The dead went out of the light in a straight line, and we followed it, because apparently none of us had learned a single thing all evening.
Ilse went first with her sword low. Brunhilde came last, unhurried, frost sighing off her boots and refusing to spread the way it wanted to. And I walked in the middle, which is where you put the injured man and the idiot, and I was comfortably both.
The drag marks were clean. That was the part I couldn't stop looking at. A body hauled by something hungry leaves a mess, a wallow, bits shed along the way. These went out of the snow in two neat parallel grooves, wing-tips folded in so they wouldn't catch, and every last one of them ran the same direction.
'Wren.'
I see it.
'Is that tidy? That looks tidy.'
It looks tidy.
'I hate that it looks tidy.'
Then we came around the shoulder of the ridge, and there they were.
