Eighteen

Eyes that were normally blue had rolled upwards to white.

Skin that was normally fair was now grey.

Green grass and white roses ran red with blood…

The pair faltered, but only for a moment. Because even as Claudia's horrified eyes met Gurdo's, the same thought passed through their minds. Pod had been first on the scene at Clytie's murder, now he was first on the scene at Sarra's. Neither Claudia nor Gurdo believed in coincidence.

'Take him to the cave,' she hissed. 'A preparation of hemlock should do the trick.' God knew, the stuff grew rampant enough in these parts. 'You do know the dosage?' she added sharply, remembering the trug brimming with hellebores, hedge hyssop and monkshood that she'd seen over his arm, each a deadly poison in its own right.

'If you're asking, will I make it too strong so it does a Socrates on him, save your breath,' Gurdo retorted, 'I want my boy calm, not bloody paralysed. I'll use black hellebores. They'll put him in a deep sleep.'

But the sting to his words belied the fear in his eyes. This time it was the Guardian of the Spring who was looking for miracles.

'Stay with him while I tell Beth,' he said, and Croesus almighty, it was taking every ounce of their combined strength to prise Pod off the corpse.

'I'll go,' Claudia insisted, as they finally dragged him away. 'If ever a boy needed his father, Gurdo, it's now.'

That was a lie. As savage and shocking as this murder was, Claudia was more concerned with Beth's reaction when confronted with this second tragedy.

'Just make sure the pair of you are gone by the time I get back,' she called over her shoulder.

Gurdo nodded grimly, gratitude showing despite the rigid jaw and blenched skin, but his gratitude was misplaced. This wasn't just about Pod's potential shunning. All right, if even one sniff of his relationship with Sarra got back to the Hundred-Handed, he'd be banished on the instant and that the girl was dead — murdered — counted for nothing. He'd breached sacred rules against which there was no appeal, but Claudia wasn't doing this for Pod or for Gurdo. She was doing this for Sarra, and Clytie before her…

Me mother? No more than wind at the door. Pod's words flooded back as she raced down the path to the Field of Celebration. Seven summers old, I was, there or abouts, and what with me having no memories of me own Why no memories, though, that was the worry. Ducking the overhanging willows as she ran, she recalled numerous cases where death had visited a child's life so violently that the very horror of it had wiped clean memories of the event.

That little girl they found wandering the Capitol, for example. Her entire family had been butchered by a next-door neighbour acting on the orders of Almighty Jupiter himself, who'd told him these people were fiends in human form and that only by chopping off their heads would mortal man be free of demons. Mother, father, grandmother, eight-year-old son, six-year-old daughter and baby still in its crib were all slaughtered, except for the four-year-old, who'd been playing under the bed when the monster broke in. In his axe-wielding frenzy, he'd not noticed the child and though she escaped with her life and the memory of that terror had been blissfully erased, the girl had nevertheless grown up troubled and difficult, striking out at nothing, hurting relatives and friends for no reason. In the end, and aged only sixteen, she took her own life. But then tragedy always rolls on and on.

Whether trauma of that kind had crossed Pod's path, Claudia had no idea, but by drugging him, at least his stupor would slow everything down. It would give her time to grieve for a girl she'd barely known, yet who had been butchered with a savagery she would never forget. And it would give her time to think this whole thing through, because even as she first saw Pod, face blank in grief as he clutched Sarra to his breast, darker thoughts had run through her mind.

That his grief was genuine went without saying, but that four-year-old wandering the Capitol had triggered other memories. Like the cloak-maker's daughter who strangled her cousin ('I didn't know death meant for ever'). The cobbler's son, who started with kittens before slicing up his baby brother. And especially, yes especially, the poulterer's boy. Claudia remembered the story so vividly His father coming in from the back yard to find the boy kneeling over his mother, her chest so badly mangled there was hardly room for his blade. He kept stabbing and stabbing, as though he was an automaton, not recognizing his father, he couldn't say his own name and later, could remember nothing about it…

She pictured Pod as she'd left him, ashen and trembling, with only animal sounds coming from his mouth as he clutched a mangled spray of white rosebuds to his breast. The fact that there was no knife found at either murder scene didn't mean he hadn't thrown it into the undergrowth, while the fact that he had blackouts didn't mean he hadn't killed those two girls. And the fact that he'd killed Clytie and Sarra certainly didn't mean Pod wasn't sorry Claudia's footsteps echoed over the footbridge.

Two young girls, two crucial dates in the Hundred-Handed's calendar, copious amounts of blood. And yet… And yet…

As she ran up the steps onto the dais to wake Beth and break the bad news, there was only one thought tumbling around in her head. Assuming Sarra's arms had been spread out at her sides — and there was nothing to suggest they had been — her cheeks hadn't been reddened with rouge, her eyes hadn't been painted with kohl.

'Sarra?' Ailm barked, her voice still rough from sleep. 'I was only talking to the girl an hour or two back!'

Her face drained from shock, Beth couldn't speak. Dora, rising beside her, blinked rapidly.

'Are you sure she's dead and not pretending?' Luisa asked. 'Some of those novices are terrible practical jokers.'

'I'm so sorry, but there's no mistake.'

With a voice cracked with emotion, Claudia reported the multiple stab wounds that left Sarra's pink robe shredded in an attack that was almost orgiastic in its frenzy.

'If it helps,' she added, as finger signals flashed back and forth between the five women, 'Sarra put up one hell of a fight.'

The cuts in her hands stood proof to that. Her palms had been cut to ribbons.

'We have decided,' Beth said, and the calmness of her voice belied the shaking of her limbs. 'For once it is unanimous — ' she cast a glance at both Dora and Ailm — 'but it is our opinion that nothing of this must be broadcast to the outside world. It will achieve nothing while engendering panic'

Four heads nodded firmly in unison.

'I shall ask some of the sisterhood to take Sarra away to be prepared for the Journey, of course. But the pentagram will remain, the ceremony will continue, we will fire fifty blazing arrows into the sun's zenith as though nothing has happened.'

Like it did with Clytie, Claudia was tempted to snap, but then remembered that these women had just received a terrible shock. Arousing their animosity would gain nothing.

'You can't simply ignore it,' she pointed out calmly.

'Indeed, no,' Beth said kindly, holding up three bent fingers with the ghost of a smile. 'See? Swarbric has already been sent for.'

'So if you'll excuse us?' Ailm made no attempt to hide the hostility in her voice. 'We wish to mourn in private, if you don't mind.'

'Of course,' she replied, 'I understand perfectly,' and all things considered, was it any wonder they wanted her gone? Closing ranks was the one thing the Hundred-Handed did best. That, and covering up murder.

I suspect you meant to call me an angel, but you've just labelled me an old bat! The fairy's soft laugh rippled through the leaves in the forest. This is the cipher for angel

Absently watching half a dozen tearful women slip away as Beth whispered instructions to a stony-faced Swarbric, images floated before her.

For one more moment, Sarra was still trailing her spray of white roses down the path behind her…

Blushing furiously, but unable to meet Pod's eyes…

Timing her walk so that she'd bump into the young woodsman…

Through the thick sticky heat, Claudia saw the shine on the girl's long, silky hair. The even longer kiss the lovers had exchanged. The grass stains she and Sarra had laughingly removed from the girl's pale pink robe. At least Sarra's last hours had been happy, she thought, and dammit there was something in her eye that was making it water, and she just could not rub the bloody thing out.

While deep within the Cave of Resurrection, the spirits that buzzed like invisible bees guided a gentle soul down to the Underworld.

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