“I don’t know,” he admitted. “We don’t even know their names or where they came from.” He rose and dusted his hands off. “We need to return to the fortress.”
She grabbed his elbow. “Wait. Have you seen enough of the body?”
A slow nod. Good. So had she—and she’d had enough of the smell, too. She’d committed it to memory, noting everything that she could. “Then we’ve got to bury her.”
“The ground’s too hard here.”
She stalked through the trees, leaving him behind. “Then we’ll do it the ancient way,” she called. She’d be damned if she left that woman’s body decomposing in a stream, damned if she left her there for all eternity, wet and cold.
Javelle pulled the too-light body out of the stream, laying it on the brown pine needles. Rowan didn’t say anything as she gathered kindling and bra
