Here is a list of things I should have done that afternoon.
Attended Principles of Arcane Structure. Gone back to the dormitory. Slept, possibly, given that the body was operating on zero hours and the headache had expanded from behind my left eye to a sort of general hostile occupation of my entire skull. Read the syllabus that had been sitting on my desk since apparently whenever Harlan Voss had moved into that room and had clearly never been touched.
Instead I went back to the east forest at two in the afternoon in full daylight like a person with absolutely no survival instincts, which was ironic given that survival was currently my only real agenda item.
My reasoning, which I would like to stress was sound, was this: Sable had 48 hours. That estimate assumed she'd go at night, under cover, the way investigators in this kind of academy setting always did because the dramatic timing demanded it. But Sable had struck me as someone who did not particularly care about dramatic timing. She cared about getting there first. Which meant she might go in daylight. Which meant I had potentially much less than 48 hours, and the footprints were still there, and I had not finished thinking about the hands.
I told myself this was professional.
The forest believed me slightly more than I did.
The scene was undisturbed.
I crouched next to the place where Cedric Mallow had been and looked at what was left, which was not much in the visible sense but was quite a lot in the forensic sense if you knew where to look. The body had been found, or it hadn't, and either way the ground still held the shape of things.
Two sets of footprints. Mine, and the other one.
Mine were easy to identify because I'd dragged my right heel slightly on the approach, a habit from the original body that I'd noticed this morning when I walked to class. The other set was different. Smaller. Deliberate, even pressure, no drag, the kind of walk that came from either military training or a very specific kind of self-consciousness about sound.
They approached from the north side. Not the main path.
They left the same way.
I pulled a small stick from the ground and used it to measure the stride length without touching anything, and the number I got back was interesting because it was inconsistent. The approach strides were shorter, compressed, careful. The departure strides were longer. Wider. In a hurry, or relieved, or both.
Something had changed for them between arriving and leaving.
What had they seen? Cedric already dead, presumably. The rock. The blood. And then they had stayed long enough to fold his hands and leave. That was not a panicked response. That was a considered one. They had seen a body and decided it deserved something and provided it.
That was either grief or ritual.
Both had very different implications.
I was so busy thinking about the stride pattern that I almost missed the mark on the tree.
Almost.
It was small, low on the bark, at about knee height on a crouching adult. A symbol I didn't recognize, cut with something thin and very sharp, the edges clean enough that it was recent. Within the last day. Within the last twelve hours, actually, because the sap at the cut edges hadn't fully dried yet and it had been cool last night.
Someone had come back.
After I left. After the body was presumably removed. Someone had come back and marked the tree.
I looked at it for a long time.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
Environmental Reading has flagged an item of interest.
Symbol identified: Ashford Founding Script, pre-reform dialect.
Translation: "Returned."
This symbol appears at all four prior scenes.
Cross-referencing with academy historical records...
Cross-referencing...
Error. Records access restricted.
Recommendation: Find another way in.
Wonderful. The System had hit a wall and was delegating.
I straightened up and looked at the tree and at the word "Returned" carved into it and thought about an academy with a containment protocol and maintenance tunnels under the east dormitory and an administrative officer who was handing out restricted access keys to a student investigator at what I strongly suspected was not standard procedure.
Four bodies. Same symbol at every scene. A founding script that required pre-reform knowledge to read, which meant either very old or very studied. A person who came back to scenes after the fact to mark them, which was behavior I had a clinical name for and the clinical name was not reassuring.
I took a mental photograph of the symbol's exact dimensions and position and left.
On my way out of the forest I nearly walked directly into a boy sitting against a tree who was so still I processed him as a feature of the landscape for a full two seconds before he moved.
Tall. Younger than me. The kind of face that had probably been described as angelic at some point by someone who then immediately felt embarrassed about it. He was holding a small carved figure in both hands, turning it over slowly, and he was staring at the middle distance with the specific thousand-yard expression of someone who had received news and had not yet decided where to put it.
He looked up.
I stopped.
We looked at each other.
"Sorry," I said, because it was the only reasonable word for having nearly stepped on a person.
"It's fine." His voice was raw at the edges. He'd been crying, or not sleeping, or both. He looked at me with eyes that were doing a full assessment of their own, slower than Sable's but somehow more personal. "You're a second year."
"Harlan Voss."
"Rowan Mallow." He said his own name like he was handing it over and wasn't sure he'd get it back. "Did you know my brother?"
Every correct answer to this question was a lie of one variety or another. I picked the variety with the smallest footprint.
"Not well," I said. "I heard he was missing. I'm sorry."
Rowan looked back down at the carved figure. It was a bird, I could see now. Poorly made, one wing slightly shorter than the other, the kind of thing someone made themselves rather than bought. He turned it over once more.
"He carved this for me," Rowan said. "Third year. When I was scared of the dark."
I said nothing.
"He wasn't a good person," Rowan said. "He really wasn't. I know that. I knew that." He turned the bird over. "I keep trying to make that matter and it doesn't."
The carved bird had a small crack running through its base, old and re-glued, the repair inexpert and obvious. Someone had broken it once and fixed it badly and kept it anyway.
I had nothing professionally useful to offer this situation. I had nothing personally useful either. I stood in the forest with the symbol "Returned" carved twenty feet behind me and Cedric Mallow's brother in front of me and the headache came back with reinforcements.
"The bird's good," I said finally, because my brain had apparently decided to stop functioning above the level of mild sincerity.
Rowan looked at it.
"The wings are uneven," he said.
"Still flies in the right direction."
He didn't say anything. He also didn't tell me to leave, which I was taking as a neutral outcome and removing myself from before it changed.
I walked back toward the academy.
The System did not send a notification.
For once, I wished it had.