Chapter 26: Rafe's POV: Stones

Rafe's POV

The ground above the stream was frozen two inches down, and I broke it with an iron bar the toll keeper lent me.

The council had given her a shelf of flat land where the road bends, in sight of the market walls and out of the wind.

Nobody had told me to dig.

When the red-bearded captain asked who would see to the grave, Ivy said, "Rafe can carry the stones."

That was all she said, and she did not look at me when she said it.

It was the one thing she had let me do, and I took it the way a hungry man takes a crust, carefully, afraid someone will take it back.

The stones were in the stream bank, flat and grey, and I could carry one at a time.

Any more and the new skin across my back pulled open, and the healer had told me to stop before that happened.

I did not stop before that happened.

I carried the first stone up the bank at sunrise and set it down at the edge of the hole.

My palms split on the third trip, because the edges were sharp and the water was near ice.

I wrapped them in strips of my shirt and went on.

The captain came by at noon with bread and a skin of water.

"I'll take a few down with you," he said.

"No."

He looked at the blood in the wrapping, and he looked at me.

"She said me," I said.

He nodded slowly, put the bread on a rock, and went back up the road.

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