Nettle & Bone(21)

She was still staring at her hands when she heard two of the lay sisters talking. “I don’t know what to do,” said one. “I’m out of ideas.”

“Go to the dust-wife,” advised the other. “She knows things.”

“What sort of things?”

“You know. Magic.”

Marra looked up sharply. Too sharply as it turned out. They saw her and moved away hurriedly, lowering their voices, but the seed was planted.

The dust-wife.

In this part of the kingdom, every graveyard of any size had its dust-wife. Marra was vaguely aware of their existence, but she came from the western side of the kingdom, and there was a definite difference. On the seacoast side, churchyards buried a dog to guide and guard the dead—church grims they were called. On the eastern mountain side, there were dust-wives. (In one or two places in the middle, there was both a dust-wife and a church grim. “They’re no trouble,” said one dust-wife of the grim, “and it’s good to have a dog about the place.”)

Dust-wives lived in little houses by the cemeteries. They operated as combination witches and gravediggers, digging the holes and laying out the dead. Even when a dust-wife got too old and frail to dig the graves herself, she would totter out with a spade and move the first spadeful of earth before hired hands did the rest. Otherwise, there was a chance that the dead might think the diggers were graverobbers, and their curses would be upon them, if not for the dust-wife’s blessing.

It was said that the dust-wives could speak the language of the dead and that they knew all the secrets that lay beneath the earth. When a dust-wife died, she was cremated and her ashes were spread across her graveyard, so that each dust-wife who came after might keep the wisdom of her predecessors near at hand.

Marra pulled her cloak’s hood up over her hair and went out to find the dust-wife. The convent had its own tiny cemetery, but those souls belonged to Our Lady of Grackles. She had to go into the town to the big church, consecrated to Our Lady of the Harvest, to the graveyard there.

The dust-wife was working outside, tending the graves. She was a fat, sturdy woman with a pink face. “Good afternoon,” she said, smiling. “Can I help you, lass?”

“I need a spell,” blurted Marra, then stood there, unsure if she had committed some dreadful social error. Were you supposed to make small talk with a dust-wife? Beg? Offer money? “I’m sorry. I don’t…” She put her hands to her cheeks. They felt hot.

The dust-wife pushed herself to her feet and patted her hand gently. “Let’s start at the beginning. My name’s Elspeth. What’s yours?”

“Marra,” said Marra, before it occurred to her to lie.

“Good, solid name. Like our princess. Come sit down and tell me what’s wrong.”

Marra took a deep breath. Her mother’s warning hung heavy in her mind. How much could she say? “My sister is married,” she said, sitting down on the wall beside the dust-wife. “He’s … he’s not good. She stays pregnant so he won’t beat her. But it’s hard on her. She loses them sometimes, and then it’s worse. I can’t … I have to help her. But he’s … um. Not going to let her go.” She stared at her hands.

“Poor girl. That’s hard. Does he have the rank to get away with it?”

Bursting into hysterical laughter would not help anyone, so Marra simply said, “Yes.”

Elspeth leaned back, face grave. “What would you have me do, child? It does not sound like barrenness will help her. I could give you a charm to make childbearing easier, but I tell you true, it’s little enough and it cannot save a babe that does not wish to come into the world.”

Marra closed her eyes and thought about treason and regicide and whispered, “Can you give me a spell that kills him?”

The dust-wife was silent for a long time. Marra opened her eyes, expecting to see horror, but Elspeth’s eyes were full of sorrow and understanding. “No,” she said. “If I could, I might, though I’m not an executioner and I’d need to know more before I bloody my hands. But the sort of magic you’re asking for is far beyond me. That’s real power, not charms and knowing and listening to the dead.” She looked away, apparently measuring her words carefully, then said, “If you go to the capital, there is a woman, I am told, who knows much of poison.”

Marra shook her head. The prince employed a food taster, of course, but she could not very well explain that. “If he was poisoned, they would think of her immediately,” she said instead.

Elspeth reached out and took her hand. Marra thought for a moment that the woman was offering her comfort, but the grip was too tight. She looked up, startled, and the dust-wife’s eyes had gone strange and slack, the pupils huge, the irises nearly gone.

The eyes of the dead, Marra thought, and then, Damia’s eyes must have looked like this.

Then Elspeth blinked and her eyes were normal again. She dropped Marra’s hand and rubbed at her face. “Well,” she said, almost to herself. “Well then. So that’s how it is.”

“I’m sorry?” said Marra.

“The dead could help you,” said Elspeth. “But you need a real dust-wife, one married to clay and bone and grave dirt, not an old herb witch good at digging holes.” She squinted and winced, as if the brightness of the day pained her. Marra watched a tear leak from the corner of her eye and run down her cheek.