Chapter 2 #2
Another wave of pain flooded her head. Rue snarled and bared her teeth, challenging any more sentimentality to try its luck.
“You shouldn’t go back,” the bird croaked. “The sell-swords will have burned it all.”
“No smoke.” Rue nodded to the pale sky above the trees’ reaching arms. “Don’t you want to warn your friends, Senna? Your boy? His young ’uns? That niece of yours?”
Senna had been quick enough to warn everyone when Rue came to settle in the village. The stranger wasn’t to be trusted. She was dangerous. A witch perhaps. Children had started to avoid Rue in the main street within days of her arrival.
Senna made no reply. A talking crow wouldn’t last long in Pye.
Senna would have been the one to cast the first stone too.
In a place where the young men had chased off a stranger for “wearing foreign clothes,” anything bearing even a hint of magic about it was treated with deep suspicion.
Even the worthless healing charms they purchased at the grey markets were worn beneath their clothes, too shameful for the light to see.
On the long slow climb to the ridge, recent memories returned, images surfacing in Rue’s mind every few paces: a horseman black against the sky as if seen from hoof height, Maddy Spinner’s face twisted by terror, the pounding of Rue’s heart becoming the gallop of mercenaries charging from the field.
Rue paused at the halfway point, shaking her head to rid it of the pictures. “Shit…” The shaking was ill-advised. She put her hands to her temples and squeezed, trying to contain the hurt.
“Bad?” The crow could have been asking about the pain, or the memories, or both.
“Seen worse.” And Rue had seen worse. Worse than a band of hired blades cutting down peasants on their way back from market.
But not for many years. Years spent trying to forget, trying to divert herself with the scratching of a living from unforgiving soil, raising goats, haggling for grain, all the dull, hard business of normal lives that can be lived without others having to die to make room for you.
Rue stopped again just shy of the ridge and whatever scene would be revealed to her on the far side. “Why are you a crow?”
Her head still ached as if ten devils were trapped in her skull and wanted out in a hurry, her wits still felt loose and apt to spill from her if she made a sudden move, but she wasn’t mad, she wasn’t barking-at-the-moon mad, and this bird was Senna Weaver…which made no sense at all.
“I don’t know.” The crow fluttered to the branch of a nearby tree where the buds were still green fists clenched against the last breath of winter. The bird managed to look guilty.
“You do know.”
“I think…” The crow pecked reflexively at some unseen thing. “I think she sent it. This crow. And…I…” A shivering of black feathers. “It picked me.”
“Picked at you, more like.” Nothing drew carrion crows faster than a heap of corpses.
“It was…I was…” Another convulsion and the bird took off, aimed at the sky. “An eye. I was eating—”
The distance devoured the words, but Rue had heard enough. The crow had eaten Senna Weaver’s eye and now it was Senna Weaver. That made no more sense than before, save now at least there was a reason for the connection, for the choice.
Rue walked on. She had been stupid, and she had been weak. How could she have fallen so easily? By rights she should be dead, still with the others rotting in the sun. Age: she blamed age. It had stolen all her sharp edges and paid her with aches, with grey hair, wrinkles, and confusion.
Fifty yards brought Rue to the ridge top from where Pye could be seen nestled in the bend of the river that wound its way down the shallow valley.
The Rill—little more than a stream—and Aaron’s Vale.
It had been “a” river and “a” valley when she’d arrived ten years ago.
Now they had names and characters. Characters she liked more than many of those she shared the village with.
Even so, she had time for some of the inhabitants.
Or at least the woman they’d tossed into the grave had.
That old woman had had friends. Rue felt herself to have become something different now.
Something both new and old. She had undergone a thing most unexpected in a person of her advancing years: change.
That other woman, the one she’d been, had had time for the children too, of course, even if they feared her. Children always eased her soul and tightened her heart, their chatter more soothing than the river’s, but so much more vulnerable.
The chimneys in the valley below still smoked, but the thatch did not. She could see no fresh graves. Even so, there were a dozen horses in Steffan’s field that had no business being there.
Overhead the crow circled, cawing alarms.
“I didn’t want any of this.” Rue squeezed her head once more, never taking her eyes from the seeming peace of the village. “I’m just an old woman. I only wanted to sit and stare at the fire until…”
She lowered her hands and made fists. A very long time ago a young girl had been taught three important lessons.
She had been taught not to care.
She had been taught not to get angry.
And she had been taught how to kill.
With a soft curse, Rue discovered that she had forgotten the first two lessons.