Nettle & Bone(36)

“Deliberately,” said the dust-wife thoughtfully. “You wanted to die, but not by human hands.”

Fenris gave her a quick, wry glance. “For all that we say that we are servants of the Fathers, everyone knows what clan we hail from originally. I am a criminal, but whoever killed me would make an enemy of my clan. But if I was not killed, then the clan of the lord I had killed would lose face as long as I walked free.” He tossed a pebble into the water. “It was not their fault that their lord was a monster. They suffered under his hands more than any of the rest of us.”

“And Hardishmen consider suicide shameful,” said the dust-wife.

Fenris shrugged. “I do not much care for my honor, but to fall on my sword would be to say that I believed what I had done was wrong.” He sighed, and a little emotion crept at last into his voice. It sounded like weariness. “So here I am. I was in the goblin market for a long time and I am very tired.”



* * *



Marra looked toward the pond. Fenris had requested a little privacy to bathe. She wondered if he was really doing so, or if he was running off into the woods to put as much distance between them as he could.

I did not tie the bone dog, and he came back. She rubbed Bonedog’s skull, feeling the ghost of fur under her fingers as they pushed through the glamour.

“That was a sad story,” she said aloud. “Poor man.”

“If it’s true, yes,” said the dust-wife.

“You don’t believe him?”

“Mm.” The dust-wife shrugged. “He doesn’t feel like a liar, but that only means he believes himself. I imagine most of it’s true, more or less. But there’s men that would kill a rival and convince themselves they’d done it for noble reasons.” She laced her fingers behind her head, lying back on her bedroll. “Everybody makes up a story about their sins. Sometimes to make them less, sometimes to make them the worst thing a mortal’s ever done. Really depends on the person. I’d wager this one’s more martyr than apologist, but you never can tell.”

“Do you think he’ll try to leave?”

The dust-wife shrugged again. “If he comes back tonight, I doubt it. But if he has any sense, he’ll take his freedom and go and we’ll never see him again.”

Marra bit her lip. “The moth said we needed him.”

“We needed him then, yes.” The dust-wife tilted her head. “It is possible that he has already done what he needed to do.”

“What?” Marra frowned. “That was an hour ago!”

“Yes. And perhaps we would have been attacked in the goblin market if we had not had a large bodyguard walking with us, and his purpose is over and done.”

Marra blinked. “Do you … do you think that’s likely?”

The dust-wife shrugged yet again.

“But if it isn’t, we still need him!”

“Indeed. But just because you need someone doesn’t mean that they are under any obligation to provide. He may leave to take his chances elsewhere.”

“I have not left,” said Fenris from the shadows. Marra jumped. How could a man walk so silently? And how much had he heard?

She looked up, and Fenris walked out of the shadows, his tread slow and heavy as a draft horse. “I have little enough sense, Lady Fox,” he said. Again that bemused smile. He turned his gaze to Marra. “We ransom prisoners often in my land, and usually it is only with gold. But you have bought my freedom with your own blood and bone. What little honor I have left is yours, and if I can be of service, I will.”



* * *



Breakfast the next morning was dry bread without even one third of an egg apiece. Fenris snapped his up in three bites but did not complain about the scanty rations. Marra wondered how on earth they were all going to feed themselves on the way to the Northern Kingdom.

Fenris walked much more quickly than either of them at first, a ground-eating stride that would probably have him in the Northern Kingdom before Marra and the dust-wife had even left the Southern. He had to stop and check himself several times, almost apologetically.

Marra was having a difficult time herself. She had become used to ducking away from travelers, to making sure that Bonedog was out of sight. The first time that a farm wagon passed them, she grabbed his collar and almost dove into a hedgerow before she remembered.

The wagon driver did stare at them, but not at Bonedog. Instead he was looking at the hen on top of the dust-wife’s staff and grinning hugely. “How’d you teach her to do that?” he called.

“Teach her, nothing,” said the dust-wife. “Couldn’t get her to stop.” The driver laughed loudly and tapped his cap, then drove on, while Marra tried to calm her racing heart.

“Easy,” murmured Fenris.

It was on the tip of Marra’s tongue to be annoyed, but then she looked over at him and realized that he was talking to himself as much as to her.

How long was he in the goblin market? Does this seem strange to him as well?

She turned it over in her mind for a few moments, and then she simply asked.

“Too long.” Fenris looked up at the sky, which had lost the pale gray-gold notes of dawn and was turning to blue. “It was hard to keep track of the days. They say that people who go into a fairy fort will dance for a night and come back to find that years have passed. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if the goblin market is always running. It seemed like I was always there in the stall, but sometimes I’d sleep and it felt like a long, long time had passed. And sometimes it was … different.”