Nettle & Bone(81)

“She could not pull the guards from the entrance without it looking peculiar,” said Marra, “but she called on the others to escort her. She had gone to Vorling’s mother’s tomb. She said that no one thought of the mothers in this time and she wanted to commune with the shade who had lost a child and— Oh, it was amazing. It really was. She’s so good at this. At being queen. Everyone was very impressed.”

“I was certainly impressed,” he said a bit dryly. “When she looked down on me in that stone box, I thought that she was going to let me die a slow death in the dark.” One corner of his mouth crooked up. “And I found that I did not want to die. Not like that.”

“I’m sorry,” said Marra again.

“Don’t be. I had faith. I thought if I could just hold out long enough … well, you and Lady Fox here would come for me.”

The dust-wife snorted. “I would have,” she said. “You might not have been alive at the time, though. Dead men are much less trouble.”

He staggered again. Marra winced. “Did they torture you?”

“Very little, considering. General Takise is a good man, but more importantly, a good soldier, and he knows how little torture is worth for extracting usable information. I made up a tale that had truth scattered through it, and he decided that I was likely mad, but with the magic we had seen, he could not be sure. Torture only tells you what the victim thinks will save him, and they knew that. So they beat me a little, and when my story did not change to anything they could use, they stopped.

“Where are we going now?” asked Fenris.

“Away.” The dust-wife glanced over her shoulder. “Agnes arranged for a cart.”

“Agnes is walking around freely?”

Marra laughed. “Everyone remembers her as very tall,” she said, “with bright green eyes. It’s the damnedest thing.”

“She was, though,” said Fenris. He had to stop and lean against the wall for a moment, stretching his legs and bending his knee to work the kinks out. “When I saw her. Wasn’t she? Was it an illusion, like the one on Bonedog?”

“It’s not an illusion,” said the dust-wife. “Not exactly. Your mind knows what certain things ought to look like, and when your eyes are wrong, your mind wins. Agnes’s magic thinks she ought to be six feet tall with eyes like a starving wolf. That Agnes’s body didn’t comply is just an oversight, so far as the magic is concerned.”

“She’s a very wicked godmother, isn’t she?” asked Marra.

“Evil magic could flow through her like a river in full flood. Fortunately for the rest of us, there’s a lot of Agnes in the way. Whether that makes her wicked, I’ll leave to philosophers. This turning here, I think.”

They emerged into the gritty light that precedes dawn. Marra barely took note of their surroundings. Another quarry, it looked like. She was too busy helping to shore up Fenris. One step after another, one step, one step more, and then there was a wagon in front of them and Agnes was falling off the driver’s seat and threw her arms around them. “You’re alive!” she said. “But of course you are; I didn’t think you were dead— I mean, Fenris, I thought there was a chance you were dead, I didn’t know, but of course Marra wasn’t dead—not to disparage the dead, obviously they serve their purposes and we’ll all be dead eventually anyway, so you probably shouldn’t speak ill of them, although I can’t say that I’m sorry to see Vorling go—”

“How is Finder?” asked Fenris, stemming the flow of words.

Agnes rummaged around in her scarf and produced Finder, who was half asleep and clearly indignant at being awoken.

“You need to train him to sit somewhere else,” said the dust-wife disapprovingly. “Otherwise you’ll have a rooster who thinks he should dive headfirst into your cleavage when he wants to roost.”

“It’s been a while since any man wanted to dive into my cleavage,” said Agnes. “It might be a nice change.”

“Not when the spurs grow in.”

“Oh, well, probably not.”

They got Fenris into the wagon and Marra handed up the bag slung across her back. It rattled as he took it. “What’s in here?”

“A friend.”

His eyebrows went up. Marra climbed up beside him and she and the dust-wife arranged empty feed sacks to conceal him. He sneezed a few times but did not argue.

“I see you have much to tell me,” he said. “Ah … not over the face unless it looks like we’ll be stopped. I was in that box too long, and having things on my face…” He smiled up at her, but it was a thin layer over deeper horror. Marra found his hand under the layers of burlap and squeezed. Another wound for Vorling’s tally. But if we get away, then it is done. It is all done, at last.

“No talking now,” said the dust-wife. The wagon wheels creaked as they left the quarry, going away from the city. Marra pulled the nettle cloak tight around her shoulders, chilly in the predawn cold. Fenris’s fingers were warm in hers.

By the time the sun had risen, the white city was behind them. She could still see it, like a canine tooth in the earth’s jaw, but it was far away and had no more power to bite.

And I will never go back.

When she had taken leave of her sister for the last time, they had both known it. Kania had said as much. “I do not know how long I can keep you out of this. I can try, but…”