Once she was inside with the door shut, she confronted a saddle-like seat that she was apparently supposed to plant herself on. She hung her cloak of office on a nearby peg, skinned off her riding pants and underwear and hung them alongside it, then squatted over the seat. The wood there, unlike the rest of the building, was polished and oiled from contact with many behinds. She could not bring herself to touch it, but managed to hover over it. She waited for the moment of release.

“Vocate Aloê Oaij,” said a thin voice weaseling its way through the thin door.

“This is not a good time,” she said with absolute sincerity.

“Vocate Aloê Oaij, I am Binder Denynê of the Skein of Healers. I did not have a chance to introduce myself to you earlier.”

“I’m not giving you the chance now. Go away.”

“I don’t know what you saw this morning, or what you thought you saw—”

“GO AWAY!” roared Aloê.

Little miffed-sounding footsteps receded into the distance, and Aloê heard off in the dim afternoon Oluma’s painfully jovial voice cry, “I told you to leave her alone!”

Later, a much-relieved Aloê sponged herself off in the tub room (which was indeed intended for human occupants, it seemed) and changed her clothes, returning to the kitchen to find dinner being served and a new occupant at the kitchen table, a tall woman with orange hair and black eyebrows.

The newcomer stood as soon as Aloê entered. “Guardian,” she said stiffly. “I’m the Arbiter of the Peace in Big Rock and roundabouts. I brought a couple of horses for your seconds so that you can ride out to the murder scene.”

“Thanks, Arbiter!” said Aloê, and would have said more, but the Arbiter walked out of the room.

Aloê shrugged and sat beside her seconds.

“She’s a pretty good sort,” said Oluma in a worried tone, “but I think the last vocate through here sort of high-handed her. You’ll like her better when we get a few drinks into her tonight.”

Oluma was more worried about it than Aloê was, and Denynê was worried about something else. They had their secondings with them, though: witnessed documents that they accepted the authority of Aloê for the purposes of the investigation into Earno’s death. Without them, her orders to these Guarded would put her in danger of exile under the First Decree. With them, she could order them around like thains—but she would not, of course. That was no way to get skilled work out of someone.

Aloê tucked the secondings into her sleeve and then ate a quick dinner of seared landfish and earthapple crisps alongside her seconds.

“What’s to do for the rest of the evening?” asked Oluma. “Do we show you around Big Rock and introduce you, or—”

“Let’s ride out and look at the body,” Aloê said.

“A night exhumation!” Oluma said. “I love them! Although, strictly speaking, the body hasn’t been inhumated yet. Still, it should be equally creepy, don’t you think?”

“Let’s hope so.”

Oluma ran off to get her bag of tricks, and Denynê took the opportunity to say urgently to Aloê, “Vocate Aloê, I don’t know what you saw or what you thought you saw this morning, but. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Aloê met her orangey-brown eye. “Yes?”

“Well, I. I just. I just want to assure you. That I would never. I would never ever. That is, never again.”

“Never what?”

“Oluma seduced me, is what it is. We were waiting, and I was bored, and she is agreeable—don’t you think she is?”

“I do. I’m glad for you.”

Denynê drew back, appalled, as if the small distance between their two chairs had become a deep chasm spouting fire. “What do you mean? I assure you that I am a person devoted to my craft of healing and to the Skein of Healers.”

“What does screwing Oluma have to do with that?”

“We were not screwing!”

“Boinking? Cleaning the carpet? Kissing the fish? Diving for pearls?”

Lundê squawked out a laugh and hurriedly stepped out the side door.

“Why do you have to be so offensive?” Denynê said plaintively. “I won’t do it again!”

“It’s nothing to me whether you do or you don’t,” Aloê assured her.

“But you . . . you wouldn’t. . . .”

“Engage in sex with my partner in a task for my order? But I do so. Constantly. I’m married to a Guardian, Denynê.”

“But before you were married. You wouldn’t have. You wouldn’t have. . . .”

“I did though,” said Aloê, smiling as she remembered a few wonderful moments from long ago, and some horrible ones, too—all equally pleasing somehow from this distance. “But I think I know what you mean at last,” she said, remembering her concern about whether Morlock and she would be able to work together after they started messing around. “I would say: don’t worry about a problem until it is a problem.”

“And if it is?”

“We’ll talk then.”

These matters, once so puzzling to the young Aloê, did not trouble her much anymore. The mystery to her in this situation was what Oluma saw in the dried-up apricot named Denynê. But that was not a mystery she had to solve, unlike the death of Earno.

She and Denynê stood and walked toward the front of the house. Oluma was standing with her bag just outside the door of the kitchen, shifting nervously from foot to foot; clearly she had overheard at least part of the conversation.

They went to get their horses from the stable. She was glad to see that her seconds were both capable horse handlers. Aloê hadn’t exactly grown up with horses herself, but knowing how to ride and tend to the beasts was a useful skill that she had been compelled to learn . . . and that certain males who lived with her had never learned very well. She smiled as she saddled up Raudhfax, wondering how they were doing.

As they rode out into the brisk spring evening, they passed by a big house in the shadow of the Big Rock. The Arbiter was standing in its arched doorway, but she turned aside as Aloê and her seconds passed.

“I can’t imagine what’s gotten into the Arbiter!” fretted Oluma. “It’s almost as if she dislikes you.”

Aloê slipped this matter into her mental pocket containing all the mysteries she didn’t have time to solve, and rode away to the field where her dead friend lay waiting for her.

The pale golden sun was gone from the gray field beside the quiet little brook; it was nearly gone from the sky. Earno’s body lay on its back in a private pool of sunlight, staring at the cool blue-edged clouds with empty eyes. The anchors of the stasis spell, seventeen of them, ringed the body with their pointed faces turned inward, like pale chipmunks standing at attention.

“Is this how you found him, Vocate?” Oluma asked.

“No—that’s not how it was at all.” Aloê thought back to that terrible day. “He was alive when we came in sight of him. We were riding up from the south, Morlock and I. The others were beyond the stream, shepherding the Khnauronts toward it. Earno was on horseback—and Deor, he is never on horseback if he can help it. Noreê was walking next to him, talking about something. I’d never seen them so close together by choice. Deor hates her.

“Earno saw us and smiled. He rode his horse across the stream. When he was in the middle of it, that great wound opened up in his throat and he fell down dead in the stream. He was dead when we pulled him out of the water.”

“How quickly did you set up the stasis field?” asked Denynê.

“Almost as soon as we realized he was dead. Though there was some dispute about it.”

“Oh?”

“Yes: Deor wanted his body incinerated and the ashes decently buried. Dwarves are like that about people they care for. But Noreê and Morlock ignored us and started setting up the stasis spell. That was funny, too, because—” She didn’t finish.