The Outskirter's Secret Read Online Free PDF Page A

compelling. His
gaze flicked between Bel's face and Rowan's. His mouth worked
twice, as if there were something he needed to say, but did not
want to.
    Between them, the wounded woman writhed once
and emitted a clench-toothed wail as an appalling amount of blood
worked its way between her fingers.
    The question resolved itself. Custom and
tradition combined with need.
    He turned to Rowan. "I'm Jermyn, Mirason,
Dian." Bel vanished, gone to help the other wounded, and Jermyn
locked his right hand on Rowan's shoulder and quickly swung the
woman off the ground as they linked hands behind her legs. "Help me
get my wife to camp. I think she's dying."
     
    It was the help they rendered that gained the
two travelers the right to ask for assistance of their own. But it
was the exchange of names that guaranteed it would be granted.
    They began the short trip to the tribe's main
encampment slowly: three wounded people supported and aided by four
whole, carrying as much of the cached equipment as they could
manage. Soon, they were moving more quickly, with only two wounded
members.
    Rowan paused, looking back to where the body
of Jermyn's wife lay in the trackless brush, abandoned. "Aren't
they going to bury her?"
    The others were already far ahead. Bel had
dropped back, waiting for Rowan. "Customs differ. Even among the
Outskirters." She winced. "My people wouldn't leave her like this.
But we wouldn't bury her, either."
    At the last, Jermyn had sat long beside his
wife, holding her hand, while his comrades shifted impatiently,
waiting for her to die so that they might continue. Their only
interest seemed to be the length of delay.
    The steerswoman turned away and joined her
friend, disturbed. She remembered a poem Bel had once recited, that
included a death rite. "You'd burn her body?" It made her think
much better of Outskirters, to know not all were so callous.
    Bel adjusted the load she carried: two packs,
her own and one belonging to the man whose leg she had helped
steady while the old woman painfully extracted three arrows. "No.
That's only for heroes." One pack was on her back; the other she
shifted from hand to hand by its straps.
    "What, then?" Rowan took the extra pack from
her.
    "First," Bel informed her as they resumed
following the Outskirters, "we'd divide her."
    " 'Divide'?" Rowan was puzzled.
    Bel gestured. "Cut her up. Into pieces, at
the joints."
    The spare pack dropped to the ground as the
steerswoman stopped short, stunned and sickened. "What?"
    "With the torso in two pieces." Bel had
paused ahead and was looking back at her, matter-of-factly.
    Rowan swallowed her distaste. Customs
differed, as Bel had said. "And then?" Her voice sounded thin to
her own ears.
    "We'd cast her."
    "You're using that word in a way I don't
know."
    The Outskirter gestured with both hands: in
front of her, then out and around. "Spread the pieces, as far as
possible. Distribute them across the land."
    "Whatever for?"
    "For the sake of the land's soul."
    Religion. Rowan took a breath and released
it, then regathered the spare pack. Even in the Inner Lands
religion was the one thing most varied, and most inexplicable.
    Religion, she thought again, with a touch of
amused derision, then remembered: the farm of her childhood, the
desert so frighteningly near, grim and red but for the distant holy
green of the funeral groves—and the nearer groves, huge and old,
one sheltering the farmhouse itself. And more: small phrases spoken
to ward off evil, daily beliefs unfounded but cherished by her
family, the great solemn Midsummer Festival of joy and sacrifice .
. .
    In the absence of thought, one fell back on
habits of emotion. In the world of her childhood, to cut the body
of a dead person was sacrilege.
    But she was not a child, she was an adult,
and a steerswoman. There was no reason to believe that the
disposition of a corpse had any effect on its departed
inhabitant.
    She tucked the pack awkwardly under one arm
and rejoined Bel, and they continued