Below them, cleared fields gave way to forests and fields, walled towns to villages and hamlets dug into the very hillsides where their goats grazed. Such places rarely had room to host a thousand travelers, but the king was generally invited in while the rest of the column set camp outside.

Princess Rose was assigned the night watch, which rather neatly avoided imposing her upon their hosts.

When the villages grew further between, they circled the wagons, camping crouched over the road. Aaron liked to join Rose on her watch. The sky was not so vastly far, at night; the darkness tucked itself down over him like a cavern’s roof, each star a crystal speck reflecting errant light.

“I have no idea what I’m to call the alarm for,” Rose confessed, even less a connoisseur of forest noises than he.

Considering that her watch shift always had one more body on it than the others, he doubted they expected her to.

Messengers were on the road each day, fresh horses kept for them at every village that could support it. King Orin received regular reports on the progress of the other noble’s troops, on the frequency of dragon sightings, on the fierce weather that seemed to be holding off the first of the skirmishes.

“Your sister is making good time,” the Lady commented, passing one such report to him as they sat before a cook fire. “Are you excited to see her again?”

“Nervous,” he replied. His sister’s handwriting was tight, and almost totally lacking in the little loopy flourishes the other nobles seemed to add without restraint. He could read this, given enough time. Which made it both the first thing he really knew of her, and the first he liked. He didn’t let liking turn to anything so foolish as hope. “I’m rather different from the brother she last saw.”

“Some would consider that a good thing,” said the Lady.

“And will she consider it a good thing, that our father is in jail?”

“She’ll prefer it to him being dead already.”

Markus had been partially responsible for one of those, and Aaron the other, but that wasn’t exactly a point he could use in his own defense.

“How long will it take her?”

“A week or so after we do, I should think.”

* * *

Northern griffins were long-range fliers. Aaron was not. This meant his wings and his legs had equal opportunities for getting sore. He slid from his saddle, and regretted the action immediately. Riding was terrible, but touching ground again was worse. His knees started up an immediate and rather sharp protest.

“If my legs are going to hurt this much,” he said, “I’d like it to be from using them.”

“This is a mounted column, Aaron. You’re not walking,” Lochlann said, with an entirely unwarranted lack of sympathy. “Now walk it off.”

“Do you hear him?” he asked, turning to Rose. “Do you think he hears himself?”

“You really must improve your posture,” the princess said. But she’d touched ground and frozen every bit as much as he had. Princesses hidden away in the royal quarters hadn’t much more riding experience than rats, as it turned out; she’d had her first lesson at the same time as him, the both of them under Lochlann’s tutelage. Following which she’d apparently sought out at least one primer on the topic. After days of riding next to her reminders, he felt he’d done the same.

“Walk it off,” Lochlann repeated. And because he was nominally speaking to Aaron alone, he didn’t even have to add the Your Highness.

The flea-bitten mare made the decision for Aaron, jerking her reins to lead him in the same slow circle he’d seen the scouts do with their own horses, when they’d come back from a hard ride. Except he didn’t think it had been the horses leading, then. With a distinct lack of complaint, Rose joined him. He could just about stand straight again, at the end. He fished a treat for both horses from his saddlebags, and one for himself, too. Rose declined hers. Lochlann hadn’t earned one, and didn’t get one, and closed his mouth when it became clear he wasn’t getting a chance to turn one down. He opened it again, of course.

“Do you have anything in those saddlebags besides horse treats?” Lochlann asked.

“Population records,” Aaron replied.

“...One day,” said the good lieutenant, “I will be able to tell when you are lying.”

Aaron looked the man in the eye, crunched down on his radish, and politely declined to disagree.

* * *

They were reaching the end of the O’Shea holdings—a little over half their journey completed, with the last hamlet days behind them—when they stopped.

Aaron had been riding. Towards the front of the column, where he wasn’t quite so surrounded, and didn’t have to wait for news to propagate through the column. His first day of riding—of unexplained stops and starts, of waiting with straining eyes and ears and Seventh Down as twitchy under him as he felt—had been enough to teach him that he wasn’t a middle-of-the-caravan sort of fellow.

They stopped now for a rather obvious reason: the Lady was waiting for them in the middle of the road, her hood back.

“You remember that homestead on the border?” she asked the king, with no preamble.

“The one my father kept ordering to move to a proper village?” Orin replied.

“To no one’s surprise,” she said, “they should have listened. Come, Markus. Let us earn our keep.”

They went in as wolves, ducking off the road and into the forest, shadows cool over his fur and ferns brushing his shoulders. There was something altogether too easy in running next to her.

A mile further on, the forest gave way to farm fields, the clustered buildings of the homestead centered among them and utterly still. Birds sang, unconcerned. A squirrel jeered down at them from a tree. The Lady led them in a lope around the perimeter, stopping now and then, ears pricked and nostrils flaring. He was still sorting out the things this nose told him, but the strongest trace he got of humans was the smell left on their own skins. He scented old fire, though. And something that hadn’t rotted so sweetly as the fox’s flowery grave.

The stalks of last year’s crops prickled and broke under his paws as they made their way towards the buildings. A few maple seedlings had taken up root in the herb garden, doing their best to grow tall faster than the neighboring mint could grow wide. The chickens were dead in their hutch, clumps of feathers that froze and thawed and rotted all where they were. The ashes of three pyres stood out back. Not fresh; just black mounds, slumped from the spring rains. The goats had escaped their enclosure, and bleated warningly down from the roof of the main house. Maybe a real wolf couldn’t have gotten to them there, but Aaron’s eyes traced a likely path up the wood stack before he remembered he didn’t eat meat. He bared his teeth at them, on principle.

The Lady gave the air one last sniff. Then she rose up on her hind legs, her cloak already falling away around her, and was human again by the time she’d fully stood.

Aaron, lacking such ambitious balance, unclasped his cloak from the ground.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“Wood stack’s too high, chickens look to have starved, goats have had the run of the hay bales all winter. First few deaths, they bothered making pyres for. Didn’t keep it up. Might be that they ran out of able bodies to do so, or might be that going outside proved a bad sort of idea. Last town didn’t mention anyone getting through for help, so. Probably the latter. Anything I missed?”

“The house,” she said.

“Yeah,” he agreed. He hadn’t missed it. His gaze flicked to the pyres, then back to the house in question, closed and still but not entirely quiet.

The militia burned unattended bodies. Before their own families could identify them, ofttimes; that was why scribes sketched their portraits. It had been the polite thing, even in Twokins, to drag a body out where the militia would trip over it, or at least to weigh it down and roll it in the river for the Minnow’s fish to fatten up on. Human bodies weren’t a thing to leave lying about where just anything could move in.

“You’re going to tell me we have to go inside, aren’t you,” he said.

“I was rather thinking we’d torch the place, instead,” said the Lady, who needed to stop saying things like that before he liked her.

They reported to His Majesty, first, back where the column still waited.

“You’ve no idea what killed them?” King Orin asked.

“They’ve been dead for weeks at the least, Your Majesty,” the Lady said. “It could have been anything from a snow wasset to a bocuk. It’s not exactly a fresh sort of trail.”

“There might be more signs of what hunted them, inside,” said one of the King’s party, some minor noble who’d joined them at a village a week or so back. He was scowling rather pointedly at the Lady. And at Aaron, but it was the sort of look Aaron was used to, so he felt rather at home.

“We don’t know what’s taken up in the bodies,” the Lady said. “Nothing smart enough to get itself back outside, but even corpse flies could be dangerous, given this long to fester. I’ll not be putting my journeyman at risk for a might.”

“Nor yourself,” the noble said, like he meant it for an insult.

“Least of all,” the Lady agreed. “You’re welcome to go in, my lord.”

They brought salters back with them, to set a perimeter. Archers and pikemen, in case anything stumbled through the flames. Weighted nets and oil and a few ready torches, for anything that wasn’t stopped by the rest.

The house caught readily enough. The things inside screamed. Not the sort of scream that came from a throat; the scream of something wet, heated and shriveling.

“Why is it only humans this happens to?” Aaron asked, as they watched the flames.

“I told you already, Markus,” she said. “We break. We broke ourselves, long ago. They called it magic then, when doppeling was a new thing, before they pushed things to the point of the Letforget. The same fault lines that let us change leave gaps; when death takes us, what we leave behind is a hollow thing, with a hundred cracks to be wormed through.”

“What if Death doesn’t take you?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the flames. “Do you just… haunt your own body, until it decays around you?”

He could see her, out of the corner of his eye; it was a sharp sort of look she sent him.

“What has you thinking of that?” she asked.

“Something someone said to me,” he said. “What is a ghost? Is it just another kind of revenant? Do they even know they’re dead? How can you tell one from a human?”

“How can you tell a puss-in-boots from a cait sidhe?” she asked. “It’s in what they’ve done, and what they’ll do yet. Be happy you don’t need to know more. Humanity wouldn’t survive another.”

“That’s not actually helpful, you know,” he said.

Her lips quirked. Something in the burning house went pop, and he didn’t think it was the wood. “Didn’t the princess give Aaron a certain book of kingdom tales to practice his reading? That copy she found you is a second edition. I would give it a glance, were I you. Before the royal librarian discovers its absence.”

* * *

He didn’t have Kingdom Between the Hills with him. He had another book, though. With Rose’s help, he looked the little homestead up: seven had been living there, at last census.

“...You have population records,” Lochlann said, which was rather missing the point.