The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

More Headless Over Heels.

The scaffold creaked under the heavy stride of the Verdugo as her shadow fell across the kneeling woman. “Do you love your people, Jesska il Maksdotir?”

The waxen-faced sacrifice blinked away her sweat. “I do.”

“Do you repent your crimes against them?”

“I do.”

“Do you give praise to Hundred Saints, and to the Sorcerer General, and the deathspell beneath which he shelters us?”

“I do.”

Annalise whistled toward Jesska’s blind spot. “Ho, there, Tiago. Pass me the sword.”

Jesska turned her head in confusion to Tiago where he stood gauntly to one side—didn’t the woman behind her already have her black blade ready?—and Annalise struck.

The village of Tondarre reacted with a healthy ohh! Only a couple of screams, no whooping or clapping. Seth, observing from the carriage’s threshold at the rear of the crowd, was developing a theory that you could tell how the year had been in a village by the sound their assembly made when the head went flying.

“Why does she do that?” he asked the placid girl at his side as she flipped the hasped broach of her traveler’s cloak open and shut. “The fake-out?”

“It positions them right,” Ofelia said. “If they stay put, they hunch sometimes, or dart, or the muscle is tense with the anticipation of the blade. The al Ydrises don’t swing twice.”

“What does she whisper to them? The reluctant ones?”

“I’m not sure,” Ofelia said. “Mother’s actually never executed me, if you can believe it.”

“It does beggar belief.”

“Thank you, Jesska.” Annalise passed a palm over the corpse’s gray eyes and shut them forever. She pulled a rag from her belt pouch and wiped the wide span of her steel. “With that, folks, we’re done. On behalf of the Legion and the Sorcerer General, I thank you all for your loyalty, and wish you as warm and safe a winter as Ms. Maksdotir’s sacrifice has earned you. We’ll see you next year.”

Esteemed colleagues and also Ofelia, I decree the 841 quota season complete!

The sword hissed back into its scabbard. The prisoners who had earned a punishment gentler than its mercy were corralled from the scaffold. Annalise waved aside a hermandati gauntlet on offer to ease her passage to the ground, and hopped down instead, her boots splashing into the mud.

Corregidor Tannon valiantly attempted warmth from as far as one could reasonably excuse. “Madam Verdugo. It’s such a privilege to finally make your acquaintance.” The guy had a pair of long gloves on and a scarf cinched up past his chin, which he took every second breath from. The proper Corregidor maneuver was to invite the new Verdugo to stay in the manor. Tannon’s training did pitched battle with his terror of catching the soul-sickness from this huge unlit woman. “I would love to. Er. Well, that is to say, it would be such an honor to invite you and your retinue to stay, in, in whichever, uh—we, we understand Ms. il Maksdotir lived alone, and perhaps—”

“It’s been grand to meet you, Corregidor.” With a merciful smile and a wave, Annalise released Tannon from the metaphorical meathook he dangled from. “Truly it has. But if it’s all the same to you, we’ve got to be on the hoof again. It’s a chock-a-block schedule. So unless there’s any pressing business—”

“Of course, Madam Verdugo!” Tannon was so loud and abrupt it brought a startled flush to his own face. “Of course. Wouldn’t dream of keeping you. Yes. Uh, be well.”

Annalise mirrored his relief as she departed Tondarre’s emptying plaza, Tiago in tow. Seth moved aside; she caught his hand and tugged him with her into the carriage. “Come on, come on, come on,” she whispered urgently. Ofelia scurried in after them. The spring steel of the carriage’s black-lacquer driver box squeaked beneath Tiago’s hasty clamber to the reins.

Ofelia banged her palm on the front-facing window’s diamond lattice. “Go, go!”

Tiago cracked the reins; Draco and Draka huffed into motion. Demetrius, tethered into their train, knickered with annoyed confusion at the haste.

“Not yet. Not yet, dammit. They might hear us.” Annalise indicated a scaffwood tree split along its midpoint like a tuning fork. “Once we’re past that.”

The carriage trundled past the tree. Tiago stood on his seat and proclaimed it in his praise the Verdugo voice: “Esteemed colleagues and also Ofelia, I decree the 841 quota season complete!”

Annalise seized Seth and showered the side of his face with kisses; Tiago banged his fist on the roof; even Ofelia couldn’t help but bounce in her seat and punch the air.

“Thank you, Jesska, for number fifty,” Annalise cried, “Thank you, Plainlands, and smell you later! Thank you, Draco and Draka and Demetrius and whatever Seth is naming his! And thank you, Sunshine and Feeli and Seth il fucking Gutierre because we did it!”

They cheered, and broke out the red wine and the nice cups that were wrapped in newsprint and stuck inside a munition breastplate for safe-keeping, and Seth was exactly where he belonged.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...lers-haven
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2532866/