Bitter Seeds

interlude

Frozen earth meant shallow graves. Shallow graves meant easy picking. r And so the ravens of Albion gathered along parapets and treetops while the men from the island quietly buried their dead.

Twenty-six holes, dug in neat little rows for bodies that weren't so tidy.

Some were sooty black things, curled tightly upon themselves; preternatural fire had charred these men to the core. This flesh, the ravens knew, wasn't worth the effort. Heat had seared away its nutrients; it was little better than eating charcoal.

Others had been crushed, their every bone pulped. These retained their man-shapes solely by virtue of their skin. Better than the scorched dead, but still too much effort. Meat mixed with bone dust and bile. Bitter, and difficult to digest.

A number of dead had succumbed to more familiar injuries, ones the ravens had seen time and again. Their bodies were perforated with holes both large and small, some that still contained metal. Bodies like these were strewn across the continent: the detritus of war.

But the best meat came from that handful of men who had died without apparent injury. These were the men who had traveled through places the ravens could never visit, whose souls and sanity had been lost in transit. Perfect, unblemished, lifeless bodies.

The ravens waited until the holes had been filled, until the men with shovels and spades left the valiant dead to their peace. Then, as one, they descended.

They picked at mounds of freshly turned soil while their cousins to the east, upon the Continent, did much the same in the field behind a ruined farmhouse.

Many years had passed since new burials had drawn the ravens to this farm. There had been a time when it was littered with tiny graves, each no larger than a sack of grain. But new burials had come less and less frequently, until they ceased altogether.

Thus with great interest did the ravens watch as bodies were pulled from the wreckage. Several had died in the farmhouse, but only one evoked tears and anguish. The ravens recognized this bald little man; his experiments had fed them well in bygone years.

His body did not join the others in the cold, hard earth. The mourners cremated him upon a hellish pyre that crumbled his bones to ash. Winter wind sent his remains aloft, beyond where the ravens circled, and farther still.

To the east, to the far edge of the Continent, where his ashes mingled with snow and fell in large gray flakes upon the armies converging there. Erstwhile partners in invasion now assessed each other warily, like lonely revelers eyeing each other across an empty dance floor. They watched for feints and missteps, waiting for new music, for a new dance to begin.

The ravens of Eastern Europe had watched this impasse take shape. Now they waited hungrily for the spring thaw that would rouse these forces into motion.

But the farmhouse and the events there had become a pivot, the fulcrum upon which politics and aggression hinged: twin levers that could move whole armies in new directions. Winter hadn't yet diminished when the would-be aggressors lost their appetite for eastern conquests. Instead, they reevaluated. Consolidated.

The would-be defenders watched. And waited.

Spring came fitfully. The changing seasons were punctuated with savage, unnatural cold snaps.

Ravens everywhere huddled in their nests, to ride out the ice.