“Say that again?” Speranzi asked, scarcely believing her ears.

Skana shook her head, “I’m sorry, My Lady, but I doubt it.”

The priest and the chief both began sputtering aloud, spittle flying from their lips, their backs straightened, even that of the old man, both thoroughly affronted.

Speranzi looked up at Skana and said with words what the villagers said with gasps, “You’d better explain that. The priest of the gods of man must have pronounced his guilt. So how can you say otherwise?”

Skana waved a casual hand toward the bound victim, “Just look at him, he’s scrawny, underfed, I can see his ribs from here. He hasn’t had a full meal in months. If you’d said that he stole food, or even a horse, that I could believe. But just stealing things? Not a chance. Even if it were valuable, what good would it do him? He can’t eat it. And murder is a lot to ask out of a person who isn’t strong enough to fight if they’re caught.”

Speranzi looked at the doomed man again. ‘He is looking skinny…’

“That doesn’t mean anything. He probably panicked and fled, and didn’t think to take food after he finished.”

Skana didn’t see which villager protested, and she didn’t try to find out. Instead she said, “If this village is anything like mine, you’ve all been hungry before, if you ever looked like that,” she pointed at the faded figure of a man, “would you forget to take food? Ever?!”

“He could have hoped to sell whatever it is he stole when he got to the next village or town, or even hold on to it until he got to a city?” Corwin proposed as he approached where the duo stood before the village.

Skana lowered her eyes under his gaze, but shook her head. “You travel in a wagon and with a horse, but with respect, I traveled a lot on foot. When you travel on foot, you carry only what you need to survive. An extra feather in your pocket is like full armor if you walk long enough.”

Speranzi grunted out an acknowledgment. “She has a point there, Corwin.” It rubbed her the wrong way, but she leveled her stare at the priest and watched him shrink under the all consuming eyes. “Let my woman here confirm your verdict. Even the wisest of men can make mistakes.”

The priest tried to sputter a denial, but though his lips moved, no words came out, the woman in front of him seemed to tower like a giant, a great weight pressing down on his soul, threatening to bring him to his knees.

Unable to form words, he gave up, and nodded.

“Besides, if she fails to make her case, I’ll put a few coins toward whatever supplies your village buys from my companion here.” She put her hand on Corwin’s shoulder, and the dubious villagers who up until that moment traded looks of dissatisfaction, perked up.

‘Peasant practicality wins again.’ Speranzi mentally chortled, and now with leave to act, Skana clapped her hands together.

“So, tell me exactly what happened.” She said, walking past the villagers and over to the brutalized man.

“Nothing!” He slurred out, “Nothing! I came here, stayed the night, did some work in exchange for food. Yorig said I could stay the night but had to leave in the morning.” The wounded man cried, and the rumble went up.

“Yorig was alive that night, he stayed there, Yorig was dead in the morning. What more proof do you need?” The priest demanded.

Skana nodded, “That would be pretty convincing, but…” She tilted the man’s slumped head up, “what is your name.”

“Jordis.” He said, his hazel eyes turned up hopefully toward Skana, “Please, I didn’t do this.”

“Jord, where in Yorig’s home did you sleep?” Skana asked.

“Shed. He has a place he keeps tools. I slept in the shed.” Yorig swallowed, “I never even left it! He let me eat at his table, he gave me extra to eat yesterday… I’m not a killer… I’ve never hurt anyone in my life!” Jord wailed, but the peasant mob was unmoved, their glares would have weighed his head down if he hadn’t had it held up at the chin by Skana’s two fingers.

“Is that normal here?” Skana asked, turning her face to the chief.

“Yes. Everybody has a little shed connected to their house, it’s an old village tradition to build it together to hold the tools we use instead of keeping them in our homes.” The chief answered, “But that means he did it, he had access to the weapon!”

Skana was quiet for a moment as she combed through her memory.

“Where was the mattock when you found the body?” Skana asked, and the chief shrugged.

“In the shed of course.” He answered, and Skana leveled a steady stare at him.

“So let me get this straight. This stranger shows up, stays the night. He takes a mattock, creeps into the house of his host, bludgeons him to death… then takes the time to put the weapon back before robbing the cottage before leaving?”

She drew her hand away from Yorig’s chin and put her hands on her hips, “That’s bold. That’s bolder than any bandit. Next thing you’ll tell me is that it was clean.”

A collective gasp went up.

Skana furrowed her brow, “It was clean, wasn’t it? You really believe that he’d take the time to murder a stranger in his home, rob it, clean the weapon in the dark, and put it back? Why bother? Why not run then?”

“Panic?” The chief suggested, “Maybe it was his first time… or…”

“Maybe he didn’t run because he didn’t know Yorig was dead. If he slept in the shed and left when you all told him he had to leave, which I assume was sun up, you’d catch up to him easily. You did, didn’t you?”

Nods went up from the men of the village. “Only an hour or two down the road.

Skana whistled, “And he stayed on the road without hiding from you? Did Jordis sound crazed to you?”

“But he had a pack on him, and the stolen things belonging to Yorig!” The chief protested, his body shaking as he held onto his walking stick, “Explain that!”

“What were these things?” Skana asked.

“A pair of painted stone birds, he won them in a game of dice on a trip to Fortress Myen! They’re worth several silvers, or so Yorig boasted!” The chief exclaimed, his aged glare through deep recessed eyes were fixed on the bound and bleeding man. “How did they end up in your pack?!”

“I don’t know! I didn’t take them!” Jordis protested and struggled in his bonds, wiggling his body back and forth in a futile attempt to escape the pain.

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“Where did Yorig keep them?” Skana asked.

“Hidden in a box beneath his bed.” A young woman protested, she stepped forward from the mob with tears misting in her eyes. With black hair and dark eyes to match, shapely and full breasted, she was in the flower of her youth.

“Who are you?” Skana asked.

“Myre… his lover.” She blinked back her angry tears, “He kept them safe in a little box, like I said, hidden under his bed where he could grab them if he needed to sell them to a merchant or something…”

“I never saw them!” Jordis shouted, “I didn’t even-”

He stopped when Skana cleared her throat, “Myre, did he tell strangers about these?”

“Not that I ever knew… Yorig was protective of them. We all knew, but… I-I guess he probably wouldn’t tell a stranger unless he was going to sell them.” She admitted.

A low rumble went up from the village residents.

“So someone was comfortable in his house in the dark, knew where he kept his valuables, was sure he wouldn’t be disturbed during the murder…” Skana muttered and turned toward Jordis, “Jordis, where was your traveling pack while you slept?”

“On a hook outside the shed.” Jordis began to gasp, “Please… it hurts…”

Speranzi turned her head toward the waiting wagons and the line of her soldiers, “Micah! Get up here and heal this one!” She shouted.

“But you can’t-” The priest protested, then snapped his jaw shut as Speranzi snapped her head toward him.

“He can die just as easily if it turns out he did it. Skana has made some good points, there’s reason to doubt his guilt. You will wait. If he is innocent, then leaving him in pain is pointless.”

The robed caster hastened to the fore and when Speranzi pointed to the injured man, he acted without hesitation. [Heal] He cast his spell and the blue glow of mana wrapped itself like bandages around the many wounds of the bound man… and the injuries faded away, leaving only bloodstains to mark that they were ever there.

The Priest’s sputtering was muted, but he was the only one to sputter at all.

“So it would have been easy for somebody to murder Yorig, take his things, put them in Jordis’s pack, then leave without a word. Jordis wouldn’t even know about the crime before you all accused him.” Skana pointed out, and the priest glared at her with hate in his eyes.

“I am a priest.” He insisted.

Skana shrugged. “Priests are men, men can be wrong. Men can do wrong while still being priests. And men can be fools or just fooled.”

The blasphemous words brought gasps of dismay.

The anger of the priest threatened to rile the mob, but with the armored company close by and Speranzi’s hand drifting tellingly to the hilt of her sword, there wasn’t anyone willing to act.

Skana appeared oblivious to their anger or even that she’d blasphemed at all, “One thing bothers me though.”

“The clean mattock?” Speranzi guessed.

“Yes.” She answered, “If Jordis didn’t do it, and nobody disturbed his rest to get Yorig’s to finish him off, that means somebody else’s was used.”

Speranzi quickly barked an order. “Every man of this village, go retrieve your mattocks. Line them up… there.” She settled on the low wall. “Let’s see if there are any bloody ones.”

Galvanized or terrified, the men of the village dispersed to their homes, “Do you think anyone will run?” Speranzi asked while they waited.

“No.” Skana answered. “I doubt it.”

It didn’t take long for the command to be followed, and in short order a line of mattocks sat side by side against the low wooden wall.

The priest and the chief took it on themselves to walk past each one, picking them up, looking at the metal heads, and setting them down. They went through every tool until the end of the line and the chief pronounced in his aged, scratchy voice…

“Nothing. No blood.”

“This is a waste of time. It may seem strange, but he is a stranger. He arrives and one of our village dies!” The priest snapped at Skana, “You’re an outsider too, you can’t be trusted any more than he can be!” He turned his gaze from Skana to the still bound and trembling Jordis.

Skana however, took his words without complaint.

She said only, “Wait. Wait and watch.”

Speranzi understood as the quiet minutes passed and the truth began to reveal itself.

There was a steady buzz amidst the many mattocks of the common villagers, a buzz from eager flies, and the flights alighted on one tool among them all.

“That one was covered in blood recently.” Speranzi snapped and strode over to where the mattock lay. “It was wiped clean, but flies love blood, and you can never get rid of it all even if you wash it off with water. So? Whose is this?”

The uncertain looks did not last long, nor did they need to. The priest’s face had gone a pale white and the elderly chief was looking at him in horror.

“I am a priest! A follower of Gensi, our Lord of Law! I-” The priest was not able to finish the sentence before Myre let out a wail.

“You tried to talk me out of marrying Yorig! You told me it wasn’t the will of the gods! You told me I would be punished for defying their will! I thought I was! I thought I was I thought I was I thought I was! But it was you?!” She broke down and charged from her place in the crowd her dark eyes filled with wrath, her nails out to scratch and claw at his eyeballs, she tore at him as soon as she was close.

The priest was larger than she, and though he was in his middle years, his body was still relatively strong from his time as a farmer, and caught in a mix of anger and frustration, he grabbed Myre at the wrist, yanked her away, and struck her face with the back of his hand, sending her tumbling to the ground.

“I am-” The priest raised his voice to shout an order at his fellow villagers, but it was cut off.

Skana barely saw the flow of motion from her commander, Speranzi’s bow was in hand, an arrow nocked, drawn, and shot in a single fluid act.

It pierced the priest in his open mouth and the arrowhead burst through the back of his skull to lodge in the post where Jordis still stood frozen in his terror.

“No priest.” Speranzi finished her words, and as the priest whose name she never learned tumbled back to fall onto the ground with arms and legs splayed out and eyes staring up at the sky, she approached.

The world was a frozen place to her then, the sudden sentence of death from the wandering Baroness took place so quickly that it was not properly processed, and so she wasn’t interrupted by even a whisper, other than the whimpers of the dark haired young woman.

Speranzi stood over the fallen body and looked down into his eyes, leaning over him so that she filled his view while the light and life faded from him, and he could see no more.

“Justice is done. Cut that man free.” Speranzi ordered and half reached out her hand to the fallen peasant woman who still lay weeping out her anger, and then she thought better of it.

“One of you, see to her.” She ordered the village, and that brought them back to life.

They might have begun shouting, they might have begun protesting, but their aged chief began speaking while staring down at the body of the priest.

“He was one of us… he always did fancy her… but I never dreamed…” He blinked back tears of his own as he stared down at the body of the priest. “The village raised the money itself to send him to study, to become a priest who could heal our wounds… he was one of our own… we gave him everything. And he- he killed one of us out of jealousy or lust and… framed that one?”

Another villager was busy sawing through the ropes which bound Jordis to the place of his execution.

“How… how could he do this to us?” The chief whispered, his belief in the guilt of the priest eased the rest of the village into it, “I… I practically raised him.”

“I’m sorry.” Skana said, “I don’t know. But you do have something else to think about now.”

“I-We do?” The chief asked.

Speranzi pointed to Jordis who was busy rubbing his wrists, the spell healed his injuries, but the phantom pain lingered on, and the horror stricken expression was still on his gaunt face, nor had he ceased to quake with fear that some other cruelty might come his way.

“You tortured an innocent man who was already starving, and nearly killed him. I’d say you owe him a debt.” She pointed out the obvious, and shame began to sweep the faces of those who cast their stones.

“We did… didn’t we.” The old man murmured. “What do we do?”

“Give him the priest’s share of land, his house, his tools. Pay for Jordis to go become a priest if he wants, and let him take the place of the dead. Feed him, give him a better life to make up for almost taking the one he had.” Speranzi said, and under her unblinking eyes, it was difficult to argue.

“I- We will do it. If he wants to stay, we will do what you say. If not, we will feed him until he is strong and give him enough food to carry him where he wants to walk…”

“That’s fair.” Speranzi nodded, and returned to where Corwin stood, flabbergasted at the turn of events.

“I know you planned on staying here, Corwin, but I think it’s best that we move on. Nothing good can come of staying around the stench of double death and betrayal.” Speranzi urged, and with his own face as pale as that of the guilty priest, his jowls jiggled a little as he bobbed his head up and down.

“I think that would be best.” He swallowed hard, and Speranzi raised her hand over her head and made a circling motion with one finger.

“We move on. Form up!” She ordered, but after both she and Skana set their backs to the village and made ready to walk away, Jordis’s voice picked up.

“Wait… at least… at least tell me the name of the one who believed me first…” He begged.

“Skana.” Skana replied, “Her loyal soldier.” She flashed a pearl white smile and hastened toward the already moving wagons that were clearly not about to wait for her.