A gift for the dead

It was a sorely missed experience to wake up somewhat rested.
Alexis spent a moment to check her minor wound, satisfied to find it healing well.

Now, it seemed like she had a free day on her hands. Quite a rarity in itself since she came here.
A good time to think as she had decided she would. And for another little thing she had not found the time to do yet. While she could still push away the thoughts of having to attend a banquet she absolutely cared nothing about hosted by a person she was growing to resent.

She washed up and got ready, packing a few items other than her usual equipment this time, leaving the keep in the early morning hours.

She would have visited the cemetery, but Hendrik‘s and Jiyn’s ashes had been given to the sea, so that didn’t make much sense. She found herself a quiet and secluded place at the edges of the town instead, where she had not to worry for passer-by.
There, she set up a small campfire, spending some time just staring into the flames.

After a while she retrieved the little bundle she had brought along and opened it, revealing a few figurines she had taken to whittle after the burial rites of Jiyn and Hendrik.
For a Jiyn, she had whittled a dagger, reminiscent of the personal ones he had shown her his techniques with. She smiled at it ruefully.

“I wish I had gotten to know you better, so that I could have come up with something better. Forgive me.”

With that she threw it into the fire, letting it burn to ashes.

For Hendrik, she had made not one figurine, but six. All of them meticulously shaped into little cats.
She fed them to the fire one after the other.

“Couldn’t find any daisies, I fear. But hey, it is called Zin’s garden, is it not?”

she told the flames, thinking back to that first evening at the hare with her friend.
Alexis watched the items burn in silence for a few minutes before she spoke up again, though barely above a whisper.

“What should I do now, guys?”

She looked up to the keep in the distance. From here, she could of course not see the corpses of the executed farmers on display. But she knew they were there. They might always be there, long after they would be removed, in her heart and mind.

Maybe it had been necessary. This was a rough patch of land with a rough kind of people. But deep inside her, she could feel nothing but rejection for this way of handling things.
Could she really surrender herself to having to follow orders like that again?
And if that was how they treated their own people, what did they have in store for the plains people?

Alexis just stayed there for a while, letting the fire burn down.
When it did, she would collect the ashes and give them to the sea, to join the ashes of her friends.
And then she would take a walk. And think some more.