“Shh,” I whispered as I knelt down by him. His bleary eyes blinked helplessly up at me, yellowed and watery from the too-bright sun. His sickly-white skin was already starting to burn. “I’ll take care of this,” I promised him as I took out my sharpest knife, “and you’ll feel much better soon.”

I’d never leave a creature helpless and vulnerable on my own property, and there wasn’t a single craftswoman’s instinct in my body that would allow him to leave as mangled as he had arrived.

It took ages to get the measurements exactly right, what with all the distracting twitching. I wasn’t used to sealing together that kind of meaty matter, either. Once I was finally finished, though, he stood firmly on two feet once more, and if those feet didn’t match, well, at least the legs above them did. Now that they were evenly sized, he wouldn’t trip over them anymore, and my stitches—with a bit of extra help—were tight enough that even if something else made him stumble, they wouldn’t come loose and leave him helpless again.

By then, the exposed skin on his face and hands was peeling terribly, but he still shuffled eagerly before me, pawing at my hands and grunting as I put my tools away.

“Yes, well…” I patted his arm, forcibly resisting the impulse to check the stitching in his throat as well. “It was nothing. Really. Just go home now before you burn any worse, and don’t let anyone stitch you up so badly ever again.”

That was that, as far as I was concerned…but I should have known better from the start.

Wicked necromancers aren’t known for leaving mysteries alone.

An hour later, I had just returned from my invigorating hike down to the swamp and had a whole new pack of ideas all jostling for position in my head. I was busy scribbling notes as I heated a kettle on the stove when a sudden clatter sounded at the kitchen window and made me start.

Outrageously, when I looked up, I found that a sharp-eyed crow had bypassed every one of my protections just by tossing a hard pebble at the iron-framed glass above my mostly-ignored little window box. The moment the creature caught my eye, it opened its beak to let a piece of paper flutter to the ground just beyond my buried horseshoes.

Rude!

I pointed forcefully at the ugly scratch that it had left on our nice thick windowpane.

The crow flapped its wings and cawed even more forcefully back at me, kicking one clawed foot towards its waiting message.

Enough! I abandoned my kettle for the privacy of my own workshop. I’d dealt with more than enough of my neighbor’s intrusions for one day.