Nettle & Bone(7)

Chapter 3


On the edge of the blistered land, Marra stood and looked around for the source of the voice. It was too bright here. She had gotten used to the dimness of the blistered land. Her eyes ached as if she were staring at a snowfield instead of a dusty road and a line of fences.

“I saw you,” said the voice. She squinted against the light and saw the speaker. A man. Perfectly ordinary looking, in the gray-brown garb that everyone wore, here on the edge of the desert. There was nothing that stood out about him, except that he was shouting at her.

“Hello?” she croaked. Her voice sounded as harsh as the crows overhead.

“I saw you come out of there,” growled the man. “You’re one of them. One of the bad ones.”

Marra shook her head. This was absurd. She’d broken bread with cursed souls, and of course it was a supposedly sane man who was going to try to stop her. It was ridiculous. It was …

Typical. The prince is sane, too, as men judge these things. I should probably have seen it coming.

“I’m not from there,” she said, fighting the urge to defend the people inside. “I got lost. I’m from the Harbor Kingdom.”

“The Harbor Kingdom is nowhere near here.”

Despite herself, Marra felt a pang of relief. Good. The blistered land did not touch her own kingdom—not yet.

Her relief was short-lived. The man was carrying a shovel. Marra eyed it warily. Shovels were good for burying dead bodies, and also for making bodies dead in the first place.

“I traveled for a long time,” said Marra. “To get here. Well, not here specifically. To the dust-wife.” She wondered if the dust-wife’s name would help. Surely everyone respected dust-wives?

The man spat on the ground. “Trying to raise the dead?” he asked. “The bad dead in there?” He took a step forward.

“No, I…” Marra retreated, darting a glance over her shoulder. Could she make it to the safety of the fog?

This is completely ridiculous. Did the hero Mordecai have to stop and explain about the poison worm to the locals? Did they try to chase him back into the swamps? Bad enough that Marra had failed in the task, but now this?

He took another step forward and lifted his shovel. “You go back in,” he said. “You go back in or I’ll kill you. You stay where you belong.”

“But—”

She tried to explain. She really did. The words spilled out of her like blood from a wound, a jumble of explanations about the dust-wife and the bone dog and three impossible tasks and traveling on the coaches from the Harbor Kingdom, and after about thirty seconds, she realized that he wasn’t listening to her at all. He was staring past her, into the fog.

Marra turned and saw shadows moving in the murky edge of the blistered land.

“Oh god,” the man whispered, clutching his shovel. “Something’s coming.”

Marra froze, trapped between the shadow and the shovel, not daring to move. She could hear footsteps pounding on the earth, a rattling sound, and then …

It galloped out of the fog, an articulated ghost, bouncing on its forelegs. Briefly it rose up and swiped at her face with its nonexistent tongue, then dropped back down again.

“Dog,” she said. Tears began to spill down her face. “Dog. You came back.”

The bone dog gazed up at her from empty sockets, mouth open in a fleshless grin.

“M-monster!” shouted the farmer, scrambling backward. “Monster!”

Monster? Where?

Marra looked behind her, wondering if something terrible had come out of the blistered land. The skeleton dog barked soundlessly, bouncing on his paws, and Marra heard the rattle-bone click of vertebrae and wire.

She grabbed the dog by the backbone, trying to find a convenient way to hold him. You couldn’t very well scruff an animal with no scruff. “Hush!” she begged him. “Settle down! Be quiet!”

The edge of the blistered land was calm. A crow cawed and it echoed in a space neither here nor there. The man was long gone and had left his shovel behind.

Monster?

And then she looked down and realized that her assailant had been talking about the skeleton of the dog.

Oh. Right. I suppose … yes.

She scowled. He was a good dog. He had excellent bones and even if she had used too much wire and gotten it a bit muddled around the toes and one of the bones of the tail, she’d think that a decent person would stop and admire the craftsmanship before they screamed and ran away.

“No accounting for taste,” she muttered. She was still crying a little, but her tears felt as ghostly as the bone dog’s tongue. “All right. Let’s go back to the dust-wife and show her you exist.”



* * *



Because she was a novice but would never take orders as a nun, Marra was not expected to attend services three times a day. Sometimes she did anyway. The services for Our Lady of Grackles were short. The goddess—or saint, no one was quite sure—did not care for complex theology. No one knew what she wanted, only that she was generally kindly disposed toward humans. “We’re a mystery religion,” said the abbess, when she’d had a bit more wine than usual, “for people who have too much work to do to bother with mysteries. So we simply get along as best we can. Occasionally someone has a vision, but she doesn’t seem to want anything much, and so we try to return the favor.”