Chapter 31: Edda's Night

"Yes," I said.

I took her hand.

She pulled me up off the step so hard I nearly went into the river.

Then she hugged me, ash and flour and all, and over her shoulder the tracker finally looked away from the heron.

He was smiling.

I'd never seen him smile.

"Saturday," Edda said into my hair. "At the house. And Sorrel, the seven first. In the morning. I want her in the ground before I'm happy."

"The seven first," I said.

We buried them on Saturday at sunrise.

On the hill above the round hall, where the pack had always buried its own.

The lumber father had cut the graves the day before.

He wouldn't let anyone else hold the shovel.

The whole valley came up the hill in the cold.

The families went first.

The lumber father and his wife and his three living sons.

The woman with flour on her arms who'd asked me not to put her name on anything.

She'd been the first one up the hill.

The man who'd called me a hearth-shamed little rogue at his door stood at his daughter's grave with his hat in his hands.

When he saw me, he took a step toward me.

Then he stopped, and nodded, and looked back down.

That was enough.

The stakes from the Ash Line stood at the head of each grave.

Each had a notch at the top.

Now each had a name cut into the wood below it, too.

The tracker had cut six of them, the week we came back from the south.

Edda had cut the seventh herself.

She'd done it at night, by the fire, and wouldn't let anyone watch.

The last girl's mother stood beside that one in her good coat.

Under it, the holes in her cardigan were mended.

The schoolteacher had brought seven pine seedlings in a wheelbarrow.

We planted one at the foot of each grave.

The families did it with their hands.

One grave had nobody left to plant it, so the cook knelt and did it.

Alder came up the hill last, slowly, on his stick.

Nobody had asked him.

He didn't stand with the families.

He stood at the back, under the old oak, by himself.

He didn't speak.

When it was done and the others were going down, he walked along the row of seedlings and read every name on every stake.

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