Mercifully, the spring-cave had been cool, and the season not yet high summer. Sadly, something had been at one of the hands, and there was, after all, the blood, and the other general nastiness attendant upon days-dead bodies. Her face—her face had been untouched, except for the bruise splashed across the right cheek.

In life, she had been beautiful.

Lute shuddered.

They had laid her in the parlor, across two benches pushed together, draped with an old quill they had found near the wood box. They had crossed her hands over her breast—whole one over chewed—and combed her hair until it fell in gleaming waves straight back from her face to the floor.

Her eyes had already been closed.

“Blue,” Cedar had said distractedly, touching her hair, her face, her folded hands. “Blue as tael-flowers, her eyes. You would have loved her, Master Lute, if you had seen her—as she was.”

Lute shuddered again, whether in pity or revulsion he did not know.

The boy had declined to wash or sleep, saying it was not so long until dawn and if he was to see Mother Aster and tell her the whole, he might as well be there when she came down.

“Besides,” he said softly, eyes on the dead girl’s face. “She’s home now. It would be graceless, to let her in the night alone.”

Pity locked Lute’s tongue. Leaving the reminder of three abandoned nights unspoken, he had gone to wash.

Washed, and in somewhat better control of himself, he quit the laundry and went to the guesting-room, dread ’round his heart like ice.

* * *

“MOONHAWK?” In the candle-glow he saw her, reclined among the pillows, wrapped in the blue cloak that she had not allowed him to remove. Her face was smooth, distant, childlike. Her breathing went in and out with regularity. He could not tell if her state was trance or sleep.