It was small. It was warm. It had, until very recently, been a living creature with opinions about its own continued existence.
Emma had dissected things far more complex than this. In sterile halls, labeled, organized, specimens preserved past protest. She had mapped the lymphatic vessels of a human hand. She knew the precise location of points that could, if pressured correctly, cause unconsciousness or death.
None of that, she discovered, was any help at all.
She started at what she thought was a logical entry point. The skin tore when she expected it to rip, resisting in the places she expected cooperation. She adjusted her grip. Lard soaked her gloves. Removing them didn’t help. Adjusted again. A small, wet sound. She shivered, contemplating eating it.
She longed for Circle kitchens. Clean bread. Strained broth. Things that arrived on plates, already decided.
Across the fire, Morrigan had spread a length of oilcloth across her knees and arranged on it a collection of plant matter harvested while they’d walked. Some of it Emma recognized in an approximate way. Her own herbalism instruction had been in a tower in the middle of a lake, using reagents that had been extracted, titrated, concentrated, powdered, preserved, and shipped.
Morrigan worked without reference material. She stripped stems with her thumbnail in one clean motion, releasing a sharp smell. She sorted by mysterious taxonomy Emma could basically reconstruct. Season, maybe. Proximity to standing water. Whether it had been growing in sun or shadow when she’d pulled it.
Emma started trimming. Then kept trimming. The fat came off. The connective tissue. The more ambiguous portions of the interior. She was getting it under control.
Morrigan pinched a small bundle of something dark and pungent. Bog rowan, Emma thought, though the leaves were broader than any specimen she’d studied. This close to the Korcari corridor it was probably flush with iron from the soil. She hung it from a looped cord on her pack to dry. Then she moved on to the next thing, unhurried.
She was also not not watching Emma who turned the carcass over, squinting at it. There was very little left.
Morrigan set down a stem and looked at the remnant. At the growing pile of discarded pieces beside Emma’s knee, which was becoming an argument for having not caught anything at all.
“Hm.” The witch appeared at Emma’s shoulder without seeming to move. Her hands were still faintly stained by dark vegetables. She reached in and plucked something out of the body cavity: a small sac, intact, but ominously adjacent to something shredded. She tossed it into the dark.
“There. Now you cannot poison us unless you try.” A pause, to survey the wreckage. “The fire forgives many sins.”
She withdrew. Returned to her oilcloth. Picked up the next stem. Emma looked at Morrigan’s hands: methodical, unhesitating, moving through material that was half-toxic by any strict reading. Morrigan had selected it from the roadside without pausing, without checking anything, without consulting a single source.
Without you, they will surely fail, Flemeth had said. Emma had no doubt the old witch was correct.
She wiped her hands, gripped her staff, and dragged a wisp of the Fade through the veil. It settled about her shoulders, glowing for her to better examine the carcass.
The joint. The hip socket. She could see it clearly now, a shallow acetabulum. While it lived, it must have walked and ran with pain. The femoral head was still seated. She knew where the capsule was, to disarticulate it cleanly.
She’d done this in the Circle’s anatomy practicum, on specimens that were, admittedly, human and already preserved, but the principle was the same. Ball and socket. Find the plane of the joint. Don’t cut through bone when you can move through cartilage.
She repositioned her hands and applied pressure at the correct angle. The joint released with a soft, definitive click, and the leg came away cleanly, no tearing, no wasted meat. Then, the other side.
The snap of disconnection felt reassuring. Morrigan’s stem-stripping paused for perhaps one second, then resumed. Emma set both legs aside and went back to the rest of it with steadier hands.
The fire was small, damp wood hissing under it, releasing smoke sideways like a filthy tea kettle. Somewhere behind them: the Blight. Somewhere ahead: also, presumably, the Blight.
Alistair had been quiet all day, settled on events he hadn’t finished processing yet. He’d walked half a length behind them for most of the afternoon responding with single syllables, eyes going somewhere else.
Now he stopped. He looked at the carcass. He looked at the growing pile of discarded pieces beside Emma’s knee.
“No,” he said. Not alarmed, exactly, but approaching it. “No, you can’t throw that away.”
He crouched beside her. He smelled like road dust and slightly scorched metal, which Emma was learning is simply what one smelled like after three days of walking through terrain that was trying to kill them.
“The gristle melts,” he said. “If you give it long enough. And the fat… you need the fat. Especially out here. You’ll want everything you can pull out of this.” He glanced at her, something sheepish crossing his face. “You’ll really want it.”
Emma frowned. He didn’t explain, but she had a feeling. A hunger had come, settled in, and never entirely left. A low, persistent thing she’d been politely ignoring. It was easy to blame the road.
“The skin thickens the broth,” he continued, picking up a piece she’d set aside. He seemed almost apologetic, dangling the scrap briefly in the light. “I, uh. I’ve eaten worse. Considerably worse.” He turned the piece over in his fingers. “Chantry kitchens build character. And other things. Mostly, it builds things in your gut.”
Emma looked at the piece he was holding and endeavored not to display a visible reaction.
“It won’t be good,” he said. “But it’ll keep us standing. Standing seems like the goal, given the circumstances.”
Somehow, she knew, she had not entirely internalized the reality of this Blight. The history books told her: it meant no markets she could trust, no clean bread, no someone else having already dealt with the difficult parts. Her stomach felt the urgency. Her appetite did not.
She took the piece back from him. She put it in the pot. She put the other pieces in too.
The stew was, as promised, not good.
It had the coloring of some organic ambivalence. The gristle had technically melted but was bitterly present within the broth. Emma ate it with the focus of completing a task rather than enjoying a meal, which was apparently the correct approach. Alistair was eating with the determination of someone who had stopped distinguishing between the two.
“I’ve had worse,” he said, with exaggerated gravity, examining a spoonful. “Not recently. But in the historical record. There’s precedent.”
Emma watched him locate a particularly ambiguous piece, consider it, and consume it without changing expression. The small, internal courage this required was not lost on her. He noticed her watching and nudged the bowl toward her.
“You’ll need it more than I will.”
This was, she was nearly certain, a lie. He was bigger than her; He must still be hungry. But he said it with enough conviction. She ate it.
While the fire worked down to coals, Morrigan finished processing what she’d collected. The dried bundle of rowan went back into her pack. The remaining material she wrapped separately, in smaller cloth parcels.
Emma watched her tie off one of the parcels and found herself asking: “Deathroot?”
“Tis the black-stemmed variety,” Morrigan looked up. She retied the parcel and set it aside. “You know the margin.”
“What margin?”
“Between the written measure and what will kill you,” Morrigan said. “Those books of yours were written by domesticated animals, about specimens grown in controlled soil.”
She picked up the next piece of cloth.
“What you found near the millpond would dose differently. The frost slows the concentration. One would want roughly two-thirds of the written measure… If one was using it correctly.”
Emma said nothing. She added that to the running, grim tally of things she hadn’t known that she would need to know.
Morrigan finished her parcel. Alistair had stopped eating, bowl empty, staring at a point somewhere between the fire and the Fade itself.
Emma didn’t say anything. The stew sat in her stomach, dissolving into something thoroughly undignified, doing exactly what it was supposed to do.