Aaron stopped the cart and Thoko jumped to the ground. The little bag full of silver juggled against her thigh. She, Yamikani and Greg walked up to the entry of Eoforwic’s catacombs. Her palms were sweating, and not just from the sun. Would the guards let her take her father’s body? Did she have enough money to bribe them if they refused?

Greg carried the linens they were going to wrap the body in, her mother the blanket she had woven. It would go into the earth with him.

But first they needed to retrieve the body. Which was illegal.

They should have brought Lord Feleke, or Imani. Or the Countess deLande. Someone with the authority to override the guards’ orders.

Thoko bit her lips nervously as she approached the men at the gate. She was proud that her voice barely shook as she said: “I’ve come for my father.”

The two men covered in silver looked at her, her mother, Greg, the cart. “Really, Miss?” the older one asked. They clearly remembered her. “Where are you going to take the body?”

“I’m going to take him to my land,” she said, trying to project confidence. “So he may finally rest.”

“It’s quite restful here, Miss. Look, you ain't’ the first one asking this. Keeping him up on the shelf is one thing, but if you take him into the city, it’s our jobs.”

“I won’t,” Thoko said. “I won’t take him into the city.”

“Oh, really. Think you can make it through the forest with a dead body in tow? On that old cart? How much alchemy did you bring?”

Thoko glanced over her shoulder. Greg hunched up his shoulder but nodded at her. “I need no alchemy. I brought a werewolf. Will you let me pass?”

For a second, the guards looked stunned, but then they laughed. “Well, well, well, Miss, that’s a fine bluff.”

“I’m not bluffing.” Thoko reached into the little bag with the silver. Greg turned his head away. When she flicked the coin at him, he jerked and made no motion to catch it. She could see his jaws work as he pulled his sleeve over his fingers to pick it up. Under the guards’ scrutiny, he dropped it into his other, naked palm, closed his hand around it, and dropped it again. When he raised his palm, the portrait of the Roi Solei was almost recognizable, burned into his skin.

Thoko shuddered. Had he always hurt that much? She wouldn’t have flicked the coin at him without a word if she had known it would burn him so badly. Was that another thing that time affected?

She still remembered him getting just a rash, back when they had visited Sheaf together for the first time.

The guards slowly shifted their grips on their silver-tipped weapons. They glanced at each other, then the werewolf before them. Neither of them seemed eager to deal with that problem and after a breathless moment, they stepped aside.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Miss,” one of them said.

“I hope so too,” Thoko muttered under her breath as she walked past them. Greg followed her, breathing flatly. She could see goosebumps run down his arms, and she thought there was a light around his head, a blue shimmer around his hair. Or maybe it was just a trick of the eye. His eyes certainly watered, though that might have been the smoke from the torches.

They walked into the back of the catacombs quickly, and for once, Thoko didn’t talk to her father as she helped Greg and her mother to wrap him into the cloth.

Greg picked up the burden.

“Do you want—”

Help, Thoko had meant to say, but Greg turned and nearly ran out. He didn’t stop at the guards’ station, and when he reached the cart, he unceremoniously dropped the body inside and started coughing violently.

“I am never—never—going back in there,” he grunted, once he had caught his breath.

“Worse than the alchemy from the Eoforwic bridge?”

Greg nodded vehemently, but then slowed. “Maybe. Yeah.”

“Let’s get out of here?” Aaron asked. “We’re being watched.”

The guards were indeed staring at them, so Thoko climbed in and reached out to give her mother a hand. Greg followed last and then they were off, as fast as Aaron’s oxen would go.

It took nearly ten minutes for them to reach the trees and lose sight of the catacombs.

But they had time. They had food and drink, and if they didn’t reach First Camp today, well, they had blankets, too. The nights were warm and it didn’t look like rain.

And at First Camp, nobody would stop them from taking a dead body onto the train, at least as long as they were willing to travel in a cargo wagon. So they were sure to reach the Savre Camp tomorrow with the evening train. Thoko couldn’t wait to see her own plot of land, finally. Eyal had said it was a good one—all the land they had been given was good. The duke had made no attempt to screw them over in any way.

Probably David’s influence.

***

The Savre Camp had been rebuilt, bigger and better, with solid wooden walls, a roof above the train station’s single platform, and the first proper houses. In the centre of the Camp stood the repaired Meeting Hall. A single clay giant kneeled under the porch roof in front, chin resting on one fist in a thoughtful pose. It looked deliberately non-threatening to Thoko.

Travellers would likely think the figure just a memorial to the battle fought here. There was no sign that it might ever move and it didn’t have the glowing sigil burned into its forehead, but Thoko was sure that Eyal’s crew could wake it, should the need arise.

Otherwise, the crew likely would have used a different material than loam.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Thoko! Greg! You made it!”

Isaak came running at them from behind the golem, his arms spread wide. He made to hug Greg, spotted the white-wrapped burden he carried, and turned to Thoko instead. She smiled in relief when he wrapped his long arms around her, lifting her up in the air a bit and swinging her around. His grin was infectious as always.

“I don’t remember if you ever did meet my mother?” Thoko said, when he put her down again. “Yamikani.”

“Of course we’ve met,” Isaak said, and took Yamikani’s hand in both of his. “Right after you signed up with us. I’m glad you came, Mrs. Banda.”

Finally, he slapped Greg’s shoulder.

And there were Eyal, Nosson and Gavrel. Anshel wore a flap where his eye used to be, and he still limped. But he had pulled through the injuries sustained in the Rot-queens’ attack and also the five months after he’d been bitten. Too many others hadn’t.

Thoko introduced her mother around, conscious of the burden Greg still carried. Eyal seemed to think the same thing, because he asked: “Do you want to see the place?”

“Yes, please. How far is it to my plot?”

Eyal paused. “Oh. I was thinking—we do have a cemetery,” he said. “Unless you want him even closer to home?”

“You have—?”

But of course they had. So many people had died here during the siege of the Rot-queens, of course they had a place to honour their dead.

“We call it a cemetery,” Eyal said, with a slightly forced smile. “Laurent calls it his favourite place to rest. But yes. There’re safe grounds here.”

Speaking of the werewolf, there he was: Laurent came sauntering around the hall, in his human body, flanked by seven more werewolves. Three of them—Oli, Ruad and Anthony—Thoko recognized. She had no idea who the others were.

Greg frowned, too. “How’d you get the Lackland Company to assign you so many?”

“What, you don’t recognize them?” Isaak asked. “Mendel, Randal, Dicun and Harold?”

Greg repeated the names softly, his face doing something complicated as he looked from wolf to wolf. “Hello,” he said softly. He cleared his throat, and added: “Glad to see you made it.”

One of them bumped his head into Greg’s chest, tail wagging lazily. “They’re just learning to speak like this,” Laurent said. “But they’re glad you made it, too.”

He walked forwards, until he stood in front of Greg, holding out a hand. He didn’t quite touch the linen, but said: “He was a man of power in life, wasn’t he?”

He turned around and walked off before Thoko or her mother could answer, and Greg followed him. After a couple of steps, Greg flicked his head in a motion Thoko recognized. Clearly, Laurent hadn’t asked him if he wanted to come along.

“Father was a healer,” Thoko said, following the elder. “Will that be a problem?”

“We’ll bury him deep,” Laurent said, tossing his long brown hair. “No, it won’t be a problem. The Rot is retreating ever further.”

They walked past the communal hall, past Nosson’s kitchen and the space ahead—what looked like it would become a market place one day—and through a second gate.

“That’s new,” Thoko muttered to her mother. “There used to be only one gate, towards the railway station.”

Behind the new gate lay the cemetery, surrounded by its own walls. These even had a stone foundation. Orderly little paths and the stone-marked graves dominated half of the walled-off space, the other half belonged to the werewolves. Thoko could see where the earth had been flattened where they liked to lay in the sun. Right around a sturdy little building. It was no larger than a shed, but much nicer, with double doors that had a six-pointed star engraved in them in silver.

Eyal walked over and opened them, revealing a bier inside. Other than that, it really was a shed, with tools in racks along the walls.

“He’ll be safe here for the night,” Eyal promised, as Greg placed the body on the bier.

“We should use the rest of the light though,” Eyal added, and reached for the shovels, handed one to Isaak. “Do you have any special requirements? Any direction you’d like him to face?”

Thoko shook her head at the same moment as her mother said: “Just deep enough that the Rot can’t dig him up. Or the Valoise.”

“We can certainly do that, Mrs. Banda,” Eyal promised. He looked at the seven wolves already settling down. “Want to give us a hand? Or a paw?”

Oli jumped up, ears flopping eagerly. The rest of them only followed when Laurent held out his hand for a shovel. He looked around and pointed at a spot. “Here, in the sun will be good,” he said, and looked back at Yamikani. “Does that work for you?”

“Thank you,” Yamikani said. Her voice sounded rough. Thoko herself felt herself swaying a little when two of the giant wolves started to dig with their claws and the earth went flying. She caught a whiff of something stale, but before she could get nervous, the smell was gone again.

Had she just imagined that?

She couldn’t quite believe this was really happening. That they were finally...

Tomorrow. Tomorrow her father would finally find rest.

It didn’t quite feel real.

***

It was hard work, digging through what used to be forest ground. The wolves took turns deepening the hole and removing roots and stones, while Laurent, Eyal and Isaak used their shovels to get the dirt further out of the way. Thoko took a turn, too, smelling the fresh loam and sometimes the sickly sweet smell of the Rot.

About three feet deep, there was a layer of something slimy, reeking of death and decay, and Laurent pushed both Thoko and Isaak away. The elder’s yellow eyes flashed bright.

“Make it wider,” he ordered the digging wolves. “We want to get as much of this as possible while we’re at it.”

He stood guard over them, shovel raised to strike, dearing the Rot to rear its ugly head.

But nothing moved. As the werewolves unearthed the stinking mass, it changed. Much faster than should be possible, the sun burned out the wetness, and the slimy sheen vanished, until all there was were some strange white fungal growths and a lot of dead leaves.

“Figures,” Laurent muttered. “Coward.”

What would have happened if the elder hadn’t been here? If they had tried this at Courtenay a year ago, with only Greg to guard them against the Rot? Suddenly, Thoko was glad, glad for the delay, for having waited.

Yamikani wrapped her shawl tighter around herself and muttered a prayer to the ancestors.

Even with the widened opening, there wasn’t enough space for all seven wolves to help dig. A couple of them started at a new place, just on the other side of the earth they had piled up.

“Oi!” Eyal shouted at them. “Not there! You’ll push the heap right back into the grave.”

He sighed and walked over to direct their enthusiasm to a more useful place. “Here.

“You’d think they never did this before,” Isaak griped.

“You have dug a lot of graves?” Yamikani asked, looking around.

Isaak shrugged. “Graves, basements, foundations. Oh, and wells, of course. Anything we build around here gets the Laurent-treatment first. Except for the fields. Those we just ploughed real deep. Don’t have enough werewolves to cleanse them yet. Worst case, we might have to burn the first crops, but we’re hoping that as long as we don’t plant anything that roots too deep, we’ll be good. It’s not like the Rot is feeling brave right now.”

“The underground layers are getting thinner, too,” Isaak added as Greg jumped in with a shovel to help. “First few graves we dug, it was as thick as my arm is long.”

Now, it was barely a foot deep. Half a foot as it got closer to the werewolves’ resting places.

“It’ll take forever to do this in every settlement,” Yamikani said softly. “Still, it is good to start here.”

She looked around the little cemetery, at the flowers blooming on some of the graves. Thoko thought she could see the thoughts running through her mother’s head. Yamikani had never loved Loegrion, had only ever tolerated living on the cursed continent. Did she see it now, the dream? The great dream that had made Thoko join Eyal’s crew, a lifetime ago?

The dream of a free Loegrion, cleansed from the Rot, and free from the Inquisition’s—any Valoisian—influence.