The death-birds were back. Even while they bore the still-bleeding wounds Everard inflicted on them hours ago, they attacked with more ferocity than ever. The headless ones used their claws, and those without wings bit at his legs with blade-sharp beaks. The birds screamed their opprobrium, their hideous rough voices rising around him in a terrible wave, until – he awoke.

Everard opened his eyes and was met with two red ones staring back at him. The runtish death-bird that ghastly woman had taken stood in front of his snout, its head tilted down to look him in the face. It opened its jagged beak and released a gods-awful caw. That racket must have infiltrated his nightmares. The crow made another load croak and hopped upon his nose.

Immediately, Everard jolted upright, snorting. The bird fell off his muzzle, landing splayed. It did not dissuade the rotten thing. The crow righted itself and flapped its threadbare wings, the quills of its stripped feathers scraping the ground. Another caw, loud and insistent.

“You ought to teach this bloody thing manners before you bring it topside,” Everard groused. He scowled towards where his hirer should be keeping guard, wondering why she hadn’t quieted the bird – but she wasn’t there. The bird followed the path of his eyes, scrambling to the spot where Unferth sat by the campfire hours ago.

“Missing. Oh, that woman. That fool woman.”

Everard rose on creaking knees. Two possible scenarios came to his mind. She had been stolen in his sleep by some foe, or she herself had stolen into the night, abandoning him. In the first, she was his responsibility to find. In the latter, she deserved a lashing, and he would be all too happy to give it to her.

As Everard lashed his sword to his side, he saw the bird grow more excited, leaping about. It turned to him, then away, its beak pointing off into the fog.

“You know where she’s at, then?” He asked, resolving to feel foolish about talking to a wretched little monster later. The bird opened its mouth and gave a low, crackling noise. As good of an assent as any.

“Show me.”

The season of death was drawing to a close, and the spirts seemed to feel it. Instead of carrying on in their endless battles, they stood still, almost melting into the mists. They did not seem to notice the courser. Instead, their blank eyes stared at something he could not see. In voices that were almost indistinguishable from the frostbitten winds swirling on the old battlefields, they spoke a single word: “Galatea.”

 Perhaps the ghosts were searching something or missing someone. Everard was too. Well, searching, at least. He did not miss her presence one whit. Assuming she had not joined the mindless ghosts drifting along the moor, Everard would be all too happy to kill their contract instead.

Everard and the crow walked amongst the listless dead and long soul-pumpkin vines, already beginning to rot in the foul conditions of the moor. The bird had tried to scrabble up his legs, but a swift kick dissolved any illusions of camaraderie. Everard had quite enough death-birds upon his back in the last day. The wounds had only just stopped bleeding. Instead, the bird hopped alongside him, flapping its wings to get just enough moment to keep up with the old courser’s strides.

Strange tracks walked ahead of the pair in the mud. One set of hoof-prints, obviously Unferth’s, with small, uneven hooves taking small, uneven steps. The other prints, he couldn’t place. A courser’s hooves, but larger, dragging themselves in an odd, shuffling gait. Then, a new mark: a long, straight gash cutting into the skin of moor. The muck pooling in the narrow crevasse was the color of a scab.

The cackling of a crow perked Everard’s ears, too deep and jubilant to be the sorry creature hobbling beside him. The scavengers had reason for their delight: in the fog, Everard made out the shapes of two corpses, each attended to by black-feathered morticians. The birds hunched over the still coursers, crowing between pecking at bits of skin and open wounds.

Cautiously, Everard approached. These birds weren’t as bold as the ones he owed his newest scars to. At the sound of his sword leaving its scabbard, the birds alighted, taking to the sky in a cloud of pitch and death-stink. Still, Everard kept his weapon ready. On the Moor of Sleep, the dead were dead, but they could hate.

One body, Everard couldn’t identify. It looked to be dead for some time, its pelt sloughing off its rotten skin, its fluids putrid and congealed. Poor sod. The dungeons claimed them all eventually.

The other was no less pitiful. Fresher looking, but still naught more than skin and bones. Muck and blood caked its pelt, making its color hard to discern. Its face was half-submerged in a puddle mud, but the side facing up stared with a glassy, still eye. The fur around it bore a familiar stain, a marking like dripping ink. He knew it all too well. The crow gave a long, gurgling noise as it hopped upon Unferth’s scrawny neck. It took a few strands of Unferth’s mangy mane in its beak, pulling at them insistently.

Everard slipped his sword back into its scabbard. “No use, bird. She’s dead.”

The puddle around Unferth’s nostrils bubbled. Her ribs pressed against her flesh, cracking the dried dirt on her flank. Words gurgled out of her blood-caked mouth, weak and wet but dripping with the dismal, mordant slime she had spewed all along:

“Wouldn’t that be nice.”