She sighed, waving a hand dismissively. “I’m sorry, Chall. You’re right, of course. I don’t like it either.”
The man nodded but said nothing else, perhaps worried that to do so would be to risk her ire once more, and Maeve watched him drop back to walk with Priest, scolding herself. The man had wanted reassurance, that was all, and instead she had bitten his head off. The problem, of course, was that she had no reassurance to give, for she felt the same worry that had been writ so plainly on the mage’s face. And not just worry, either, but guilt. Guilt for how she’d treated the mage, yes, but not just that.
She felt guilt for the village—or what was left of it—before her. Felt that, somehow, she and those with her were responsible for it. She had no proof, could not imagine how that could be the case, but that did not change the way she felt, did nothing to answer the guilt roiling through her, guilt which she could see on the mage’s face as well. She’d felt such guilt before, of course, but had thought she’d left that behind her along with her old life. Say what you wanted about being married to an ass of a husband and spending your idle hours knelt in the dirt tending a garden which never seemed to produce well no matter how much you tried. Boring, maybe, but no one’s life depended on whether or not her tomatoes grew well.
Worry and guilt, yes, but as she stared at Cutter’s back, the man walking on toward the ruins of the village, either not noticing or not caring about those bloody lumps scattered in the fields around them, she found that she felt something else, too—anger.
Before she knew it, she was speeding up her pace until she was walking beside the man who had once been her prince. He turned, glancing at her, his expression unreadable, before turning back to the trail. “You know something,” she said, not bothering to try to hide the accusation in her tone.
“A few things,” he said. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
She frowned. “Something about this, I mean,” she said, waving her hand in a gesture meant to encompass the village and the corpses scattered about it like broken dolls.
“Yes,” he answered.
She waited, thinking there would be more, but the man said nothing else, only walking onward.
Maeve felt her anger rising to a boiling point. She glanced back at the others, the youth with his pale face, his lip trembling as if he were on the verge of tears and just managing to hold them back; Chall walking with his shoulders slumped as if he carried the weight of the world on them and looking little better. The man might act as if he cared for nothing but ale and whores, but Maeve knew it to be a lie, one he closely guarded, for the man’s problem was not that he did not care but that he cared too much.
Even the normally unflappable Priest looked troubled, his eyes roaming the fields and each corpse as if he meant to commemorate them to memory. All of them, then, affected by the grim scene. All, that was, save for Cutter whose expression betrayed nothing—except perhaps impatience. “Well?” she demanded, her anger overriding a caution which would have normally warned her off of talking to the man in such a way, for she had seen how the man dealt—nearly always with a bloody finality—with people who he felt disrespected him.
But while many aspects of the man before her felt infuriatingly the same, it was clear that the years had worked some changes in him, for he only glanced at her, his expression not one of fury but one which was still unreadable. He studied her for a moment, as if thinking, then he seemed to make a decision. “Did you notice the corpses?”
She glanced back, making sure that the others were out of earshot, then leaned close. “Of course I noticed them,” she hissed. “How could I not? Corpses are a lot of things, but they’re generally not subtle.”
He gave a single nod, seemingly oblivious to her anger. “And did anything about them strike you as odd?”
“Call me crazy,” she said, “but I’m always a bit put off by an entire village being slaughtered.”
“Not an entire village,” he said.
“What?”
He nodded his head in the direction of the village, and she followed his gaze to see figures moving about the smoking ruins in the distance, and she clenched her fists at her sides. “Oh, right. So a few survived. Well, that’s okay then. Maybe we should have a celebration, throw a party.”
“You’re angry with me,” he said, with no more feeling in his voice than if he’d been commenting on the weather.
“And here I thought I was hiding it so well,” she said. “You know, an entire village—sorry not an entire village, but a damned far amount of it from what I can see—has just been slaughtered. It might do you good to show a little bit of damned feeling.”
“And would doing so bring the dead back to life?” he asked. “Would it close their wounds and take away their grief?”
“That…well, no.”
“Then what good would it do them?”
“You’re right,” she said, “why bother, you know, being human? Better to be some unfeeling brute who doesn’t pay attention to anything at all, is that it?”
“I pay attention, Maeve,” he said softly. “Now, the corpses. Have you looked at them? Closely, I mean?”
Maeve wanted to snap at him then, to tell him that, as a general rule, most people, human people, avoided looking closely at corpses whenever possible. But she didn’t have the energy, felt exhausted, so instead she only sighed, turning to glance around the fields again, searching for one of the unfortunate souls who’d been slaughtered. It didn’t take long to find one, this one the body of a
