Nettle & Bone(22)
“Where do I find someone like that?” asked Marra.
“South,” said Elspeth. “South and east. Not here. Go around the south side of the mountains. The dry plains, you know?”
Marra nodded. Her father had taken the princesses there once, part of a royal procession, the whole land bone-dry, stone-dry, kicking up vast clouds of white dust as they traveled. “I know it.”
“There’s a great necropolis there, but you don’t want that. Stop before you get there. The mountainside and the carved caves, the abandoned dwelling and the skulls of bulls. There. There’s a dust-wife who’s worth the name. The dead would crawl on their knees to give her their secrets.”
Marra nodded again. “Thank you,” she said, sliding off the wall.
“Don’t thank me,” said Elspeth. “Come back to tell me, after it’s over.”
Thinking of the long journey southeast, Marra shook her head. “I may not live to do it,” she admitted.
“I know,” said the dust-wife gently. “But I’ll still be able to hear you.”
* * *
It was a long road. The only person she told was the Sister Apothecary, who looked at her with steady eyes and then handed her a purse full of coins and a bag full of tea leaves. “Magic,” she said. “Magic is beyond my skills. Come back as you can, and if you can’t, I hope fate is kind to you.”
Marra no longer had much faith in fate. She had been born a princess, which should have been lucky, but the price for never going hungry was to be caught in a struggle between people too powerful to call to justice.
She also rather wished that the Sister Apothecary would tell her not to go, because then she would have something to push back against. She was used to being stubborn, but having people agree with her was off-putting and didn’t give her much to work with.
With the Sister Apothecary covering her absence, she pulled up her cloak and went into town again. The dust-wife directed her to a shepherd taking fleeces to market in Low Bandai to the south, and Marra rode with him clear to the city. The shepherd seemed to like company but did not talk a great deal, and that suited Marra, who had little to say that wasn’t Oh god oh god what am I doing oh god …
From Low Bandai, there were coaches that traveled in all directions. She parted ways with the shepherd and took one southeast as far as it went, then another. She hoarded her coins for food and slept either in the coach or on benches while waiting for coaches. She was tired and snarly and often the hood of her cloak was to cover the wreckage of her hair, but her stock of coins did not go down as quickly as they would have if she demanded rooms at an inn.
No one would have mistaken her for a princess.
It was frightening the first time she had to go and request a seat on a coach. She had never done it, and she was afraid that she would say something so foolish that the driver would laugh at her and refuse her a seat. But she screwed up her courage and said, “I need to go to Essemque,” and the driver named a price. She handed up a coin and he nodded and told her that the coach left in twenty minutes and to be on board.
The next time was easier, and the next after that. She got used to the coaches and she learned that being crammed inside was a recipe for rattle-bone nausea, but it was the cheapest way. She was not certain where this sudden frugality had come from, but something in the back of her mind whispered that there was no help coming and if she ran out of money, she had no real way to earn more. Her only skills were embroidery and weeding gardens. I suppose I could sell my body, but I’m not sure how one does that, either. It seemed like it would be a lot more complicated than getting a seat on a coach. Did you approach people, or did they approach you, and how did you start a conversation that ended in money for sex? Was there an etiquette?
This was not the sort of thing one was taught at convents. It was easier just to sleep in the coaches.
Sleep by bone-jarring sleep, she made her way south and east around the tail of the mountains. It occurred to her that the abbess had probably had to tell the queen that she was missing. Had she run away? Could you really run away when you were thirty years old?
She was lucky, as such things went. No one bothered her—much. Only once did a man try to engage her in conversation that proved dangerous.
“Where are you going?” he asked her, sitting opposite inside the coach. He had all his teeth and she could see each one in his smile.
“South,” she said.
“Which city?”
Marra shrugged. “South,” she said again, trying to hide the way her pulse jumped. Had he recognized her? Why was he asking?
He asked her name and she looked at him in silence. He asked more questions—where she was going and did she have family there—and when she did not answer him, his tone turned ugly. He spit an insult at her, heedless of the other passengers listening.
It was a middle-aged woman who saved her, leaning over and snapping her fingers in front of the man’s face. “You rude young fool,” she growled. “Can’t you see she’s a nun? Why are you taking your temper out on a nun on pilgrimage?”
The man was in the middle of cursing the woman when her words sank in. He stopped in midobscenity, the consonants getting lost on his tongue, and stared at Marra in her travel-stained robes as if seeing her for the first time. “A nun?” he said.
Marra seized the opening. “I serve Our Lady of Grackles,” she said to the woman. It was not as much of a lie as it might have been. “Thank you.” Lady, forgive me.