Nettle & Bone(40)

Bonedog usually slept humped over her feet, his rib bones gouging into her ankle. Finding two sets of feet, he did not seem to know what to do. He circled, whined briefly, and then draped himself over her shins. The glamour tried to soften the hard points of his pelvis but failed.

Marra could not seem to get comfortable, either. It was hard enough to sleep on the ground, but had the ground been this hard last night? Was that a rock under her? Her arms were pulled inside her robes for warmth, but had the sleeves always been so constricting?

She shifted position, trying to get comfortable, then wondered if she was waking Fenris up, or if he was still awake and she was annoying him. She didn’t squirm this much when there wasn’t another person there, did she? Or did she, but she didn’t worry about it and didn’t notice she was doing it?

How many years had it been since she’d slept near another human being? She tried to remember. In smaller houses, with fewer beds, people bundled up two and three to a bed, but princesses slept alone.

When she had been very young, she had sometimes crept from her bed to Damia’s. I had a bad dream, she would say. Her older sister had been very patient, had pulled the blankets aside and helped her climb up onto the tall bed. Marra remembered it all with sudden vividness, the scent of dried lavender under the pillow and the crispness of the sheets. She hadn’t thought of that in years.

I can’t remember Damia’s face, she thought, gazing dry-eyed into the dark, but I remember the lavender.

Her back was beginning to warm up. Unfortunately one side of her sinuses was starting to clog. Normally she would have rolled over, but if she did that, she’d have her face squashed into Fenris’s spine. She wished she could sleep on her back, but it always made her feel short of breath. (Women in her family did not sleep on their stomachs after puberty. She hadn’t even tried since she was fourteen.)

She fidgeted again, located a rock under her hip, and tried to get it out of the way without squirming too much. Bonedog got up, circled three times, and collapsed again in exactly the same position.

Fenris is probably regretting agreeing to this. He is probably thinking he got better sleep with his face an inch from the coals.

It was foolish to even try … she thought, and then it was morning and the warmth against her back was gone and the brown hen was clucking irritably for her breakfast.



* * *



The day they crossed back into Marra’s own kingdom felt strange, because it didn’t feel like anything at all.

The borders were porous and no one particularly cared, and they were on a back road that lacked even a guard post. There was a faded wooden marker with an approximation of the royal crest burned into it, recognizable even if the dragon looked more like a snake and the hare looked like a blobby dog. Marra paused at the line, then stepped over as if stepping into cold water.

I should feel something, she thought. This is my land. I’m a daughter of the royal house.

She didn’t.

She’d been asleep on the coach when she had crossed the other way, and she’d been so anxious about finding the dust-wife that she hadn’t given it much thought. But this time she knew where she was and she was walking into her own kingdom and it seemed as if she should feel … something.

“Problem?” asked Fenris.

“I live here,” said Marra. She nudged the dirt with her boot. “I’m home, I guess. Except it doesn’t feel like much of anything.”

“Ah.”

“The poet Tarus said that when he came home, the land itself sang under his feet, and his heart sang with it.”

“That may be unique to poets.” Fenris started to rest his hand on a nonexistent sword hilt, caught himself, and shoved his hands in his pockets instead. “I came back from my first campaign and I’d been in my own clan’s lands for half an hour before I noticed.”

She glanced up at his face, surprised.

“I was cold and wet and very tired,” he said. “When I did feel something, it was because I realized we were only about twenty minutes from the keep and I might get warm again.” He shrugged. “And then again, other times I have come home and felt as if I had finally woken up after a long illness. I suspect these things say more about us than they do about the land itself.”

Marra was watching his face, and so she saw the sudden flash of pain across it, quickly stifled, the deepening of the lines between his eyebrows.

“Will you be able to go back to your clan’s lands again?” she asked.

“No.” He lifted his head, looking around them. This part of the countryside did not go red and orange with autumn, only dun and yellow. Wind rustled through the dry stems of broom straw at the edges of the road. “No. I can go anywhere in the wide world that I wish, but the borders of Hardack are closed to me.”

“There is no appeal?” asked Marra. “You can’t … um … wait for someone to die? Or forget?”

His smile was acknowledgment that she was trying, not happiness—a quick flicker, then gone. “No. My return would start a senseless war of vengeance. I will not sentence so many people to die merely because I am homesick.”

“I’m sorry.”

“As am I.” The flicker of a smile lasted longer this time. “But I am told that this is a fool’s errand and we will all probably die, so I do not let it trouble me overmuch.”