Word Count: 1,137
Set April 15



Once, the bones had haunted her.

Pendour still did not like them. It was a little odd, the way she could pick out a shattered rib or the curve of an eye socket from deep in the dry cove while she made her way to the Knight’s chamber on her wonder. It was worse, thinking of the last moments that those people must have suffered at the hands of her own ancestor.

Over time, though, she’d come to terms with it more, and now the bones were just part of the backgrounds on most of her visits to her wonder, at least on the visits where she just came up to get away from Earth for a while, or to tend the plants. There was a vague sense that maybe she should do something about it, but as with anything that was mildly unpleasant, she did not act on that thought for a long time.

She did not act on that thought for years.

As she’d spent more time delving into the depths of her wonder, though, looking at the pipeworks and realizing that maybe she could get the water running or even refill the cove, the matter of the bones became more pressing. It was true that she had the waterbreathing. Even if the water returned, she could go diving for remains if she had too, but it would be more trouble then, and easier to push aside again and again.

No. She did not want her cove to look fine, but be full of the dead.

She’d arrived at her wonder with her arms full of flowers. These were cut flowers, not things for the garden. She’d thought of growing her own before she realized that it was just another way to procrastinate, so instead she’d gone to a florist and asked the clerk what was best to put on graves.

She had lilies, star flowers, as soft and white as anything in nature could be. Those were for purity and peace, a wish for the soul. There were mums, too, for mourning, something that Irving had likely not given his victims.

It would take more than flower stories, though, to get her wonder clean and to give the dead the respect they deserved. She set her haul down at the edge of the cove. She tied up her skirt, and she switched out her delicate, pearl-laced heels for a pair of old work boots she kept. Then, she made her way into the dry basin of the cove.

She padded past shells and little pieces of coral, all dry as dry and shattered from the passage of time. Those could stay. Those were fitting things for Neptune.

She knelt in front of the first skeleton, the one that she could see most easily from the path above, and she reached out to touch it, hesitant at first. It was smooth and dry and neither warm or cool, not pleasant to the touch, but certainly not awful, either.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the empty eyes, and then she gathered it up in her arms as best as she could. It turned out skeletons were fragile things when the flesh and the cartilage were gone, and one of the legs clattered to the ground, but she picked it up with another apology and carried it up, out of the cove.

It had taken time to figure out what she was going to do with these, exactly. She’d considered bringing them back to Earth for burial, but that had its issues. It would take a long time, with the limited trips, for one thing, and for another, she wasn’t sure what she would say if a police officer found her with a shovel and a pile of bones out somewhere in the woods.

Then, she’d thought of catacombs, the stone houses for the dead that could be beautiful in their own right. Royalty slept there. It would mean no disrespect for these people, and it was manageable here on the wonder. There were buildings up on the second story, simple round white things that lacked some of the opulence of the rest of the wonder, but they were nice enough. They’d been guest houses once, from what she could tell. Still a bit of an odd choice for a crypt, but it was what she had. She’d picked on in the corner of the back row, and a few weeks ago, she’d pulled out what remnants of beframes she could find around in the other houses, and she’d lined them up neatly inside.

She took the set of bones and laid them out in the bed, and then she went back for the next.

Some were half-crumbled, or missing pieces, but she did her best.

She was on the seventh when Irving found her. She was surprised it had taken him so long.

“They don’t deserve this, you know,” he said, although his tone was more even than it had been before, as if he knew she’d disagree. “They’re thieves. Traitors.” He kicked at the skeleton that she was standing in front of, even though his foot passed right through.

Thieves? thought Pendour, bile rising. That’s what you thought made someone worthy of death? Executing traitors, while not something she approved of, was something she could almost understand, but she couldn’t think of anything that someone could take that would make them deserve this fate. Stealing was a sign of desperation.

“You made your decisions about what to do with these people, Irving,” she said, soft as soft, taking the seventh skeleton up in her arms. “Now I’m making mine.”

She felt the ghost’s eyes on her back as she carried the bones up to the house, and he lingered as she gathered the rest, but he did not do anything to stop her other than shaking his head a few times from the distance.

There were twenty, all told. In the end, she had to squeeze things oddly and line up most of the skeletons two to a bed, but that seemed okay. It had to be more respectful for them to rest here, laying under a roof, than it was for them to be in awful, twisted piles under the water. They also wouldn’t scare anyone who happened to swim that deep, although she doubted that many people could.

There was one more thing she could do for them.

Taking one last trip down to the cove, she returned with her flowers, and she split them up evenly among the remains, wrapping long-dead finger bones as best she could around peace and mourning.

Then she stood in the doorway, looking over her work with a smile that was half sad and half proud.

“Good night,” she whispered, and then she vanished back to Earth.