Severus leaned over the limp corpse. With inefficient but brutal thrusts he dug his knife into the hip joint above the deer’s good hind leg. With some noisy sawing of cartilage and bone, he ripped the joint apart, and hung the limb over his shoulder. “We’ve got neighbors,” he said, pointing with his bloody knife. “I saw lights. A farmstead over that way, over the ridge. I’m going to see if they’ll trade.”

“Yes,” said Carausias urgently. “There are many things we need—”

“What I need is some wheat beer,” said Severus. “I’ve had enough of this for one night.”

Carausias called, “You can’t be so selfish, man!”

But Carta only said, “Come back alive.”

When he had gone, the others stood over the carcass. Blood slowly leaked out of its throat and into the mud.

Carausias whispered, as if he might wake the deer, “What do we do?”

At length Regina sighed. “I used to watch the butchers at the villa. We need rope . . .”

They dug through the garbage in the buildings until Marina found a mouse-chewed length of rope. To Regina’s horror the deer’s flesh was warm and soft; she had never touched anything so recently dead. But she got the rope tied around the deer’s remaining hind leg. She slung the rope over the branch of a tree. With the three of them hauling, they managed to drag the carcass into the branches.

The deer dangled like a huge, gruesome fruit. Blood, and darker fluids, flowed sluggishly from its neck and pooled on the ground.

Carta watched dubiously. “We should collect that blood.”

“Why?”

“You can cook it—mix it with herbs—stuff the intestines with it. I’ve seen it done. We shouldn’t waste anything.”

Regina felt her gorge rise. But she said, “We don’t have a bowl to catch it. Next time.”

“Yes.”

Regina stepped forward with Carausias’s knife. Calling on grisly memories from childhood, she reached up, plunged the knife into the deer’s skin under its belly, and with all her strength hauled the blade down the length of the carcass. Intestines slipped out, tangles of dark rope. She flinched back, trembling. Her tunic and flesh were splashed with dark blood, and her hands were already crimson to the wrists. She stepped behind the carcass and began to tug at the flaps of skin. “Help me,” she said. “After this we should cut off the other legs.”