Nettle & Bone(82)
“I know,” said Marra. “I know. Someone will remember seeing me. Someone will make a connection. As long as I’m here, there’s the risk. It’s better if I go.”
“It’s not quite that,” said her sister. “Although that is certainly true. You are now the sister of the queen regent of the Northern Kingdom, and you are no longer staying unwed to appease Vorling’s paranoia. Mother will begin thinking where to put you.”
For a moment, Marra was too astonished to be appalled. “But I’m … I’m not a virgin and not a princess. I’m almost a nun!”
“Almost is the key,” said Kania a bit dryly. “You could rush home and try to take orders, and I will bet you the finest horse in the kingdom that the abbess won’t accept them.”
Marra inhaled sharply. To be wed for politics. To be shipped off to a strange man’s bed, while Fenris lay in a box in the palace of dust, waiting for rescue …
“She doesn’t mean to be cruel,” said Kania. “She isn’t. She stopped a war by marrying our family into Vorling’s. The Northern Kingdom would have rolled over us like a tide and our people would all be feeding the crabs by now. She had to choose the people over us, and use our bodies to seal the deal.” She rubbed absently at her forearm, where the bruises were yellow and faded. “She saved thousands of lives.”
“I know,” said Marra. “I know.”
Kania had given her two gifts before she left. One was a pouch full of money and one was a sack full of bones.
“They gathered them all up,” her sister said. “Every one, down to the smallest claw. They were terrified that if they left any, it would give evil magic a way into the room. I told them that they needed to be disposed of properly and that my sister would take them to Our Lady of Grackles for the nuns to sanctify before they were burned.”
Marra could not see through sudden tears, but Kania wrapped her arm around her sister’s shoulder. “Go,” she whispered in Marra’s ear. “Run and be free. They cannot use what they cannot find.”
And Marra hugged her back and went out through the godmother’s palace door with her hood over her head, then slipped away into the city to meet the dust-wife and save her friends.
* * *
They meandered south, day by day. The wagon was drawn by an exceedingly patient mule who tolerated the brown hen standing on his back. Marra sat in the back of the wagon and worked as well as she could with everything moving and rattling under her. At night, by the fire, she made much better progress, but then the light was bad and she jabbed her fingers bloody again. Agnes tutted and salved her fingertips. The dust-wife watched her, her long face expressionless.
“Will it work?” asked Marra, wrapping wires.
The dust-wife stood looking down at her and her skirt full of bones. “It would never work on a human,” she said. “Humans know when they’re dead. It might work on a dog. Dogs are simpler.”
She slept back-to-back with Fenris at night. No one commented. Sometimes he moved and she knew that he was also awake in the darkness, but neither of them quite had the nerve to act on it, not with Agnes and the dust-wife there. I could roll over. I could put my arm around his waist. I could …
“I’m going home,” said the dust-wife one morning. “Agnes, you should probably come with me. They’ll sort out the godmother thing one of these days, and you’ll be left trying to fend off the enemy with a chicken.”
“I know,” said Agnes. “I always expected I’d go with you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, of course.” Agnes tapped Finder’s beak. The young cockerel was growing in his adult feathers, though he was still half the size of the brown hen and had no wattles to speak of. “Finder, find me the safest place for me to be.”
Finder cocked his head to one side, then turned and walked to the dust-wife’s feet, where he began scratching in the dirt after an interesting worm.
“Ah,” said the dust-wife.
“But we have to stop by my cottage. I want my good medicine chest and I’m not leaving all my chickens. And I want seeds of all my good plants. And…”
“Yes, yes.” The dust-wife turned back to Fenris and Marra. “You two will be better off making your own way. By which I mean that all this poorly suppressed longing is giving me hives.”
Fenris coughed. Marra put her hands over her face.
“Come see us,” said Agnes. “Please. I’ll want someone to talk to who isn’t grumpy.”
“I’m not grumpy.”
“You are an absolute grump and so is your chicken.” The two old women climbed into the wagon and drove away, still bickering. Marra felt a pang in her heart and a surge of relief, all at once.
They spent the day where they had made camp the night before, in a little shepherd’s hut on a hillside, out of the wind. Fenris kept the fire up, and Marra threaded wire through bits of bone, rubbing her fingers across the broad, faithful skull and the long cage of ribs, the narrow whip of tail.
He sat beside her and handed her bones and wire as she asked, but he did not press her.
At sunset, just as the light from the fire became brighter than the light from the doorway, she finished. The skeleton lay across her lap, complete, claws wired to paws, vertebrae strung like beads.