The graveyard lay at the edge of the settlement where the ground went hard and the wind had nothing left to break it, and Gerhardt had buried more of it in one season than in all his years before.
He stopped at the low gate and let the young lord go on ahead. There was no proper order to the rows anymore. They'd run out of good ground and out of time both, and the mounds crowded one against the next up the slope, fresh-turned earth gone stiff with frost, each with its rough marker leaning where the cold had heaved it.
Two thousand. He'd lost the ability to hold the number in his head after the first week of digging, and now it was only the field, and the field went on.
Trafalgar walked out among them and stopped with his back to the gate, facing up the slope into all those markers, and did not turn around.
Gerhardt hung where he was, a few paces behind, and looked at the back of the man and could not make the account balance.
