Chapter 4
Rue
Two bodies lay on Main Street, which was about the only street Pye had.
The pair of corpses were a reminder in miniature of the slaughter back at Stones Corner Market.
Molly Plight had died a kind of death in Stones Corner and been reborn as Rue in a stinking hole a quarter of a mile from where she had fallen.
The spot where ten years of peace had come to an unexpected but perhaps inevitable end.
The market town had been on fire when Rue had clambered from the open grave they’d tossed her into.
The mercenaries gone. So she’d walked back to the place she’d called home for the last ten years and that had, for the last few of those years, even felt like home.
“Padrick Tanner and Lorrie Smith,” Rue said to nobody in particular.
The old Senna knew them well enough to recognize both, even like this, though the new Senna would perhaps be more interested in their eyes. But the crow said nothing and made no move, only watched.
Padrick, who had once served in the town guard at Reddik, had been beaten.
His thinning hair was thick with blood. The mud received his battered face, hiding the worst. He’d been loud, large, a bit of a bully, but hardly a bad man in the grand scheme of things.
Lorrie had a single wound in her back, perhaps from a hatchet.
She’d ended in an untidy sprawl of skirts and limbs.
Rue wondered where the woman’s daughter was.
Soosa Smith had turned sixteen and flowered like a hedgerow primrose, breaking young boys’ hearts left and right.
Senna hopped forward and landed on the blond tangle of Lorrie’s hair. She folded her wings, head cocking left and right in the quick, canny fashion of crows.
“Seriously?” Rue narrowed her eyes.
“What? I wasn’t going to…” Could a true crow look guilty?
The street stood empty, but Rue felt watched. The villagers would be hiding in their homes, except for the clever ones who had already left. Rue cricked her neck to the side, the bones making audible clicks.
Pye had no formal inn, but a bundle of hops always hung above Debban Tanner’s door. He’d given up his father’s trade and turned to brewing, selling sour pints in the cramped confines of his main room, or the sheds out back when custom was good.
“In there?” the crow croaked.
“Where else?” It wasn’t as if Pye had a library or as if sell-swords would visit one while they still had grass to wipe themselves.
“You’ll just get killed…again.” Senna’s warning carried a note of panic. “Isn’t this just going to be a repeat of what happened before?”
Rue’s cricked neck hurt. “Maybe. But don’t count me out. I killed someone with a candle once.”
The crow’s croak was one of surprise this time. “That’s not possib—”
“I burned them. Not my finest hour. Hours. I’m not who you think I am.”
Rue wondered if she even knew what she was now.
But it was time to find out. She walked slowly to Debban’s door.
Men’s voices reached her through the shutters, loud and unconcerned.
She paused, setting a hand to her ribs. The pain in her head had eased a fraction—enough for the rest of her body’s protests to be heard.
The years had washed over her and left her brittle, like driftwood.
And the fight in the inn, such as it was, had broken what remained.
She would not have won even that contest if she’d begun it in this state.
She didn’t have so much as a knife. Even her knitting needles were gone.
She stopped with her hand upon the latch.
Did she want to die here? The two locals she’d best liked—Jayne and Ambeth, women she had called friends—were rotting in the grave she’d clambered out of.
What did the rest mean to her? She could walk away.
Start again. Just as she’d started here.
Let the winds of chance blow her tumbleweed life to some new resting place.
The flood of years had swept her up and left her useless.
Good for nothing but waiting for the end.
She thought of waves now, imagining the distant sea as she stood in the too-bright street with her head aching like the devil, and the withered claw of her hand on the door latch.
It seemed a stranger’s fingers rested there, ringed in wrinkles. How had she let herself get so old?
Somewhere behind her a crow was cawing, crying warnings.
Rue had first seen the sea forty years ago.
Seen waves wash upon beaches of hard, wet sand.
Human lives, she thought, were like those waves.
We rush into life, all fury and flow and a tumbling, churning hunger for the next thing.
We smash ourselves upon that shore, and spread, and slow, climbing the gradient, starting to feel its pull for the first time.
And then, either soon or late, but with the same inevitability, we reach our terminus and the sea and the slope start to pull us back into the whole.
We leave a crescent of foam to mark the limit of our progress, a froth of bubbles, popping as they realize they’re alone.
And before the next wave comes, we’re gone, taking all trace with us.
A shadow loomed across her. “Who the fuck are you?” A rough voice, moments from anger.
Rue turned, took the knife from the man’s belt, and pushed it up into the softness where jaw meets neck, pressing it home with the heel of her other hand. She had not been fast, but she had been sure.
The mercenary staggered back, gurgling, then fell onto his arse, clutching at the knife’s hilt, more confused than angry. Ill-advisedly he pulled it free, and a flood of hot blood painted his chest.
“A Durong,” Rue muttered. The man’s skin was the colour of old oak, darker even than each summer’s sun stained Rue’s own. Whoever had assembled these mercenaries had spread a wide net, gathering every creed and caste.
She turned away and pushed through the doorway.
She knew she should have taken the knife, carefully wiping the blood from its hilt so that her hold would be true, but a strangeness had her in its grip.
The imprint of a narrow foot seemed to burn cold between the blades of her shoulders, propelling her forward, and though Rue had long ago refused to let herself be pushed around, she decided to allow it this one time.
After all, a failure to embrace change would truly be an admission of her age.
Her unexpected appearance stilled the conversation in the room. Perhaps ten of the newcomers crowded the space. Lorrie Smith’s girl looked up from where she knelt between two of the mercenaries seated at Debban’s rough-hewn tables, pale desperation on her face.
“I’m looking for whoever’s in charge here,” Rue said.
It took several moments for the drinkers to swallow their surprise.
Perhaps if a warrior with an axe had kicked down the door they would have reacted fast. Rue hoped for the sake of whoever paid them that they would have.
She used the time to step to the side, removing her silhouette from the door and revealing the twitching collapse of their friend in the street.
The light would blind them just as the gloom had dimmed her own vision.
One man, young with long hair in braids, pushed past Rue, his light mail rustling.
He hung on the side of the doorframe, ignoring her, his gaze hunting the street for the killer, first left, then right.
One of two women in their number, broad as an ox and with skin so red she might have been sunburned but for the season, came towards Rue, reaching with a sausage-fingered hand as if she were gathering up an errant child.
Rue plucked a knife from Long Hair’s hip.
If their underestimation of her weren’t so close to being deserved she would have been offended.
As it was, she welcomed the opportunity it offered to slightly extend this final foolishness.
Rue caught one of the woman’s outstretched fingers and broke it.
At the same time, with her other hand, she sliced open the side of Long Hair’s neck, his blade proving keen enough to cut off three of his braids in the process.
“I’ve come about two deaths in Stones Corner Market.”
Rue’s advantage was over. Good things never last. Rue had outlived a great many of them in her time.
The burly woman’s snapped finger quickly recalibrated her opinion of the ageing peasant before her, and ignoring the pain, she backhanded Rue, slamming her into the wall, before backing off to draw her blade.
As Rue slid to the floor, the thought bouncing between the front and back of her skull was that she’d seen the blow coming and that the woman she used to be would have ducked in time.
She hit the ground feeling like a sack of broken bones and spat out a front tooth in a spray of blood.
The force of the impact shocked her to her core.
She had become brittle. And as she tried to curse the fact she became aware of her broken jaw.
“Wait!” The command, barked from the rear of the room, halted the thrust of a sword.
The mercenary drew her blade back, snarling, clutching the hilt in an awkward, broken-fingered grasp. “The bitch killed Rakkar!”
That was a lie. Rakkar’s eyes were still following the proceedings, though like Rue he was lying on the floor, and the increasingly sluggish pulse of crimson from his slashed neck indicated that he would not be getting up again, at least not of his own accord.
“The great Tabtha, shield-breaker, heart-taker…she needs a sword to finish off a grandmother?” The man doing the talking sat between two larger warriors, both wearing leather caps and sharing a blunt-featured brutality that suggested they were brothers.
The speaker looked the more dangerous, though.
Something about his lack of adornment announced it, that and the creases running the length of his wind-worn face from the corners of his narrow lips to the corners of colourless eyes that watched the world with curious hunger.
“Bitch had a knife…” Tabtha glanced around for the weapon.
Rakkar tried to speak but only managed scarlet bubbles and the faintest gurgle.
The man stood up from his stool, setting down his leather mug and wiping his lips, all without hurry.
“I’m a simple man. ‘Isik,’ they say, ‘go burn this shithole.’ I go burn it.
‘Isik,’ they say, ‘go slaughter the farmers and salt their fields.’ I slaughter and I salt.
But there’s no saying we can’t enjoy ourselves first. This old girl’s got a bit of fire left in her—”
“She broke my fucking finger!”
“And you were just going to run a sword through her?” Isik tutted.
“What happened to breaking all her fingers first? What happened to good old-fashioned entertainment? You’re not going to let the little girl here”—he nodded at Soosa—“carry that load all by herself?” He came to stand at Tabtha’s shoulder, nearly as tall but half as broad.
“See how she’s looking at us. All murder.
No give. I’d sign her up if she were twenty years younger.
Get up, Granny. Let’s have a look at you. ”
Rue made the effort. Grunting in pain and spitting blood, she got to her knees in slow, jerking movements, each punctuated by a gasp.
“Hurry. Up.” Tabtha loomed over her, reaching with her good hand to haul Rue to her feet.
Rue let the knife she’d taken fall from sleeve to hand and cut the woman’s wrist, slicing veins and tendons, scoring a groove across the small bones. Tabtha’s roaring retreat pushed Isik back, but not before Rue stabbed her in the meat of the thigh too, twisting the blade as she pulled it free.
She stood in the space cleared by Tabtha’s exit and showed what she knew to be a gap-toothed crimson smile. “If I were twenty years younger, you’d all be dead already.”