Excerpt from The Boneless Mercies by April Genevieve Tucholke, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Leave it, Runa. The job is done. Let's get out of here."

She'd glared at me, mouth tight above her pointed chin. "There might be something hidden—treasures from the south, desert jewels we could sell for enough gold to book passage aboard a ship…"

"No." Ovie's deep voice echoed down the corridor. "We will not steal. Leave her things alone, Runa."

Trigve and Juniper stood silent behind Ovie, though Juniper fidgeted, at war with herself. Her thieving urge was strong. Siggy had told us time and time again that the gods were watching and that they would punish a Mercy who took anything other than coin from a mark.

And yet …

I cut a lock of the Iber woman's hair before we left. I slipped Ovie's dagger under her head, metal scraping the cold stone floor, and sliced.

Runa had taken things in the past from our marks: simple, useful things. She kept a strong coil of hemp rope in her pack and all other sorts of stolen odds and ends: strips of leather and metal hooks and pieces of old wool and vials of potions and tonics. Runa usually did as she pleased, and I admired her for it.

Afterward, we waded into a nearby stream to wash the blood from our hands. We tried not to get blood on our clothing. Whenever we met people on the road, their eyes flashed to our black cloaks … and then to the old red stains on our plain wool tunics. It reminded them that one day their blood might be staining our clothing as well. People didn't like to think about this.

The woman in silk hadn't wanted us to burn her. She'd asked us to leave her there in the forest, with the worn front doors of her home left wide open. The wolves would come and take care of everything after nightfall.

"That's how they do it in Iber," Trigve said. "I've read of it."

Walking away and leaving the woman's body to be torn apart by beasts in the night took all my discipline, all my steel. I ached to set her body on fire and let her soul drift up to Holhalla while her flesh turned to ash. Or even to put her safe in the earth, six feet deep, as the Elsh did with their dead.

How someone preferred to die said a lot about how they'd lived. The woman in black silk had wanted to die bloody.

And if she'd wanted a wild death, who was I to take it from her?

* * *

They called us the Mercies, or sometimes the Boneless Mercies. They said we were shadows, ghosts, and if you touched our skin, we dissolved into smoke.

We made people uneasy, for we were women with weapons. And yet the Mercies were needed. Men would not do our sad, dark work.

I'd asked my mentor, Siggy, about our kind one solstice night, when the light lingered long in the sky. I asked when the death trade had begun, and why. She said she didn't know. The bards didn't sing of it, and the sagas didn't tell of it, and so the genesis of the Mercies was lost to time.

"Jarls rise and jarls fall," she whispered, her dark eyes on the last orange streaks of light flickering across the horizon. "The Boneless Mercies remain. We have roamed Vorseland since the age of the Witch War Chronicles. Perhaps longer. We are ignored and forgotten … until we are needed. It has always been this way." She paused. "It is not a grand profession, but it is a noble one."

I didn't answer, but she read my thoughts.

"This isn't a bad life, Frey. Some have it much worse".

Excerpted from The Boneless Mercies by April Genevieve Tucholke. Copyright © 2018 by April Genevieve Tucholke. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.