Across the Long Sea by Sarah Remy

melted by the unnatural heat of an unnatural fire. A few charred outbuildings lived to tell the tale, peeked roofs caved in to what was left of interior walls.
    The cobbles on the straight-­as-­a-­pin lane that had been the village’s main thoroughfare were cracked straight through. Everin talked about replacing the street, but it was only another chore on a long list of repairs in a now uninhabitable settlement.
    Avani had secretly begun to wonder if Everin was a bit mad; she’d loved Stonehill well enough, but even she knew it would never be anything more than a monument to lives lost. The gossips in the valley below held as the land was now cursed, and nothing flew faster from village to village than rumor of death and destruction. The strip of land might be the only fertile pastures on the unfriendly Downs, the only land worth farming for leagues to either side of the River Mors, but no sane man or woman would brave Stonehill’s angry ghosties.
    In truth, as far as Avani could tell the buildings were free of uneasy haunts. Stonehill’s restless spirits tended to linger near the low cairn Everin had built on gentle hill east of the village. He and Avani and Faolan had piled what corpse bits they could gather, and laid them to rest in a desert ceremony that appeared to consist mostly of piling heavy stone over flesh and bone to keep the scavenger animals away.
    Avani avoided the cairn. Island tradition had it was best to let the dead be, unless the spirit was one’s ancestor, and could be counted on to dispense wisdom. The one time she’d wandered near the grave, chasing after an errant ewe who’d slipped her pen, the Widow’s ghost had been loudly unhappy to see her and Avani had suffered head pain for an entire twelve-­day after.
    Fragile spring flowers grew up in between cobblestones; purple crocus and early-­blooming tulips, and the soft yellow flowers Faolan called butter-­smock. Vegetation of another sort invaded the burned-­out buildings. Ground vines snaked over fallen stone, sending newborn tendrils up over melted lintels and collapsed foundations. The brilliant green ferns that seemed to prefer the barrows poked questing shoots out of the ash-­rich ground, feathers tentative.
    â€œBest stay out of direct sunbeam,” Avani grumbled as she hopped over a particularly large specimen. “Barrow things aren’t meant to see summer.”
    â€œIf you’ve a mind to converse with the plants, black eyes, go and speak to my spring lettuces. They need cheering.”
    Avani stopped and smiled, and eyed the soot-­darkened mountain of graystone that had once been Stonehill’s finest home.
    â€œ Ai , Everin, best not be stealing from the blacksmith, now. Jim Smith was a madman, and would like as smash your head with an anvil as sell you his wares.”
    â€œLucky he’s dead, then.” Everin stuck his head around a cornice stone. “Come and see what I’ve found in your blacksmith’s cellar.”
    â€œIt’s not a missed corpse, we’d have smelled him by now.”
    â€œShame, Avani. You’ve grown hard. “
    â€œPractical,” Avani corrected. She walked around the side of the ruined home, found Everin crouched above what had once likely been the blacksmith’s root cellar. Clapboard doors were burned away, only disfigured bronze hinges remained, half-­buried in the earth.
    Everin was covered in a dusting of the same earth, and had it in his hair. He’d shaved his chin bare a season earlier, for hygiene, he’d claimed, although Avani suspected it was vanity, and razored his normally wild hair short, but he hadn’t quite managed to escape the grime of his adventures. Even his shorn crown managed to attract mud and gobbets of dust webbing.
    â€œSpent a day moving rock to clear it,” he said, smiling up at Avani. “But it was worth the effort.”
    Avani wrinkled her brow,