The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

An extra-special Headless Over Heels day!

“Was today the first time you saw a seraph?” Ofelia asked.

“First time that close,” Seth said. “I saw one in a field once, five or so years back, killing sheep. Pretty small. Like a horse. The hands scared it away with shotguns.”

“A yellowfeather then, maybe,” Ofelia said. “If the guns worked.”

“Maybe. Erheis killed it, I guess.”

“No, he didn’t,” Ofelia said. “We got Erheis’s books. He hadn’t killed a seraph in a decade or more. We call that kind of Verdugo a preacher. His only business is people on their knees.”

“Well, we reported it.” Seth tried to hide his annoyance. “And someone killed it.”

“Mmm.” Ofelia kicked her feet. “That’s good.”

A field cricket churred into the silence that followed.

Afraid of Being Afraid

“You are wondering, I think, about Anna,” Ofelia said.

“Not really,” Seth lied. “Just another head, right? A second head that’s a second asshole.”

Ofelia smiled with patient humor. “You’re wondering why, I mean. You’ve seen how well Annalise fights. Why would she need another skull for seraphs, especially one as misbegotten as Anna?”

He rested a foot on the fence’s lower crossbar. “I guess you have a theory?”

“Annalise uses Anna,” Ofelia says, “because Annalise is afraid.”

“Of seraphs?”

Ofelia nodded. “She’s afraid of seraphs and of being afraid of seraphs.”

Seth watched the cows and didn’t speak.

“A few years ago, we’d cornered one,” Ofelia said, “and she had a… moment. Sort of like the episode you saw, but waking.”

Seth remembered the whimpering and the jerking. “As bad as that?”

“Oh, it was horrible. She froze in the face of this stampeding redfeather. It only happened once, and it hasn’t happened since, but it nearly killed her—it would have killed her.”

“What saved her?”

“A murani seraph hunter named Nik saved her,” Ofelia said. “She worked with us for a season, half a decade ago. You’ve seen her face, but not the rest of her.”

Seth rubbed his face. “She’s Anna?”

“She’s Anna’s donor. That was her last hunt. She saved Annalise, but not herself. Told Mom with her dying breath to take her head and use it—said she wasn’t finished killing seraphs.” Ofelia smiled wanly. “She was an asshole, but she was fun like that, sometimes. I’m glad a part of her is still around. And it really helped Mother, too. Not seeing her friend die, I mean, though we’d all joked about what a relief that’d be, one time or another, the way Nik was.”

Seth laughed humorlessly.

“But having a head to hunt seraphs helps her partition it,” Ofelia said. “Anna is a great tracker with an encyclopedic knowledge of them. She has purpose and drive and knowledge and viciousness. She’s a place Annalise can fill up with the horrible stuff, so the rest of her can be okay.”

The stench of that place revisited Seth’s mind, and he wished he had as separated a place to put it.

“Tiago’s right, you know.” Ofelia stared out into the dark. “She’s gotten a lot better. The first few years after her unlighting were not good. A bit ironic. The more heads she’s managed to get, the more like herself she’s become. But she’s never once worn anything but Annalise to an execution. I wonder why sometimes.”

“If you’re in the mood for sharing secrets,” Seth said. “Who’s the Verdugo she killed?”

Ofelia had no outward reaction to the question. “She mentioned it?”

“In passing,” he said. “I’m the only one still alive who heard it. What’s the story?”

“The story isn’t my place to tell, I’m afraid.” She hopped from the fence. “You’ll have to ask her.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” he said. He knew he wouldn’t, and though he tried to keep the knowing out of his voice, she turned in the night and looked at him closely.

“I know you’re getting ready to leave,” she said.

“I wasn’t—”

“I won’t stop you and I won’t wake anyone up, though I can’t let you take anything from the carriage but your own effects, I’m afraid. I don’t imagine Annalise would chase you, once she found out.”

“I’m not,” he said. “Where would I even go?”

“I lack the energy for a truth tasting, Seth,” Ofelia said. “So you’ll have to forgive me if I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m just reading into you how I might be feeling, if I was you.”

He let out the rest of his breath on a loose raspberry and clammed up.

“It’s a strange life,” she said. “And not an easy one. And Annalise is a strange person, though she tries not to be. But I think you should at least meet Lisa first.”

“Lisa’s another head?”

Ofelia nodded.

“What’s she like?”

“She’s very nice. She’s brassy.” Ofelia tilted her head. “I think you’ll like her. I’m sure she’ll like you.”

“Well.” Seth lowered himself from the fence. “That’ll be a nice change.”

Ofelia breathed a soft laugh. “Thank you for speaking with me, Seth. I think we might be friends one day, which would be nice. I don’t really have any at all, outside the Necropolis. Unless you count family. And what properly teenaged teenager would?” She gave him a brief wave from the hip. “Good night.”

She meandered away from him, back to the carriage where her brother slept. The door opened and shut.

The calf twitched again. The mother shifted; her tail rested across her baby’s.

Seth stayed a few more minutes like that, leaning on the fence, and then he returned to his bedroll and went to sleep.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...ing-afraid

And then, almost immediately after that, he wrote:

Hello, folks!

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Hounds, Foxes, and Hens

Strictly speaking, his employer hadn’t told him to stop stealing. In fact, she’d encouraged it. Perhaps she wouldn’t appreciate his freelancing, but he hadn’t appreciated the goddamn charnel house she’d thrown him into.

If that bonus was still on the far horizon he wasn’t about to wait. He needed an emergency supply of cash, enough that he could cut and run; the brush with Anna had shown him that. Maybe he was sticking around, but who could blame him for devising an exit strategy?

And if picking pockets was the best way to burn off the twitchy energy he sometimes got, the itching in his hands, well, that was just a happy side effect. Some thieves talked about it like it was a high, like it was sex. The rush, the gratification. Seth couldn’t wrap his head around that.

Seth stole because stealing was when he felt normal.

A silver-plated pocketwatch. A billfold of braces. Everyone wanted lumber, and this far from the iron arteries Laramme was the only good place to get it. They were well-heeled, the people here. Satisfaction curled the corners of his mouth. He was too threadbare himself to limit his lifts to the affluent, but it was his strong preference.

“Verdugo Erheis is dead,” Annalise said. “Fallen in this past Winter War. Condolences, folks, if he was a friend. Unlikely as that is.”

Laramme, unlike Prossimo, could afford at least a pittance of a laugh, and Seth dutifully joined in its low rumble before getting back to work.

The work. The purpose, the calm. The clarity of need, the execution of expertise. Like he was doing what he’d been designed to do. Like a tangle finally being worked out of matted hair. And the risk of getting caught and hurt, yes. But Seth felt a version of that all the time, every minute. Always something over his shoulder. To have an actual reason to feel it was a balm, not a burden. It made life fall into ticking clockwork order. The world was hounds, foxes, and hens. Seth il Gutierre was a fox.

He nudged a well-dressed woman in such a way that she turned to murmur a brief apology to the man next to her, and then her pocketbook was in his sleeve. Beautiful work. The distant echo through time of a hand resting atop his head. Good job, Seth. Good lift. Good boy. That’s everyone’s supper he just earned, kids. Learn from Seth.

He moved away from the square and around the outskirts of the village, as Annalise’s voice rang indistinctly from the scaffold. He stayed out of the sturdy logbuilt interiors. He untied a pouch of tobacco from an ashwood fencepost. He unhooked a roast chicken dangling above a corpselight heating element at an abandoned butcher counter and carefully wrapped it in an unattended roll of paraffin paper. He recalled the sheer size of his boss, and unhooked another. He strolled past a humming hexis dynamo the size of Annalise’s carriage and lifted a canister of popmites and a sachet of feed from the monitor’s hut. It wasn’t quite enough outdoor thievery to warm him up for second-story work, but he knew a fine middle-ground between indoors and outdoors.

A murani hardcamp sat at the edge of the village in a stump-studded clearing. A clutch of cinnabar-colored conical yurts, decorated with beaded mosaics, mushroomed from the earth around a firepit with still-glowing embers. The camp had crept further away from the mostly human heart of Laramme since Seth’s last visit, as the murani rode the rim of the forest’s slow sacrifice.

There were all manner of kindred in the United Territories, but almost everyone Seth had ever met was human or muran. He supposed the al Ydrises didn’t count any longer, and he’d run into a kari-kine once at a taphouse who had flirted with him, but it was hard to get past the independently moving eyes. Turns out a lady gazing at your lips isn’t quite as titillating when she’s looking you in the eye simultaneously.

The murani were a regular presence in this region of the Plainlands, but they preferred to keep to themselves. There was much to admire about the Felix Folk of the Plains, despite their prickliness. Their willingness for rough living, their tight communalism, and—Seth’s favorite—their general disuse of locks.

He strolled to the center of the hardcamp and cast a look around its carpeted yurts. Empty as the streets that had led to it. Seth thanked St. Wycrest of the Scales for the law of witnesses, but it was better to be safe than sorry. He took the tobacco pouch in his palm, invoked his Fox hex, and dropped it in the dry afternoon grass.

He stuck his pinky in his ear and ducked into the flap of the largest and fanciest yurt. He squinted through the dim illumination its circle-cut windows provided and rifled through the tent’s belongings. A fine camp stove, an ornate three-stringed balaphone leaning against a carved instrument rest.

He’d only just found his trophy—a well-balanced stiletto dagger he’d stuck in his boot, safely away from the discovery of his employers—when the crisp crunch of the underbrush filtered from the tobacco pouch, through his pinky, and into his brain. He hurriedly folded and packed the yurt’s contents back into place. The tent flap was just falling shut behind him as he scrambled from the entrance.

A sun-dappled muran woman stalked into visibility from the forest outskirts with a bloody faun draped across her shoulders. She halted by the farthest tent; the tension on her bowstring went taut as she drew it a few lethal inches back.

“Who’s there, then?” she called.

“Who’s there?” He puffed his chest out. “Didn’t you know the Verdugo was on the way?”

The woman’s whiskers twitched. She dropped the faun before the yurt he’d stepped from; it landed with a heavy thud and left a streak of blood down her shoulder. “My travel companion neglected to inform me.”

Her clothes were fine, despite the twigs and the deer blood. Here was the owner of the yurt, and the stiletto he’d put in his boot.

“You’re able-bodied, you should be at the square.” He jerked a thumb in that direction. “Law of witnesses.”

“You should be at the square, too.” She squinted at him. “What are you doing here?”

“Scraping for stragglers like you,” he said. “I’m part of the Verdugo’s retinue.”

She sniffed and looked him up and down. “You work for the Verdugo?”

And here was the best feeling in the world. Someone high and mighty, sneering down their nose at you, with the contents of their coin purse in your back pocket.

“That’s right,” he said. “For your own good, you want to see her before I do.”

“Her?” She tucked her thumbs into her belt loop. “What happened to Erheis?”

“The Verdugo is dead,” he said. “Long live the Verdugo.”

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