Kin by Lili St. Crow Page B

body would be arranged carefully among the sap and leaves and sawdust, and birds would clean the bones. After they were naked, white bone would be stained with ochre and wrapped securely, then returned to the earth.
    The Age of Iron left great scars in the old forests, and the Reeve had made them Waste. You couldn’t have bodies hanging in the treetops in Woodsdowne Park—although, right after the Reeve, sometimes they did.
    For those reasons, and others.
    Her charmhose stuck to her legs. White-sleeved long dresses on the women, Gran’s patterned with subtle dragons in ecru thread, Ruby’s linen plain of any ornamentation. You couldn’t wear an underwire or jewelry, no metal allowed. Even silver, that holy Moon-glow ore.
    No metal, and no words. The kin buried in silence. This graveyard was within New Haven, but no inspectors or city groundskeepers came within its peaked iron fence. Gran had once remarked that negotiating the passel of restrictions and leases with City Hall had been delicate and patience-consuming, but worth it.
    Those leases had been negotiated just a little after the Reeve, in the vast deep darkness of the Deprescence; Ruby never quite figured out if Gran meant she’d been there to witness it herself.
    Absolute silence as Woodsdowne men related to Hunter and past their tenth fullmoon run carried the wrapped body, thin sapling-sticks sewn into the wrappings to provide support for the cloth and the antistain charms.
    Her lips moved a little. It was probably blasphemous, but all she could think of were the chapel songs at St. Juno’s.
Mithrus Christ, watch over us all; we are the lambs and you the shepherd. . . .
    Gran never said anything about Juno being run by the Mithraic Order, though the kin remembered darker times when anything remotely churchlike was dangerous. Even now
cathedral-kin
was a dirty, serious insult.
    It meant
betrayal.
It meant you’d given one of your own to the mere-humans who once hunted kin for Church and sadistic pleasure alike. A tremor went through Ruby; she braced herself against the nightmare.
    It was no use. There was no waking up from this.
    Even though they had wrapped . . . him . . . carefully, it was still pretty obvious that things were, well . . . The shape was wrong, bulging oddly near the head and the legs too thin.
    Things were missing.
    What had
happened
? Gran just said, “He was attacked.” Conrad said nothing. Nobody else would tell her, and Thorne . . . well, he didn’t talk, or visit.
    At all.
    Something moved next to her. She couldn’t stop thinking about chapel at Juno, the girls massed together, Cami with her sweet throaty alto and Ellie, when she bothered to sing, quietly but clearly hitting every note. They made it sound easy.
    When Hunter was eight he had announced she was pretty okay, for a girl. The smoky char-smell of barbeque and the tang of lemonade on her tongue, she’d let him kiss her cheek and the adults had laughed. Of all the cousins, he was the sweetest. The calmest, too—he’d only gotten into a domfight a handful of times, and all of those with Thorne.
    It was Thorne next to her, dry-eyed and tense. The movement was his hand on her shoulder, warm and familiar. Her knees almost gave.
    Hunter’s mother, dun-haired Tante Alissa who had married out to a branch from the Cherweil clan down in Pocario to the south, swayed. Her husband Barth propped her up. Hunter’s brothers, all older, were either carrying the . . . carrying him, or standing on their mother’s other side. Gran, apart and alone as Clanmother, held the silence as the slow steps of the bearers drummed on sweating earth, crushing green grass.
    They lowered him slowly with charmed straps of seven-braided linen, and the soft thump of him resting against the bottom jolted all through Ruby. She bent forward, suddenly breathless, Thorne’s arm around her shoulders. He