Of Sorrow and Such Read Free Page B

Flora here then you knew or guessed this house was safe. Tell me what happened. I must know if we are all to remain safe. Are you of the kind?”
    She nods, pulls herself together. “Of a sort. She—we—are shifters.”
    Cousins then, with the ability to change shape, but not inherently able to cast spells or heal or use herbcraft. Too close to their beast selves sometimes for their own good, too much of the animal instinct to always make rational decisions: fight or flight, no negotiation or solid consideration of actions. Shifters are often the most commonly caught; folk think they’ve found a woman but lost her familiar, however it’s really just the skin-changer’s animal side they’ve glimpsed. The uncharitable would have it that they are captured so frequently for they are the most heedless.
    “We meet, several of us, in the old mill to change our form. You cannot know what it’s like not to be able to show your true face to the world!” She realises immediately the stupidity of what she’s said—we none of us can show our true faces and live—and gives me a shamed look before continuing. “The building has been unused since Erika Strauss and her family were . . . The stories of ghosts keep the curious away, and we have used that to our advantage. But last night there was a man, waiting.”
    I hold her hand and she grips me hard. I feel bones move a little and when I wince she loosens her grasp.
    “He was up in the loft, and watched as we
changed.
” A flame of fear flickers in the very back of her eyes. “He had no terror. He leapt down and attacked us! Took off poor Flora’s hand with a single slash. We were so surprised, afraid at first.” She gulps.
    “Did you know him?”
    “Not his name, no, only that he was a guest of my brother’s—or rather, the manservant of the gentleman staying with Karol. I saw them when they arrived yesterday.”
    “And now he knows your identities?” They were all dead women then, and I and my household in danger too, if he’d followed her or Flora here. I began to run through all that was needed to effect a swift escape. “He knows who
you
are?”
    She smiles and it’s a slow terrible thing, an expression I suspect has been on my own lips more than I care to recall. “He did, not that the knowledge will do him much good now.”
    “Dead?”
    “And hidden.”
    “Well hidden, I hope. Concealed is good but fire is better,” I say, thinking of the hand we incinerated in the kitchen hearth this morning, of the bones I ground to pale powder and added to the store of such things I keep in the workroom.
    “Wrapped tight in an oilcloth, trussed with ropes, weighted down with rocks, and sunk into the middle of Edda’s Bath,” she says, her face lit with the joy which comes of hard survival. And I can finally place that note beneath her perfume: sour milk, untapped and curdling in breasts that war with the confines of her bodice, a combination of fluid and padding to stop anything from leaking through.
    Ah.
    I wonder who fathered the child she did not want. I wonder if it was stillborn or if her thin hands did the deed. Many more corpses in Edda’s Bath and the water will become unfit for anything.
    “Has anyone from your brother’s house gone looking for this man? His master?”
    She shakes her head, but not to say no. “I don’t know. I’ve not been to the manor, but stayed in my home. I didn’t want to raise suspicion—Karol would have asked after his wife, wanted to know why she had not come with me.”
    I nod, thinking perhaps we might all be saved. “And the other women?”
    “Bruised but safe, no marks that can’t be explained if need be. But Flora, poor Flora caught the worst of it.”
    “Never fear. She’s been put to rights. Come and see.”

Chapter Five
    “Will she be well?” asks Gilly, sipping at her watered-down wine. All our nerves are frayed. When I took Ina upstairs we found Flora and Gilly speaking intently, heads close, as if