angles. I wasn’t sure whether they’d been broken in the struggle, or in torture, or whether it was just his body’s stiffening. I didn’t want to know.
Piper and Zoe flanked me, looking up at Leonard as the wind turned his face away.
It wasn’t even Leonard’s broken body that I mourned—it was all those tunes still inside him. All those words still to be sung.
“We need to take him down,” I said.
“It’s not safe,” said Piper. “There are Council soldiers about. We need to leave the patrol and get out of here.”
I ignored him, dismounting and looping my reins around a low branch so I could set to work untying Leonard’s hands. The twine was fastened tightly, the fibers rasping against one another as I tried to work the knots loose. The squeaking sound of it set my teeth on edge in a way that the touch of Leonard’s cold flesh didn’t.
“Can you take his body back to New Hobart, bury it properly?” I called up to Crispin, who was still surveying the road to the west.
He shook his head. “They’ve enough bodies to deal with. This is a patrol, not a grave-digging service. I’ll send a man to the town to report, and two to scout the area. The rest of us need to finish the patrol.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll bury him myself.”
“We don’t have time for this,” hissed Zoe. I ignored her and kept on at the twine holding Leonard’s hands behind his back.
When they were freed, Leonard’s hands didn’t fall to his sides but stayed bent behind his back, stiffened or frozen into place.
I couldn’t reach the rope from which he hung. I jumped a few times, swiping at the rope with my dagger, but all I succeeded in doing was startling my horse, and setting Leonard’s body spinning.
“It’d be quicker if you helped me,” I said to Piper, “instead of just watching.”
“There’s no time to dig a proper grave,” he said. “We’ll take him down, but then we have to move.”
“Fine,” I said, out of breath.
We did our best. From his saddle, Piper cut the rope while I held Leonard’s body up, then together we lowered him to the ground, his weight unleashing fresh pains from my half-healed arm. Zoe held Piper’s horse when he dismounted and lifted the guitar from Leonard’s neck. The wood creaked, splinters snapping. I leaned over him and tried to loosen the noose that clutched at his neck. I slit the rope; the flesh beneath it was dark purple, and didn’t spring back, instead preserving the rope’s indentations.
Together we carried him to the ditch at the side of the road. When we lowered him to the ground, his body bent at the waist with a creaking sound. Every minute on that road was a risk, and there was no time to bury him properly, with our bare hands, and in the frozen earth. In the end I cut a small section from my blanket and laid it over his face, grateful that he had no eyes to close. We were about to remount when I ran back to the tree and retrieved the smashed guitar from where Piper had let it drop. I gathered the fragments and laid them next to Leonard in the ditch.
Ω
We headed north with Crispin and two of his soldiers, as they continued their circuit around the town, but once we were half a mile from the road Piper turned his horse west, and Zoe and I peeled off to follow him. The others didn’t even slow their horses, though Crispin looked back and raised a hand. “Go safely,” he said. Piper raised his hand, too.
We rode far, and fast. In the snow and the darkness, it felt like we were traveling blind, and I thought of Leonard, and his perpetually dark world. Twice my horse almost lost its footing in the snow. Once I sensed people not far to the north of us, and we sheltered in a gully, glad of the snowfall that covered our tracks as the mounted men rode along the ridge above us.
We headed west until it was light enough to negotiate the rocky gullies that lay to the north. By noon, we were approaching the foothills of the Spine Mountains. The snow that we’d been thankful for earlier was now setting as a sheet of ice on the rocks. The horses, already tired, were shying and hesitant; several times we had to dismount and lead them.