The Cloud Cutter

Carrion Crows

The page was blank. I flipped to the next page, and then the next. All the pages were blank. It wasn't a book, but some sort of empty journal. My disappointment was so palpable I almost tasted it. I slumped backward, letting the book fall back into my lap. I gazed around the study; it suddenly seemed smaller now, its collection of stories less rousing than they had been only a moment before. It was a disheartening feeling to know I had truly read them all, a feeling made even worse with the thought of never getting to read any of them again.

I lifted up the small book and studied its cover. Why did my grandfather have a blank book in his library? And why had I never seen it till now? I waited in the stillness of the study, expecting an answer to come forth from the wind rapping on the shutters, but none came.

The day after my grandfather's passing Gybon made good on his promise. It was early in the year, during the close approach of the sun, and the tail end of the lambing season for Lacridean brood ewes. Our flock wasn't large, about twenty in all, so the lambing had provided only a handful of newborns. Walking with Gybon to their pen I was reminded of the previous week, when most of the ewes had given birth. Sensing my uneasy confidence at the new scope of work, my grandfather had left the majority of the task to me, leaving me running alone between each new lamb to clear its mouth of the yellowish birthing fluid to ensure it breathed on its own. Almost every year at least one lamb wouldn't live to see its second day, but this year they'd all survived.

Lecridean sheep are black, with orange eyes and two sets of horns that grow out from the top of their head. Two of the horns curl down to the sides of their face, while the remaining two grow straight upward from the skull. They are a resilient breed, able to survive on meager grazing, which makes them ideal for the Rest. Owning a flock means a renewable source of wool, milk, and mutton.

My grandfather had shown me once how to bleed an ewe, to prepare it for slaughter. He easily corralled the calm creature into a stall in the stone field behind our home. Above a shallow trough he quickly passed a knife beneath the animal's gullet. I'd recoiled as its black fur dripped with dark crimson blood, and had been particularly disturbed; not by the violence, but by the creature's calmness. It seemed perfectly prepared to meet its end, and its complacency had filled me with unease. I decided then that I wanted no part in the practice. Subsisting on a diet without meat proved to be more difficult than I'd bargained for.

Given the size of Ram's Rest, our trade market was weak, and our export without variety. An old joke often told was that Ram's Rest had only two exports: hogget and mutton. The sad part of the joke was that it was basically true. There was ragstone of course, and crops surely, but you can't eat ragstone, and the crops were small and ill-suited for export. The light that reached our town within the Rest was nearly half that which struck the bare face of the Dawnwall. So while our home on the ridge had had room for a modest garden box, it took a vigilant eye to ensure a sustainable crop.

I'd received my share of criticism for the choice to not eat meat, a good deal of which had come from my grandfather himself. To his credit, over time he grew to appreciate my dedication, and my green thumb. At the end of his days he still looked down on the practice, but he respected my choice to make it. Gybon on the other hand, did not.

I watched the butcher pace between the open-air stalls of the shelter from beneath the brim of my grandfather's hat. The tricorn was still a bit large for my head, but it gave me a subtle comfort to wear it. In a moment such as this, I was grateful for its presence.

The ewes stared back at the butcher with their glassy rectangular pupils. "What need do ye even have for them?" Gybon grumbled. "Good meat goin' to waste."

"An ewe can give you mutton for a week, or milk for ten years," I said.

Gybon snorted a laugh. "Pacifists. It's 'cause of men like you that Wyntown was lost."