Nettle & Bone(23)

The man mumbled something, flushing, and did not bother her any longer. He left at the next stop. The middle-aged woman sat with Marra until the next coach came, though, her eyes weak and watery and sharp as flint behind the weakness. “Tell them you’re a nun right away,” she advised. “There’s many a man who’ll not think twice to mistreat a woman but who lives in fear of a habit and a holy symbol. Might save you some trouble along the way.”

Marra nodded. After that she tried to walk like the abbess, to fold her hands into her sleeves as the sisters did. She had a carved grackle-feather necklace that her mother had sent her, which she had thought to sell, but she wore it on the outside of her clothing instead. It looked enough like a clerical medal to buy her a little more space on the coaches, a little more distance around her. People who would jostle Marra the woman would step aside for Marra the nun.

And Marra the princess? she thought, bemused. Would they stand aside for her?

The issue would never arise, of course. A princess did not ride on common coaches. She did not sit on the benches of common coach yards, or fall asleep with her head against the wall. The princess she had been was dead now, as dead as Damia in her grave, as dead as the children that Kania tried and failed to bear.



* * *



At the last town before the great necropolis, she made her way to the churchyard, where she found the local dust-wife, a woman so old that she could barely hold the spade to turn the earth.

“I am looking for the dust-wife,” Marra said. “The … the powerful one.”

“Ah,” said the old woman. “I know who you mean. Walk out of town toward the rising sun until you see two walls, a little higher than a man’s head. There’s a gap between them, and lots of loose stones. Walk across them, and you’ll see a flat place full of graves, and a little stone ridge. Her house is built into the ridge.”

“Thank you,” said Marra.

“Be careful,” said the old woman. The dead looked out through her eyes, and Marra wondered who exactly was issuing the warning. “Be polite. She’s not like a devil—she won’t try to trap you in words—but she knows too many things.”

It was on Marra’s tongue to ask how you could ever know too many things, but then she thought of all the things she had learned about Prince Vorling and Damia’s death. She bowed to the dust-wife, as a princess never bowed to anyone, and the dust-wife sighed and watched her trudge away to the east.



* * *



The walls were not so high as a man any longer. Perhaps they had been taller in the old woman’s youth, or perhaps memory had increased them. Marra walked between two shoulder-high walls and looked across hundreds of loose, flat stones, each the size of her hand, with writing in some language she did not know.

Set within the sea of stones were little oval buildings, like beehives without openings. Marra knew at once that they were graves. You saw such markers sometimes, even in the north, usually where a family had their own plot.

The flat stones made for uneven footing. She set her feet carefully. If she had to run, she would risk breaking an ankle or worse. They rattled and slid underfoot, talking to each other in stone language, saying all the words they had been saving up until the next time a human walked across them.

Marra was watching her feet and so not looking up much, when she heard a sound that surprised her, not for its strangeness but for its familiarity. It was not a sound she expected, here in a strange, stony plain on the edge of ancient graves. She looked up.

Bok, said the chicken again, turning its head to look at her more closely.

Marra let out a gasp of laughter. There was a stony rise and a round house built into the side of it. In the yard in front of the house, a small flock of chickens scratched and wallowed in the dust. As she watched, one hen leaned over and pecked one of her fellows, who squawked and ran off into the stones.

The house was very like the beehive graves in construction, layers of stacked flat stones but with a dark, yawning mouth. It would have been alarming if the chickens weren’t out in front of it, being so relentlessly chicken-like. It was hard to be frightened of the unknown when the unknown kept chickens.

“Yes, yes,” she heard someone say inside. The voice was not thin or querulous, and yet something about it suggested great age. “Yes, I hear you. We’ve a visitor, I suppose.”

Marra froze, unsure whether she should approach the house or knock or call out. One of the hens decided that a human standing still was an extreme threat to chickens everywhere and ran away, cackling in alarm.

“Well, come on,” said the voice. “I’m not getting any younger.” And then, almost as an afterthought, “Mind the brown hen. There’s a demon in her.”

Marra looked around but saw no brown hens in the immediate vicinity. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and stepped forward to meet her destiny and win the tools to kill a prince.





Chapter 7


The first task was the easiest one, in a way. “It’s straightforward, anyway,” said the dust-wife. “This is owlcloth.” She ran her hand down the fabric. It did not shimmer or shine in the light, but there was something about it that confused the eye. There were a half dozen ragged pieces laid out across the flat roof of the dust-wife’s home. “Make a cloak of it. You must spin the thread yourself.” She gestured to a wooden drop spindle and a distaff and a coarse mass of something only slightly more substantial than smoke. “With that.”