragments might once have belonged to a smile or a laugh, that they might once have been ordered into anything like
features.
"It's just m-meat."This lie lets him move scraps and pieces onto a blanket spread across the floorboards, to shift the main mass of it as if hauling a sack of grain, to heap it together and arduously with as much care as he could manage, to stubbornly drag the whole affair out into the light of day.
That error dispelled the lie in an instant, laying bare details the hut's dim interior had mercifully veiled.
There were Bertram's boots, undeniable, though their fur trim is caked with gore; heavy woollen trousers soaked through and stiffening; a calloused hand with skin tanned like copper; a deerskin coat with white wolf's mane at the collar and shoulders, now splashed and crusted as the rest.
"It, it's just meat."Bead-black eyes watch from the treetops as he retreats back into the shack, there to lose himself in desperate distraction.
* * *
Hours later. He's not sure how many, save that the autumn sun drifts towards the horizon, the clearing already sinking into the shadow of the encircling trees, and he's weary to the bone.
He has done his best. With unthinking effort and buckets of streamwater, with brush and rags and sand and tears he has scrubbed and mopped and scrubbed again, his world constricted to a few square feet of rough woodwork. He'd wept as he worked, paused here and there to cough hoarse sobs into his hands before setting to work again. Thin hands chapped raw, back and shoulders protesting bitterly, but the work is done.
Well, most of it.
He sits beside the blanket heaped with
just meat, and he is hollow. Too tired, too wrung-out to think, to feel, staring dully at the red ruin that remains of -
Winter evenings sat across from the woodsman, learning to draw creatures from a stout stick with patience and a sharp blade, each little figure less rough than the last; playing games of jumping stones on a stitched-cloth board, each of them striving to look more shrewd
and cunning
; tying bundles of wild herbs with twine to hang from the rafters, filling the room with their savoury aroma.- his friend. And more than friend, for he'd been a source of guidance with it, wisdom accumulated over years (how many years?) and offered gently when sought. A fixed point for a boy otherwise adrift.
His crows had already arrived when he finally emerged from the shack, a dozen or more black blots upon the grass and leaf litter, a silent circle around the blanket and its burden. Larger than their forebears and cousins, children and grandchildren of those fledglings the miller's boy had befriended years before. More hang back in the trees, similarly still.
At length one of the birds - this one starkly different from the rest, plumage of ivory-white, eyes gleaming like golden beads - steps nearer, advances upon the wreck, and a moment later the rest follow suit, the circle shrinking, tightening.
Cherny watches quietly, no word or gesture to stop them.
It's just meat.What follows is a strange, almost respectful affair, more akin to a sombre ritual than the raucous bickering of carrion-birds. Sharp and clever beaks tug scraps from flesh already rent and torn, each crimson morsel offered solemnly to a neighbour.
After a time the gold-eyed crow breaks from the circle, approaching the boy with a careful strut. It takes a span of heartbeats for his eyes to drop from the more distant scene, to fix on the ghost-pale bird and the gift she offers in red-streaked beak.
It's just meat.