“Feed the Roots”: It was carved into her lower back beneath the spiraling rune, each letter a lesson in elegant calligraphy written in their Scottish tongue.
The God of Rain left her propped up, sitting with her legs crossed in the mud, a yard from the moat. The vertical slit in the middle of her back was perfectly straight and gaping, and her eyelids had been cut away. In place of her spinal column there was a thick branch—another piece cut from the ancient Birnam Oak, no doubt—chopped to size for the thankless job of keeping her from becoming a limp fish.
She was pale to the point of transparency. Drained of her blood like the others before her.
It was raining, as it had every day for the last two and a half years, and the girl’s rigid, ghost white flesh prickled with skating droplets. Her close-cropped hair was soaked, sticking to her face and the back of her slender neck.
Her name would never be spoken aloud again after that day, as went the decree from the Council, and from then on, she was only referred to as “Number Nine”.
But Tam McMuir knew who she was, had said hello to her just the previous morning.
“Sile,” he murmured. “Good morning, Sile.”
He stared down at Sile now and cursed the God of Rain under his breath, and then he covered the poor girl with his horse’s blanket; she needed it more than Duncan now anyway.
Soon he would have to take her inside the castle walls, clean her, and ready her for entombment. He always did the work the others had no earthly desire to do. But that was okay.
They called him Tiene (meaning “fire”) behind his back, and sometimes to his disfigured face. At first it was simply a derogatory remark, one meant to sting the Castle Idiot, but now it was his name. He reckoned they didn’t even remember what his real name was.
Tam wasn’t a man to them, wasn’t a woman either, after the accident, though he was anatomically closer to one than he was to the other. He wasn’t anything really, other than their slog. Their workhorse.
He raised boars for slaughter and Castle Blae’s consumption—that usually preoccupied most of his time, caring for the two sows, Fiona and Mary, and their edible offspring—and once every year the Council would allow him, under close supervision of course, to craft weapons out of their stock-piled steel, joyfully sweating at the forge. That was his true passion: to be elbow-deep in the artistry of the fire which nearly extinguished him was invigorating. All his pieces were gone now, though. Taken for the war against England two years ago.
After he interred the girl, he would request from the Council some time at the forge; he wanted to make another blade—this one a gift for himself. Other than the rags he wore, it would be his only possession. Everything else, Fiona and Mary and Duncan (and Duncan’s blanket) included, belonged to Castle Blae and the Council.
“What are you doing out here, Tiene? You’re supposed to be slitting one of the pig’s throats, and carving it up. We have hungry women here, you know. Some of them with child—eating for two, they are.”
Tam turned and nodded good morning to the Archer coming toward him on the drawbridge. The round breast plate and the skull cap hid her womanhood from him.
“What’s that you’ve got under the blanket?”
Tam grunted his displeasure and lowered his head like a misbehaved mutt.
The Archer approached, holding her bow with one hand and reaching out for the horse blanket with the other. She grabbed a tuft of the blanket and yanked it off the dead girl.
“Aye! Fuck!” she hissed at the sight of her. “Fuck…”
She walked around to the girl’s backside and saw the message and the symbol cut there. “Lord and Mother, save us…” she muttered and crossed herself.
She glared at Tam then. “You find her just now, Tiene? C’mon, speak up, damn you.”
“I found her. Just now,” Tam replied.
The Archer bit her tongue and stifled a roar. She’d been up all night for watch on the wall with a handful of others. They saw no comings or goings.
The God of Rain was crafty.
“Take her in. But get the dead cart first,” she ordered, tossing the horse blanket at him.
Tam tramped off through the mud to fetch the dead cart. The Archer glared at the treeline of Birnam Wood five hundred yards away and spat a gob of saliva in its direction as the rainfall worsened.
She tapped her plated chest, just above her heart, and pointed at the trees, accusing their pagan tenant, summoning him for retribution.
“Fuck you and fuck your rain.”
The Talisman she wore around her neck—the Triquetra—swung back and forth, a pregnant pendulum warning of the coming doom.