4.

“Hurry,” Alena said. “We don’t want to run out of time.” Already the sun was dipping towards midday, with the shadows stretching their claws in the other direction.

“If I may ask, again... why the haste?” It was Ezekiel. He was the only one of the blade-brethren who’d speak to her after the bloodbath. The others even avoided looking her way.

So much for ‘one people, one blade,’ right?

“Local custom,” Alena said. She cut herself a hank of twine and tied off one of the pyre’s cross-supports. “Folk ‘round here prefer to burn their dead by sundown, lest their shades get lost and never find their way to the night lands.”

“Pff. Buncha heathen dirt-worshipers.”

Alena gave no reply. Religions were always odd to others looking in. Priestesses of her tribe may have told the stories of Iesu the Green, as necessary, but they hung far more emphasis on his Mother, the goddess who simultaneously was the Earth and was in the Earth. Paradoxically, she was rarely depicted as the heavily pregnant green woman one would expect—but rather as a young, almost emaciated saint, with a bleached skull taking up half Her otherwise youthful face. Only rarely did the priestesses tell of the Father, that inscrutable being who lived somewhere in the sky, and whose omnipresence was only matched by His silence.

Alena expected none of that to make sense to the uninitiated; and, at the moment, she wasn’t quite up for any kind of theological debate. So, she let it rest.

“Are they of the same tribe as the ones back there?” Ezekiel gestured uphill with his ax. He’d been using its blunt edge as an impromptu mallet.

“Honestly, I couldn’t tell you.” She clenched her knife in her teeth and pulled the knot tight. Then she stepped back and admired her work. The pyre came up to her shoulder, made of laced-together branches and stuffed full of kindling. It wasn’t pretty, nor quite level. But all it needed to do was hold up the bodies.

“Do they have a... tribal name?”

I dunno where this newfound curiosity is coming from, Alena thought. But we’re a little late for asking questions.

Out loud, she said, “They do. Just don’t ask me to try and say it.” The hill folk had their own way of speaking amongst themselves, and much of it eluded her. “In our tongue, they call themselves ‘the people of the pines.’” But she doubted it really mattered to him. Can’t we just keep quiet until we’re done?

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“Hm. Poetic, I suppose. And these four, we’re not sure they’re of the same tribe?”

“No.” Alena sighed. “We’re not. They dress in furs and sleep in wood huts, sure, but not in any fashion that’d distinguish them from other ‘dirt worshipers.’ Maybe they just decided against the village life and chose instead to live out here. You know... rural-like.”

“Rural-like.” Ezekiel’s voice went from curious to skeptical.

“Yes.” By the Mother, she was damn near ready to wallop him one. “Besides, it doesn’t matter. We owe them this.” It was the bare minimum, of course. After what they did. But it’d have to do.

“Wha—?” Ezekiel scoffed, then chuckled. “What the hell for?”

“Because they were a family, you dunce, just as you said. And we butchered them for no good goddamn reason other than that they happened across our path at the exact wrong time. At the very least, we need to pay them this one, tiny, amend. Now,” Alena turned and looked Ezekiel square in the eye, “you can either keep helping, for which I’ll be eternally grateful. Or you can shut your cockholster and step the fuck aside.”

Ezekiel regarded her for one long, quiet moment, before he chuckled again. “You are the same old you. So principled. So convinced you’re always right.”

“Because I always am.” Except, Alena didn’t feel as much right then, at that moment. Rather, she felt as if some deep and steadfast part of her had slipped its foundation and knocked her moral compass well askew from true north.

Ezekiel just shook his head and went back to swinging. “Way I see it, it’s like this: they attacked, we fought back. Same as if we were defending our own territory.”

Alena shook her head back at him. “We’re not defending our land out here on the side of this bloody mountain.” She pointed towards the family’s cabin. With the snows having subsided, their former abode was clearly visible at thirty paces. “We are on their land. We are the intruders. They died because of us.”

“They didn’t need to fight. They could’ve just hidden long enough for—”

“Well they didn’t,” said Alena. “And here we are.”

Ezekiel tromped off, muttering about how it was all ‘justified.’

Alena dropped her knife and knelt on the frozen ground. Tears threatened, and she fought them back. Not now, not now.

Through blurry vision, she looked down at her hands. They would not stop shaking.