gone back to the earth in a day or two—or into somebody's belly.'
Kellen grimaced, looking at the floating corpse. He hated the thought of actually touching it, but as it turned out, he didn't have to. One of the things Idalia had brought in her pack was a coil of light rope. After a few tosses, she managed to get it around one of the hind legs, and then handed the coil to him.
Then she took a keystone out of her pocket, and held it between her palms for a moment.
A thread of light—scarcely brighter than the sunlight, and just barely visible—wound rapidly around the carcass, until it had spun into a sort of cocoon.
'There. Now it won't fall apart while it's being dragged away,' Idalia said. 'Remember what I said about keystones? This is the sort of thing they're good for; making something to take the place of something we could do with a physical object like, say, a net. Except that we don't want to touch that thing, and the spell is very temporary, so it won't need much power.'
He nodded; that made perfect sense.
Idalia motioned to him to start pulling. 'You're stronger than I am. Drag it off someplace—away from water. Just keep the rope taut, and shake it free when you're done.'
To Kellen's relief, Idalia's plan worked. He was afraid that the carcass was going to be too heavy to move, but once it was out of the water, he was able to keep going in what was more or less a straight line. He dragged the gruesome corpse several hundred yards into the forest, wondering where an appropriate location to deposit it would be. Mindful of Shalkan's lessons, he didn't want to be a bad neighbor and leave garbage in front of somebody's house. But it was very hard to tell just what was a house and what wasn't, here in the Wildwood.
Finally he came to a place that looked reasonably deserted to him. 'Is this okay?' he asked aloud, feeling just a little foolish. 'Does anyone mind me leaving this here?'
There was no response. He took that as assent—or else there wasn't anything living here but ordinary wildlife. He dragged the body to within a few feet of him and then shook the rope vigorously. As Idalia had promised, the loop widened again, and after a few tries, he was able to flip the rope free and coil it up again.
When he returned to the spring, Idalia had unpacked and laid out the rest of their gear, and was busy pinning her long braids up on top of her head. Except for a tight band of linen around her breasts and a hip wrap, she was naked. He gulped, and tried not to stare. She seemed oblivious to his embarrassment.
'Well come on,' she said, 'get your clothes off. You don't want to get your leathers all mucky. Cleaning them of this stuff would be almost impossible—and they'd smell like dead fish forever!'
He was just glad he had something on under the leathers!
The pond was dead, unfortunately. He wasn't sure how long the deer had been in it; long enough to kill everything that couldn't escape, anyway. Once they'd used the green willow sieves to seine the dead fish and most of the scum and dead water plants out of the water, it was time to switch to shovels to dig up the dead plants surrounding the pond—muddy work, but easy. Fortunately, the pond hadn't been a very large one to begin with.
'Now what?' Kellen asked, when that was done. By now the day was well advanced, and he was glad enough to be wearing as little as he was.
'Now,' said Idalia gaily, 'we bail!' Picking up one of the buckets, she waded carefully out into the middle of the pond.
Kellen watched as she scooped up a bucket of murky brownish water and flung it toward the trees, then shook his head and followed suit. If there was anything more useless than trying to bail out a spring-fed pond, he couldn't imagine what it was, but if that was what Idalia wanted, then that was what he was going to do. Cautiously, he followed her into the water.
At least it was cool, after what they had been doing, and kind of fun, as the two of them competed to see who could throw the contents of his bucket highest and farthest onto the dry earth beyond. And after a few minutes, Kellen could see that the level of the water in the pond was actually starting to drop.
'When it fills again from the spring beneath, the water will be fresh,' he said, finally realizing what Idalia was doing.
'That's right. And when it's fresh enough, we'll restock it. Now keep moving, lazybones!'
Idalia wasn't satisfied until the soft silt was showing in places at the bottom of the pond, then she finally called a halt, wiping her sweaty forehead with the back of her hand.
'Okay, that's enough for now. Let's go for a swim and have lunch while it fills. There's nothing more we can do here till then.'
'Swim? Where?' Kellen was intrigued.
