A Breath of Snow and Ashes Read Free Page B

man,” Roger said, interrupting my thoughts. He spoke very calmly, but paused to clear his throat. “Just—just here.”
    The daylight was beginning to fade, but I could see that he had gone pale. No wonder; the curled form he had unearthed beneath the charred timbers of a fallen wall was sufficiently gruesome as to give anyone pause. Charred to blackness, hands upraised in the boxer’s pose so common to those dead by fire, it was difficult even to be sure that it
was
a man—though I thought it was, from what I could see.
    Speculation about this new body was interrupted by a shout from the forest’s edge.
    “We’ve found them, milord!”
    Everyone looked up from contemplation of this new corpse, to see Fergus waving from the edge of the wood.
    “Them,” indeed. Two men, this time. Sprawled on the ground within the shadow of the trees, found not together, but not far apart, only a short distance from the house. And both, so far as I could tell, probably dead of mushroom poisoning.
    “
That’s
no Dutchman,” Sinclair said, for probably the fourth time, shaking his head over one body.
    “He might be,” said Fergus dubiously. He scratched his nose with the tip of the hook he wore in replacement of his left hand. “From the Indies,
non
?”
    One of the unknown bodies was in fact that of a black man. The other was white, and both wore nondescript clothes of worn homespun—shirts and breeches; no jackets, despite the cold weather. And both were barefoot.
    “No.” Jamie shook his head, rubbing one hand unconsciously on his own breeches, as though to rid himself of the touch of the dead. “The Dutch keep slaves on Barbuda, aye—but these are better fed than the folk from the cabin.” He lifted his chin toward the silent row of women and children. “They didna live here. Besides . . .” I saw his eyes fix on the dead men’s feet.
    The feet were grubby about the ankles and heavily callused, but basically clean. The soles of the black man’s feet showed yellowish pink, with no smears of mud or random leaves stuck between the toes. These men hadn’t been walking through the muddy forest barefoot, that much was sure.
    “So there were perhaps more men? And when these died, their companions took their shoes—and anything else of value”—Fergus added practically, gesturing from the burned cabin to the stripped bodies—“and fled.”
    “Aye, maybe.” Jamie pursed his lips, his gaze traveling slowly over the earth of the yard—but the ground was churned with footsteps, clumps of grass uprooted and the whole of the yard dusted with ash and bits of charred wood. It looked as though the place had been ravaged by rampaging hippopotami.
    “I could wish that Young Ian was here. He’s the best of the trackers; he could maybe tell what happened there, at least.” He nodded into the wood, where the men had been found. “How many there were, maybe, and which way they’ve gone.”
    Jamie himself was no mean tracker. But the light was going fast now; even in the clearing where the burned cabin stood, the dark was rising, pooling under the trees, creeping like oil across the shattered earth.
    His eyes went to the horizon, where streamers of cloud were beginning to blaze with gold and pink as the sun set behind them, and he shook his head.
    “Bury them. Then we’ll go.”
    One more grim discovery remained. Alone among the dead, the burned man had not died of fire or poison. When they lifted the charred corpse from the ashes to bear him to his grave, something fell free of the body, landing with a small, heavy thunk on the ground. Brianna picked it up, and rubbed at it with the corner of her apron.
    “I guess they overlooked this,” she said a little bleakly, holding it out. It was a knife, or the blade of one. The wooden hilt had burned entirely away, and the blade itself was warped with heat.
    Steeling myself against the thick, acrid stench of burned fat and flesh, I bent over the corpse, poking gingerly at the