Blackveil

Broil of summer. That’s what his gramma used to call it when the air was dense with moisture, there was no wind to move it, and the sun seared everything it shone upon.

Not that it was like the old days when a criminal might hang for weeks, or was locked up in a gibbet till he rotted away to bone. Sergeant Corly, who’d been soldiering forever, said quite a stink used to fill the square back then.

But it was not yet summer, not even spring, the air was still crisp, and King Zachary did not allow criminals to hang indefinitely and so ordered them cut down after execution.

When Hank asked Sergeant Corly why, the old soldier shrugged and said, “King says it ain’t civilized to keep corpses hanging about.” Then he shook his head, muttering about the good old days and proper punishment for traitors.

Hank was just glad he didn’t have to stand guard over stinking corpses, and if the king didn’t want them hanging about, well it was all right with him. Of course he had to wait out the day to see if anyone bothered to claim the bodies. He hoped someone did, so he and Snuff didn’t have to dig the graves themselves. Snuff was lazy about it and made the graves shallow. Hank wasn’t inclined to work too hard himself, especially for criminals, and these men had been bad. Mirwellians who followed the traitor Immerez. They’d helped abduct Lady Estora.

A small audience had come to the hanging, but according to Sergeant Corly, executions were no longer the events they’d once been before King Zachary’s time. Nowadays they were held with little fanfare or public notice. A small crowd of people still came, though, like vultures. They spat on the condemned, hurled stones and insults at them. Although Hank saw true rage on their faces, he didn’t think they abused the prisoners because they had abducted Lady Estora or done some other specific criminal act. No, he thought they did it because they could. They could take out all their anger and frustration at the world for their problems, their poverty, on the prisoners who were the lowest of the low, who could be abused but could not fight back. Undoubtedly it made them feel stronger, more powerful, than their own wretched lives usually allowed. Hank never saw nobles or wealthy persons attend executions unless it was for one of their own.

Snuff sauntered over and nudged him. “Look,” he said, pointing. “We may have one less to bury.”

An old man entered the square leading a mule hitched to a ramshackle cart. He walked slowly, his shoulders hunched. When he halted before them, he drew himself up and briefly Hank was reminded of the archers up on the castle walls, for his shoulders were broad and his forearms thick with muscles. But then he started to tremble. Hank had seen those shakes before in his gramma. Some had whispered she was possessed by evil spirits and he scowled at those hateful memories. She’d just been sick was all.

“I come for my boy,” the man said.

“Raised you a traitor, eh?” Snuff asked.

Hank wished Snuff wouldn’t harass family members this way on the few occasions they came to collect their dead. It seemed to him they didn’t deserve to be punished, too.

“This way, sir,” Hank said more courteously. He brought the man over to the trio of bodies and lifted the blanket shrouding the first one. Hanging was not a gentle death and the hanged were not easy to look upon.

After a difficult moment the man shook his head. They went on to the next. Again the shake of the head. When Hank lifted the blanket of the third, the man shuddered and his eyes filled with tears. Hank’s heart sank for the hanging of this fellow hadn’t gone well. He’d fought them all the way to the noose, so it hadn’t been set just right. The condemned man did not die quickly and they all had to watch for painful minutes as he struggled and swung at the end of the rope until finally he ran out of fight and died.

“Is this your boy?” Hank asked.

“Aye.” The man nodded, his voice scarcely more than a whisper. “This is Clay.”

Hank helped the man load the body of his son into the back of the cart while Snuff watched with a jaundiced look. Normally, if family came to collect a body, there was more than one to take it away and Hank and Snuff left them to it. But Hank remembered his gramma and had pity for the old man.

“My thanks,” the man told Hank, brushing a shaking hand through his hair.

Hank nodded.

“Good riddance to a traitor,” Snuff said loudly.

The man started, but then turned his back on them, leading the mule away. The cart with its shrouded burden clattered over the stone paving.

“Why do you do that?” Hank asked Snuff. “Why are you mean to the families? They aren’t the criminals.”

Snuff spat out a wad of tobacco, just missing the nearest corpse. “Those criminals got made,” he said. “Someone raised them bad.”

Hank watched the mule cart as it disappeared down the street. He understood what Snuff was saying, but he also could tell the look of a man who loved his son.

PREPARATIONS

All thoughts of the masque were shoved to the back of Karigan’s mind as plans for the expedition to Blackveil unfolded. Captain Mapstone called her, Lynx, and Yates to her quarters confirming Karigan’s suspicions about which Riders would be going into Blackveil with her. Lynx, with his wilderness skills, Karigan could understand. But Yates? Dear, lighthearted, funny Yates? He was an excellent Rider, but to her mind it was almost like tossing a tasty morsel to the lions.

“Do you have to look at me like that?” he demanded.

“Like what?” she asked, conscious of Lynx and Captain Mapstone gazing at her.