Raven's Shadow (Raven #1)(45)

Lehr nodded, then stopped. "Do you believe her, Mother?" he said, his voice tight. "Do you believe Papa might be alive?"

"I don't know," she said, because it was the answer that would hurt him the least. Seraph took a deep breath. "This doesn't feel like one of the Blighted Places to me. Hennea said there was old magic here, but I can't sense it."

"What does that mean?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I think I would sense anything that had lasted here from the time of the Shadowed's Fall, especially power still strong enough to kill."

"So this is not a shadowed place."

Seraph nodded slowly. "A month is long enough to dissipate solsenti magic," she said, and then forced herself to point out the obvious to both of them. "Just because it was not old magic that killed here, doesn't mean that those solsenti wizards of Hennea's didn't kill Tier outright. I need you to look and see if you can tell what happened when Frost was killed here. Remember to look especially closely for any scrap of hair or clothing that I might be able to read."

She moved back to the edge of the clearing as he began to quarter it thoroughly.

"The clearest thing I see," he said at last, "is that something burned here. You can see where the earth was scorched - the patch goes all the way around the grave - see here where the grass is a bit shorter?"

She nodded.

"It looks to me that there have been three groups of people here recently," he said. "The most recent was Jes's Hennea. She walked the meadow, just like I did, stopped there" - he pointed to a place just to the right of the large stone - "and stopped again to press her hand into the dirt mound. Then she left. The party who came before her, was here a few days ago - three horsemen. One of them was the huntsman - see the way that off fore is angled?" He didn't look at her so Seraph didn't bother shaking her head. "That's the horse he was riding when he come to tell us what he'd found."

"The earliest group, though, is what we're interested in, and they worked at hiding their tracks. They were here after the snow started to melt - so no earlier than a month and a half ago. I can't tell you how many of them there were here for certain, but they were here about the same time as Papa."

Lehr gestured for Seraph to follow him and led her to the far side of the clearing, through a thicket of elderberry, to a stand of trees.

"He saw them, Mother," said Lehr. "He stopped Frost here for a while and watched them, maybe for as long as a quarter of an hour. See how Frost stood here, shifting her weight?" He turned and walked back the way they came without taking his eyes from the ground. "Then he walked Frost out into the clearing. There was no fighting, or scuffle that I can see. But Frost's prints are lost in this burnt area."

He glanced around again. "I can pick up the tracks of the other men lower down and backtrack them."

"We'll do that if necessary," said Seraph. "Did you find anything they left behind?"

He shook his head. "Nothing. I'm sorry I couldn't find out anything more. Are we done now?"

"Just beginning," Seraph answered. "Give me your pack," she said. There was a camp shovel tied to the back and she took it. "Now we dig."

"You're looking for something that can tell you what happened?" asked Lehr. "Like the saddle or Papa's pack?"

"If there's something to read, I'll try - but mostly I'm looking for the human bones the huntsman buried with Frost."

Before she set cold iron to earth, she touched the dirt, trying to find the old magic that Hennea had spoken of. "There's death here," she said. "Sudden and painful."

"Papa?" he asked.

"I don't know," Seraph replied, rubbing the grains between her fingers. "Ravens are not necromancers."

She got to her feet and started digging with the shovel - refusing Lehr's help. This was not something for children, no matter that the child in question was a foot taller and almost twice her weight.

She dug until the metal edge of the shovel blade bounced off bone. They hadn't buried Frost very deep - but a horse is a large animal. Scraping gently with the blade, she pushed away dirt and saw, beneath a coating of soil and ash, the familiar pattern of Frost's dapples.

"Let me, Mother," said Lehr, taking the shovel from her.

He shouldn't have been able to read anything from her face, but he was almost as sensitive as Jes or Tier. She was too tired from the trip here, from digging, from hope and fear to fight him.

"If we're lucky," Lehr said as he began digging, "they'd have set the skull beside the horse and not beneath her." We don't have ropes and horses to move Frost the way the huntsman did."

"I can move her if we have to," said Seraph - not as certain as she sounded. "But I'd rather not add more magic here until I've sifted all the information the grave contains."

He probed the disturbed ground and uncovered, little by little, Frost's poor burnt corpse. As the huntsman had said, her head and neck had been charred to the bone with just enough tissue to hold the vertebrae together. But the hindquarters were almost intact - left that way by the chill of the mountain spring. There was only a faint odor of meat turning rotten.