The Fell Sword by Miles Cameron

one of the few girls her own age, found the first bodies, and she didn’t scream. These women’s screams were about spent. But other women gathered around her and patted her hands, and old crone Gwyn gave her a cup of elderberry wine, and then they all began to pull the pile of bones and gristle apart. The boggles went onto a pile to burn. The others—
    They were husbands and brothers and sons. And, in two cases, daughters. They’d all been eaten – flensed clean. In some ways, that made the task easier. Phillippa hated clearing dead mice out of traps – so squishy, still warm. This wasn’t as bad, even though they were the bones of people she’d known. At least one set of bones belonged to a boy she’d kissed, and a little more.
    Stripped of their flesh, they all looked the same.
    They found a second pile of the dead later in the day, in the apple orchard. By then, Phillippa was more hardened to it. Or so she thought, until Mary Rose spat and said, ‘These is midden heaps. ’ She spat again, not in contempt, but in her effort not to retch.
    Phillippa and Mary and Jenny were the youngest women, so the three of them were given most of the heavy work. They were all pretty fair at using the shovels, and Phillippa was learning to cut with the axe, although using it raised calluses on her hands that would not please the boys in Lorica. If she ever went back to Lorica.
    When the sun was past midday, her mother rang the bell – the monsters didn’t steal the really valuable things, the way reivers and skinners would do. So she went down the hill from the apple orchard. There was an intact rain-barrel under the eaves of the manor house, and she washed her hands.
    Jenny Rose smiled. ‘You have nice hands, Phillippa.’
    Phillippa smiled. ‘Thanks, Jen. Though I’m afraid they’re going to get worse before they get better.’
    Mary Rose paused to dip her own hands. ‘What were the boys like in Lorica?’ she asked, bold as brass.
    ‘Mary Rose!’ said her sister.
    ‘Much like boys everywhere, I expect,’ said a new voice.
    Standing by the corner of the house was a tall, slim woman in a nun’s black habit with the cross of Saint Thomas on it. She smiled at the girls. ‘Handsome, funny, angry, preening, stupid, vain, and wonderful,’ the nun continued. ‘Are you Phillippa? Your mother was worried.’
    The three girls curtsied together. Jenny and Mary made a stiff obeisance, the kind that the village priest taught you. Phillippa sank down, back straight and legs apparently boneless. ‘Sister?’ she asked.
    The nun had a beautiful smile. ‘Come,’ she said.
    Jenny whispered, ‘Teach me to do that.’
    Supper was ham and cheese and good bread that must have come from the fortress with the nun. The mill at Gracwaite cross was a burned-out ruin, and none of the towns around Albinkirk had had bread – fresh bread – in weeks.
    There was a fine palfrey in the yard, and a mule.
    The nun was a curiosity – neither particularly well bred, nor ill-bred. She was somehow too robust to be a noblewoman – her brown hair was rich but unruly, her lips were a little too lush, and her eyes had more of command than languor. But Phillippa admired her immensely.
    The nun had a tonic effect on the gathered women. She seemed oblivious to the shadow over all of them, and she had brought seeds for late planting. The mule was to stay as a plough animal until the fortress sent oxen.
    ‘I gather that you have found quite a few dead,’ she said. She said it quite plainly, without the embellishment of false sentiment.
    ‘Almost all the men,’ Helewise noted. ‘We haven’t found Ser Hubert. I’d expect to know him. He had his brigandine on.’
    ‘I saw him fighting,’ Phillippa said, without meaning to. ‘I saw his axe. I never liked him. I wasn’t nice to him.’ Her voice cracked. ‘He died for us.’
    The nun nodded. ‘Hard times change us all, in ways that are far beyond our little knowledge,’ she said. ‘They teach