The second wheelbarrow load came and went, and that was it. He sluiced the stones down with water and listened to it gurgle away, feeling the satisfaction of a dirty job done well.
A hoof stamped on the stones. He turned.
There was a dead deer looking at him.
He didn’t yelp. On the scale of weird things that had come to him for help, this didn’t even make the top ten. Still, he did inhale sharply, and he was glad the shovel was within easy reach.
It was a complete skeleton, fully articulated, standing framed in the square of light of the open barn door. Its filigreed shadow streamed away into the darkness of the barn and was lost.
He knew it was a deer because of the hooves and the skull and the build, but the delicacy of the thin bone legs was belied by the great rack of antlers on its head, a massive, labyrinthine rack, more than he’d known a deer could possibly fit onto its skull.
For one horrible moment, he wondered if thinking about the peryton had summoned its ghost—but no, there were no wings, and so far as he knew, the beast was still alive. This creature was probably not alive. At least, not in the conventional sense.
It looked at him.
It didn’t have eyes, and its empty eye sockets weren’t full of eldritch fire, or even darkness. They were just eye sockets, full of ivory shadows and little more. Nevertheless, it looked at him.
“Can I help you?” he said.
It kept looking at him.
He spread his hands and took a cautious step forward, then another. It tilted its head, very slowly, and one hind hoof lifted a little, and scraped at the cobbles, the faintest sound, like a tree branch creaking in a soft breeze.
“Do you need help?” he tried again, and took another step.
It rattled at him. He froze.
The skeleton was articulated, so far as he could tell, by a kind of fine dark webbing at the joints. It looked almost like dried algae, brownish-black and forming organic loops and swirls over the balls of the joints. The deer had given a kind of rolling full-body shrug, down the length of its spine, and the clatter of vertebrae together had made the rattling noise he heard.
Sings lifted his hands, palms out. He didn’t know what that was supposed to prove, if anything. No reason to think it would recognize any humanoid body language at all. It might understand him, or it might not—some of the odder creatures were able to understand human speech, and some were no different from regular beasts.
They stood there, for a few minutes, the man and the dead deer, and then it swung its head away, the long, smooth nasal bones pointing into the trees nearest the barn, and stamped its hoof again.
A skeletal doe melted out of the trees. She had an awkward, hopping gait, completely at odds with the ossuary grace of the buck. Sings could see immediately that her right front leg was broken. She held it hitched up in front of her, the naked hoof dangling awkwardly.
“Oh, you poor thing,” he said, and quite forgetting the enormous buck standing there, started towards her.
A warning rattle stopped him. He turned, and saw the buck eyeing him eyelessly, the head lowered just a little. He lifted his hands again.
“I’ll do what I can,” he told the bone stag. And then, hoping he wasn’t about to be spread-eagled on that gigantic antlered mass, he bowed deeply to the stag.
And straightened.
And waited.
They stood there for a long moment. The leaves whispered in the trees, in a brief, cool breeze, that chilled the sweat on Sings-to-Trees’ body.
The stag lifted its head.
Sings turned away. The skin between his shoulderblades crawled. He bowed to the doe, for good measure, and she gazed at him with empty eye sockets.
There was no flesh on her, there was nothing that could pull the face into any shape beyond the mute grin of a skull, but still, he thought he could see pain.
He knelt in front of her, and very carefully, took the injured leg in his hands.
He was shocked immediately by the warmth. This was no dead thing—this was living bone. The break was reasonably clean. He had wondered why, lacking muscle and skin to hold it in place, it hadn’t just fallen off. Now he saw that the bones were threaded through and around with the black webbing, and a thick skein of it, through the hollow center, was still attached.
Hmm.
Had this been a real deer, he wouldn’t have tried it. Such breaks were extremely difficult to fix—while setting the bone was straightforward enough, you had to keep them practically immobilized for weeks to keep them from breaking it again, and the captivity and stress killed them more surely than the break would. A wild deer could get by on three legs, and other than putting out food, there wasn’t much you could do that wasn’t worse than the injury. It was different with fawns. He could manage fawns, and although he couldn’t return them to the wild, more than a few half-tame deer in parks in the elven city had started life on his farm.