What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)

by T. Kingfisher

I felt vaguely guilty about pausing in my trip to dismount and look at mushrooms, but I was tired. More importantly, my horse was tired.

I am delighted by obscure passions, no matter how unusual. During the war, I was once holed up in a shepherd’s cottage, listening for the enemy to come up the hillside, when the shepherd launched into an impassioned diatribe on the finer points of sheep breeding that rivaled any sermon I have ever heard in my life. By the end, I was nodding along and willing to launch a crusade against all weak, overbred flocks, prone to scours and fly-strike, crowding out the honest sheep of the world. “Maggots!” he’d said, shaking his finger at me. “Maggots ’n piss in t’ flaps o’ they hides!” I think of him often.

Presumably they settled there because nobody else wanted it. The Ottoman Empire didn’t even bother to make us a vassal state, if that tells you anything.

(Look, if you don’t make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren’t to be trusted. That was one of my father’s maxims, and it’s never failed me yet.)

I knew his face as well as I knew my own. And I swear to you, if I had not heard his voice, I would not have recognized him.

They both had large, liquid eyes, the sort that are called doe-like by poets, although those poets have mostly never hunted deer, because neither of the Ushers had giant elliptical pupils and they both had perfectly serviceable whites.

Instead of tapestries, there were paneled walls, and some even had wallpaper. It was in poor condition, bubbled and swollen with damp, but at least it felt a little less like walking through an ancient crypt. Very few ancient crypts have plump shepherdesses and gamboling sheep on the walls. I consider this an oversight.

Ah. American. That explained the clothes and the way he stood with his legs wide and his elbows out, as if he had a great deal more space than was actually available. (I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.)

I offered Denton my hand, because Americans will shake hands with the table if you don’t stop them.

You show up to basic training and they hand you a sword and a new set of pronouns.

Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.

“They say mushrooms spring up where the Devil walks,” said Angus sourly. “And where fairies dance.” “Do you think they ever get the two confused? The Devil shows up to a fairy ball, or finds himself mobbed with elven ingénues?”

It must have been terribly galling to be barred from an organization merely because one lacked the proper genitals, when disreputable Americans were allowed to join and write about underwater mushrooms.

She nodded gravely and changed the subject. Admittedly, she changed it to fungi, but I was willing to accept it.

“The Good Lord looks out for fools. In your case, apparently He sends the occasional Englishwoman.” “I thought He’d sent you.” “You’re a two-person job, youngster.”

(A Frenchwoman once told me that I had no poetry in my soul. I recited a dirty limerick to her, and she threw a lemon at my head. Paris is a marvelous city.)

I stumbled backward, dropping her arm. There was the faintest of ripping sensations against my fingers. It was so unexpected that I looked down and saw my hand covered in the fine white hair from her arms. Dear God, had I closed my hand and pulled it out by the roots? No. When I looked in horror at her forearm, there was a handprint of bare flesh left behind. Each finger was visible, and the outline of my thumb against her wrist, but I had not left a bruise. Had it been so shallowly rooted in the skin that my merest touch had torn it free?

I was cursing myself for a fool when the dead hare began to crawl away. It did not try to escape. That was somehow the most horrible part of all. It crawled back to its position in the circle of hares and it sat up, despite half its skull being missing. It turned its head so that its remaining eye pointed at me and tucked its paws against its chest like all the others. Whatever looked out at me through that eye was not a hare.

(We did not run. If we ran then we would have to admit there was something to run from. If we ran, then the small child that lives in every soldier’s heart knew that the monsters could get us. So we did not run, but it was a near thing.)

And of course, as always, to my husband, Kevin, who is the very best at providing encouragement when I have hit that stage of the book where I no longer know if anything is good and am convinced that I have shamed my ancestors forever. Greater love hath no spouse.