eight solid hours of moving, swapping between riding and walking, my back aches, my thighs ache and my arms ache. My head aches. Dimia’s face is white and pinched and her knuckles are bloodless where she grips the reins, but as long as she doesn’t complain I won’t either. Instead we plough on, passing mile after mile of purple and brown heathland, skirting around small woodlands and the odd isolated cottage and farm. The sky at the horizon is orange, the wind is behind us, driving us forward, there’s a fog rolling in fast, and my heart lifts because we cannot be too far from Tremayne now, perhaps three miles at most.
I’m dozing in the saddle, rocked back and forth by the rolling gait of the horse, when Dimia’s voice cuts through my reverie.
“What’s that?” she asks, a bite to her voice that has me whipping around in the saddle. Then I see what she’s looking at and my stomach swoops. I grip the reins tightly.
“It’s a graveyard,” I say finally.
“Where the dead are buried? Can we stop a little?”
“We don’t have time,” I say swiftly.
“Just a few moments. I’ve never seen one before.”
“Do you not have memorials for your dead?”
“No. They’re burned. The royal family and the lords have family vaults that they can visit.”
“Are the ashes kept in them?”
“No.” She looks perplexed. “They’re rooms for contemplation. They’re places for the families to go to remember.”
“What about the, erm, common folk?”
“They don’t have the luxury of remembrance.”
They. They don’t. Without further comment I lead my horse over and she follows. We both dismount and tie up our horses. Dimia runs her hands over the wood of the entrance to the graveyard, looking up at the roof, then down at the recessed wooden benches in the sides of the gate.
“Pretty,” she says.
“It’s a lichgate,” I tell her, unsurprised when she frowns. “A corpse gate. When they bring the dead to be buried they carry them in here, head first. The priest says a blessing and then they turn the coffin feet first and carry it into the graveyard while someone rings the lichbell.”
“Why?”
“To confuse the spirit so it doesn’t try to follow the living back out.” It’s an old superstition. She nods and walks through the gate into the graveyard proper. My insides writhing, I take a deep breath and follow her.
Dimia walks ahead of me, her head turning left to right and back again as she takes it all in. I notice she keeps strictly to the path. Once, when I was little, we came to leave flowers on my grandmother’s grave, and I’d been delighted by the mounds of loamy earth, running up and down them, chanting that I was the queen of the molehills. My mother had smacked my legs and yanked me back to her side, her skin reddening with mortification. I hadn’t known they were fresh graves; I hadn’t really known what a grave was. The memory, though macabre, makes me smile. Mama would approve of Dimia’s careful tread.
She pauses every now and then to read the inscriptions on the gravestones. She seems to stop especially at the ones for children, her mouth moving silently as she reads, before moving on.
“It’s eerie, isn’t it, to know that beneath us there are bones shifting and resting.” Her voice has a strange, heavy quality to it and in the oncoming twilight it makes me shiver. I look back to the lichgate to reassure myself the horses are still there. “All lined up, like crops, almost,” she continues. “A field of the dead.” She looks over to where the first row of mausoleums stand, leaning precariously against one another. “How strange to build monuments to house corpses.”
I blink in shock. “It’s a monument to their lives, not their bodies. It might seem strange to you, but it seems stranger to me that you burn your bodies. Burn the arms of the mothers that held you. Burn the lips of the fathers that kissed your brow when you cried. You destroy the bodies that gave you life. We give them back to the earth. We treat our dead with respect.”
She whirls around to face me. “You know nothing of death.”
“I know enough,” I snap, forgetting that she holds the keys to getting my mother back. “I’ve seen it. I’ve smelt it. I’ve tried to fight it. What more do I need to know?” My eyes drift towards the row of vaults along the far wall and she follows my