In a corner of the world far removed from national conflicts and the sufferage of swelled egos with equally swelled power, the slow dripping of the flagging rain competed in staccato against the buzz of marsh-loving insects.

  “Little fuckers!” Morello squashed a mosquito fruitlessly trying to dig its face into his arm. It couldn't; he knew that, but that didn't seem to stop the little bastards from trying. The longer the drizzle went on the more he seemed to attract. He would have thought that they might be attracted to all the bodies lying about, free blood for the taking, but his luck was never so good.

  He stuffed another thumbful of casp into his lower lip, tasting the slightly salty, slightly sour flavor of the gunk. Didn’t do anything for him anymore, no upside to it, but that didn’t stop his fingers from twitching when he went too long without it. Morello scowled through the rain, looking about at what used to be a little hamlet parked in the middle of nowhere.

  Ugh. Why did he always get the shitty jobs? He knew why, of course. Sigrid had some stick up her ass, frigid bitch, put him on fetching. He could feel a dampness seeping into his sock, making it stick to his toes, and every time that he tried to adjust his foot, to find a more comfortable position, it just made it worse.

  Fucking Sigrid. Weren’t his fault, not really. If she hadn’t been so cold this last week, everything would have turned out fine, all things made proper, just the way she liked it. But she was cold, and Morello was still a man, wasn’t he? He didn’t rightfully know about that second part, but he knew he still felt urges like a man. He might not get a heady buzz off casp anymore like he used to, might not feel the cold clinging to his skin the same way he once had, he might be too aware of the little pebbles of dew sliding down his back, and all the buzzing of the mosquitoes might sound like someone trying to beat a door down, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel things. Felt them more keenly now if anything.

  Yeah, maybe he had found some girls in this little ruin before they had made it such, and maybe he had encouraged them to help him ease his woes. Weren’t really cheating on Sigrid, was it? They were supposed to be above these little people now, so how could anyone rightfully call it something like adultery? They couldn’t, Morello knew that for a fact, and anyone that tried was just trying to fuck with his life, and when Sigrid turned cold that was exactly what she liked to do.

  And what was he supposed to do, anyway? Not let her go? He’d told the four that the one that pleased him best got to leave with their life, hadn’t he? Was she after making him a liar now? Such a pretty thing she’d been, blonde, full of life, and blonde. Jealous is what she was, Sigrid that is, and what a pitiful thing to be jealous of the cattle. Morello would laugh at the thought of that, like Sigrid was jealous of a cow, if he weren’t so fucking miserable, and wet, and annoyed, and wet.

  He swatted another mosquito as it landed on his cheek, and he felt the warm splash of the insect’s blood against his cold face far too keenly.

  “Fucking!” Morello threw his hat in the mud and stomped on it. He screamed curses at the world, pounding with the heel of his boot on the top of the fine headwear crushing it into the ground. The rage passed a moment later, and Morello was left there, looking down at what he had done to himself, again. It had been such a fine hat too, all tall and wide, sleek and black. Hadn’t looked well at all on the burger, the fat man who was all jowls only looked fatter and older in it.

  “Shit!” He kicked the hat, ignoring it as it fluttered away and down to the ground.

  Best be about it, or Sigrid would sic him on some other bullshit duty.

  Morello tramped to the house just ahead of him. He knew it was the right one by the old man out on the stoop. Dead old man he was, a ragged sword through his chest, pinning him to his slowly swaying rocker. His eyes were open, looking down at the hilt of the shoddy looking blade neatly lying in his open hand, like he was more shocked than anyone that it should be there. Morello guessed he might’ve been.

  There was a sound coming from around back of the house, so that’s where he went. He found what he was after, someone that by all means looked like a young man, lanky blonde hair falling across his face, gray eyes staring out at the waving stalks of wheat growing in the patch out back of the house. The moon was dark tonight, but just the little bit of light falling out of the sky was more than enough for them to see clear as day by. The little shit was staring at a brown hound tied to a post about ten feet off the back porch; scrawny little thing was barking away, but its voice was all cracked, must have been at it for hour.

  “What do you think, it’s thinking?” Ferro asked.

  Morello gritted his teeth as he clomped up the steps, old boards creaking beneath his boots. Why did he always have to babysit all the fucking crazy ones? The gods must have it out for him in particular, always had. It was better than actually finding the new ones and bringing them over, but not by much. At least this one kept most of his looks, not something that could be said for all of the coven, probably why the kid liked him, because they were similar in that way. Stupid fucking name, coven. It made them sound like a bunch of witches, but it’s what Sigrid liked, so it’s what they said.

  “It’s probably thinking that it’s about to starve to death now that you done killed the one that feeds it,” Morello said.

  “You reckon?” Ferro turned those big gray eyes on him, like the idea never occurred to him that a hound would be put out by what they’d done.

  “Dogs don’t think, idiot.” Morello contained the urge to slap the little shit, barely. “They bark, they eat, and they screw so they can make more dogs. On occasion, they bring balls back to you when you toss ‘em, but there ain’t a thing going on between the ears.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Ferro said, looking back at the dog. “I once knew a dog that could count.”

  “Don’t lie to me, boy.”

  “Ain’t a lie, honest. Wessly Caith had a dog that could count. He’d say a number, and his dog would bark that many times. Smartest animal I ever saw.”

  “That’s not counting, that’s a trick. If I say two and slap you twice enough times, how often you think you’ll flinch after a while?” Morello asked.

  The lanky boy just stared back, no look of thought or any kind of emotion on his face. “Wouldn’t flinch. Don’t flinch anymore.”

  “What’re you doing out here, Ferro? Word was to get your fill, make sure you’re tidied over for a week or two, and head back to the center of town. Sigrid’s looking for you.”

  “I was doing that, Mor, honest I was. Drinking my fill, making sure I’m well over for a while, gettin’ out all of them feelings like you taught me to do, but I don’t think this little corner of the burg was quite big enough for that. Got to the end of it, out to where there’s only the grain and the grass moving, and I still had feelings left. Thought I’d have myself a sit and think on ‘em for a while. Thinkin’ helps get the feelings gone just as good as anything in my experience.”

  “Thinking? What’s a dullard like you got to think on?” Morello sneered.

  “Not so much as you, I don’t think.” Ferro looked up to the moon, or at least, where the moon would have been if the pissing clouds had gotten out of the way. “I ain’t the smartest one. I know that. Takes me a while to think it all through, but I get there, I reckon.”

  “Well, you gotten there yet?” Morello asked.

  “Just about.”

  “How those feelings…feeling?”

  Ferro tried to wipe off his pants as he huddled forward to stand but only sprayed a bit of water out onto the porch. “They’re about as snoozy as they get,” he said. Then he looked at Morello with that wide smile of his, the one that makes Morello forget all the irritations in his life for just a minute.

  Morello couldn't help but snort a laugh and tassel the lad’s hair. Ferro didn't look like he enjoyed it, the kid rarely looked like he enjoyed anything, but Morello did it anyway. “Best make our way back then.”

  “Best on, boss.”

  They turned away from the sprouts of wheat and the barking dog out behind the house. Morello caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye as he turned, saw the rope that tied the pooch to the post flutter to the ground cut, and heard the animal run off into the night. Such an odd kid.

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  Just as they were about to make it around the corner of the house, he noticed a body laying out near the edge of the field, a pretty young woman with hair like hay. She laid half-in a shift, like she was trying to put it on while running. Eight shoddy looking blades stuck up out of her pale back, making her into some grotesque pincushion decorating the yard. Guess she hadn’t made it all the way out of town after all, Morello thought. Now, Sigrid really did have nothing to complain about.

  Ferro lumbered after. He always seemed to lumber, couldn't help it. His legs had always grown a bit too fast for the rest of him, and now they would stay that way if what Sigrid said is true. He looked about as they trekked through the mud and saw the little houses built with rickety boards, scavenged from other structures that either collapsed or needed to be torn down at one point or another. A board stood out to him as having been painted at least three times, all the colors dull; people out this far can’t afford anything better.

  The rain stopped, which he figured is a good thing, but that didn't keep the mud from sucking at his boots with each step. The gods never took back their miracles Sister Sinta always said, and what was rain other than a miracle?

  They passed a woman lying in the muck in front of a burnt-out house, Caberlin’s work probably. The unburnt half of her reminded him of Sister Sinta a bit, any hint of curly black hair did these days, though she had never been too far from his mind. She was one of the feelings he was supposed to do away with, that’s what Morello always told him, and who better to listen to than that man. Ferro kicked a rock as he passed, sending it through half-drawn shutters with a crack that satisfied something in him and drew an annoyed look from Morello.

  He had to keep reminding himself that Morello wasn’t a man, Ferro wasn’t either for that matter. It was a difficult thing to do, considering whenever he looked down into the river that same, bland face stared blankly back at him. Just cause he still looked like himself, just cause Morello still looked normal enough, didn’t make it so.

  Morello was a big man, tall too, and he imagined that women found him pretty handsome, probably why he managed to always keep on Sigrid’s good side, given how much yelling the two did at each other. Ferro had been promised good looks too, that’d been part of the whole deal, but nothing came about from it. He wasn’t quite so sure what made a man look good, just knew that it wasn’t what he had, but all the other parts had come out as a fair shake, so he didn’t complain too much about not getting the pretty face he imagined.

  He liked Morello, found him interesting and strong. Stronger than Ferro at least, Morello had made that unmistakably clear in that first week when Ferro thought he might have just become the strongest thing in all creation. Weren’t so. He’d have said he had the scars to prove it, but those had gone too.

  They stalked through the town, finding the odd house collapsed or another burned. The west side had been Caberlin’s part of it, far from Ferro’s east side, and he couldn’t rightly say he agreed with all the wanton burning of things. The things themselves had never done him a bad turn, and there had been so much work put into making them. Only fools broke a thing just because they could, Ferro estimated, and doing that was just plain evil Sister Sinta would have told him.

  Then he was back to thinking about her, and whether she had ever said something like that. If he was being honest, he’d never listened all that hard to the sermons, too focused on watching how the sister strutted back and forth on the two-inch platform at the head of the chapel, imagining things he ought not to have, especially in the house of a god. He wondered what she’d say if she saw this, probably nothing good.

  Was a sin to commit murder; that’s what he’d been told. Weren’t really murder when the lord’s son got a bit too drunk and ended up hitting David Finch in the head with the pommel of his sword a bit too hard though; that was what you called an accident. Didn’t even need to have been an accident, the constable had explained that well enough to old Mrs. Finch, right there in the market square in front of everyone. An elf can’t murder a man, only men can murder men, and elves can murder elves. Made some kind of sense to Ferro, but he didn’t like it.

  Sister Sinta hadn’t liked it none either, but then again, she was always the one going on about how men had evil baked right into their bones. Something to do with what Ferro’s grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather had done. He didn’t recall all the details, too many distractions in church for that, but he remembered a bit about men taking their big metal ships and trying to wipe everyone else off the world, saying that it weren’t big enough. After you do something like that and lose, well, Ferro imagined that you might start looking at men as if they had evil right in the heart of ‘em; maybe they did.

  He wondered what she’d done when she’d heard what he’d done to Wailin Casper. He’d pulled the loudmouth’s jaw straight off, the second thing he did right after becoming whatever it was he was now. He’d thought it’d be funny; it wasn’t. Ferro wondered what she might do if she found him in her kitchen some night, whether she’d laugh when she heard his new name, whether she’d shake in terror. He liked imagining that, and his mind stuck on it for a while.

  “Ferro!”

  He flinched, finding that he was suddenly standing in the little patch of mud in front of the general store, that at least had been left untouched. Morello slapped him on the back of the head, making certain that he was back in the here and now.

  Sigrid was up in front of him, sitting with her legs dangling off the back of the cart, a mat of scuffed purple carpet underneath her to keep her off the boards. She was a big woman, built like a lumberjack he’d have thought, the strongest among them and the head of the coven. Her long train of silver hair laid over her shoulders like a waterfall, red eyes seeming to glow brighter the lower the light, and there weren’t much light out tonight.

  Out next to her, was her wicked tree, a thing you might be fooled into thinking was an oak until you saw it twist its leafless branches and snag someone trying to run past. Five people were staked on its limbs just then, run through by spears of bark as thick around as a coin. The family that ran the general store, Ferro reckoned, except they wouldn’t be running anything anymore. At the base of the tree, Kessa worked at a brass spigot nailed into the trunk, turning it open and holding a big glass jar beneath the head to collect all the crimson fluid that flowed out, shining like amber despite the lack of light.

  Exeter help him, Ferro hated that one. She might’ve been pretty once, but the change had done her dirty there. All her skin clung tight to her bones, her eyes made into deep hollows that peered out, lips shrunken back so that she could never even come close to closing her mouth. Ferro hated her for how she looked, never did like ugly things, but it was how she always hung around Sigrid and whined about every little thing that he hated the most. Of the eight in the coven, she’d be the one he got rid of first were things up to him.

  “Well?” Sigrid asked.

  Another slap against the back of his head. Ferro reckoned for a moment that he would get a third from Morello here in a second.

  “Didn’t rightly hear ya,” Ferro admitted.

  “Didn’t hear me?”

  “The kid’s been thinking,” Morello explained.

  “What do you have to think about, Ferro? Got some interesting perspective that you might like to share?” Sigrid sneered.

  “Says it takes him a while to work through his thoughts.” Morello laughed. “Least you can say is that he is aware of that.”

  “Been wondering whether we’re evil or no,” Ferro said. The words earned him a look from Sigrid, a slight tilt of the head and a raising of the brow, pushed him to go on. “Men are supposed to be bad deep down, right? Twas by the mercy of the lords and ladies of the land that they’re allowed to stay here, right. If that’s true and all, don’t make much sense to me. Thought for a little bit that I might be a monster now, even though I might not look it much.” Ferro tossed a glare over Kessa’s way. “But then I remembered what was true about monsters, things made up out of magic, gods’ punishments for the badness in the world. That’s not what I’m made up of, don’t think so anyway.

  “Is a good thing to kill monsters, given that they’re evil and all, and that all they wanna do is kill you or me, but then it don’t make much sense that killing men should be all that different. Men are evil too, aren’t they? We’re not them no more, so does that mean the evil’s been taken all out. Is what we’re doing getting rid of it, pullin’ evil out of the world. Better than the nobility does, letting it spread and grow out on the land. Is mercy evil then?”

  Sigrid snickered, shaking her head. “Boy, you’re a strange one. Rest that troubled mind of yours Ferro, it’s not all that difficult.” Sigrid raised a jar, sloshing the red deliciousness around inside, taking a sip, her whole body shuddering as it slid down her gullet. Ferro felt his own body shudder; she’d let him drink right from her tree once, and he never could forget the taste of it. “There’s no good or evil out there Ferro, just folks and beasts. I have my doubts that there are any gods watching over us either, never seen hide or hair of one. Would you call a dog evil when it snatches a chicken from the yard?”

  “It’s what dogs do,” Ferro answered, his dull gray eyes locked fully on the jar in Sigrid’s hand.

  “That’s right, it’s just what they do. Get it?”

  He nodded, thinking about it for a moment, but finding the answer a bit too easy for his taste. Not that he’d tell Sigrid, tried doing that once, but what she had heard was that he thought she was stupid. You didn’t want to call Sigrid stupid, especially not to her face.

  “Good,” she said. “Now, answer my question. What did you find on the east side?”

  “Wheat,” he said. “Woulda thought they’d brought it in by now, but I suppose they could have been a lazy bunch. Wasn’t too much more than that. I did find a chest buried out in the field, but it only had copper in it, nothing too big, not what you told me to be on the lookout for.”

  Sigrid sighed, screwing the lid back on the jar in her hand one agonizing twist at a time. “Figured. Messenger just got around to us, saying that it likely isn’t out here. We will be leaving here, so if there’s anything you might want to snatch, now’s the time to do so.” Sigrid looked around at the seven standing around her cart, all somewhat miserable and damp. “Perk up, we’re heading to civilization.”

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