Nettle & Bone(55)

“Ah, Lady Fox.” He shook his head. “I think finding her makes up for anything else you did wrong.”

“Maybe, but you … you did what you could to make it right.” She didn’t know how to say what was in her head, that Fenris was a good man and maybe the weakness of being good was that evil didn’t occur to you. That never in a thousand years would she have dreamed that Vorling was intentionally hurting her sister. It had never even crossed her mind. “And then you did your best to make sure no one else suffered.”

He snorted. “By jumping into a fairy fort. Not the best idea I’ve ever had.”

Marra clasped her hands together. They seemed much colder now that Fenris had released them. “Well, if you hadn’t, we never would have met.”

“No, we wouldn’t have.” His eyes held hers for just a moment too long, and in the end, Marra’s dropped first.



* * *



“So you do curse things,” said the dust-wife.

Marra woke, startled. It sounded as if the dust-wife were talking directly to her. A curse? What was a curse?

“I don’t,” said Agnes. “I’m not like that.”

“You couldn’t bless any of those chicks, could you? Until you gave up and cursed the last one.”

Marra propped herself up on her elbows and realized that the walls were so thin that she could hear the conversation.

“Fine.” Agnes sounded defeated. “A small curse. Only a small one.”

“Not so small. The only reason the magic took was because you cursed the chick, wasn’t it?”

“All right, yes. I’ve never been much good at blessing people, not really. But I didn’t hurt the chick. It was fine.”

“What was the curse portion? There had to be something.”

Agnes mumbled something.

“What?”

“I said, if the chick didn’t find us a safe place, it would die.”

Marra’s eyes widened in the dark.

“But it found it,” Agnes continued, “so it worked out all right.” She sounded worried, even through the muffling plaster, and Marra could picture her fretful expression.

“You’re skilled at cursing. Genuinely skilled. More than that, you’ve got a talent for it. I saw the way the world slipped sideways in the alley. It wasn’t just the one mouse that time, was it? You’ve done it before.”

Another mumble.

“Who was your mother, really? Or what? Not just a random maiden with hooved feet, was she?”

Marra glanced across the room. Could Fenris hear this? No, he was asleep, hands folded neatly next to his head, breathing slow and even.

“You’re a poor liar, Agnes. Tell me the truth.”

Marra had been feeling a slight pang of guilt over eavesdropping, which immediately vanished. She wedged her ear against the wall, just in time to hear Agnes say, “What good is it? I’m not going to go around punishing children for being born. That’s a terrible thing to do. People really don’t like that.”

“So you are giving up your power in order to be liked,” said the dust-wife heavily.

“No.” That was loud enough that Marra winced. “I am giving up my power in order to be decent. If warriors are allowed to stop killing people and bang their swords into plowshares, I ought to be allowed to keep chickens and give children good health and not curse them.”

The dust-wife said something else, too low to hear.

“The world can go hang,” said Agnes, sounding perilously close to tears, and as long as Marra listened, she heard no more from the next room.





Chapter 15


“I was thinking,” said Agnes the next morning. “Maybe I should go talk to this godmother.”

“Eh?” said Marra.

“Eh?” said the dust-wife.

“Is that wise?” said Fenris.

Peep, said the chick.

They were all sitting around a table in a little whitewashed room. The surface of the table was scarred from years of use, but everything was very clean. Miss Margaret’s breakfasts were very plain—coarse bread, cooked eggs, and little fish dried whole—but she was not stingy on the portions, which was good because Fenris ate as much as the other three humans put together.

“Well, we don’t know exactly what the blessing is, do we?” said Agnes. “We know what the words are. But maybe there’s a loophole. It’s not always words. You figure that she had to make a good speech to the court, but she might have said something simpler to the baby.”

“And you think she’ll tell you?” asked Marra.

“She might. Professional courtesy, you know.”

Marra nodded, though she had trouble picturing that grim figure with the stained-glass skull extending any professional courtesy to anyone.

Surprisingly, Fenris agreed. “She might,” he said. “Very unlikely people, you know, will share confidences with each other if they think the other person understands. A prisoner who won’t tell a guard anything will thaw immediately if he’s put in a cell with another man in for the same crime. And doctors who would bite off their tongues before showing indecision to a patient will tell another doctor about how little they know and how frightened they are. I’ve seen it happen many times. It’s how spies work.”