Chapter 9
Rue
Rue had fallen beneath the mercenaries’ blows. Instead of hardpacked earth, what received her had felt like rotten sailcloth, barely holding her weight.
The thudding of kicks became a dull, distant thing, save for one bony heel pressing impossibly hard between her shoulders. The weak fabric that had held her up now tore beneath the increased pressure, and without a scream she tipped into a second, far longer fall.
Silence and the darkness of her pain held her. Time passed without a heart to beat away the moments.
Slowly and against expectation, Rue heard a noise that she had spent years listening for. A smooth rushing sound that grew from nothing until, without ever seeming loud, it filled her mind.
Rue found herself standing before a black river whose waters ran between straight banks, swift as a horse with hardly a swirl or ripple. A black sun hung in the bone sky, and while a few stunted thorn bushes studded the grey soil around her, the far banks lay desolate.
Rue knew the river and its name ached on her tongue, daring her to speak it. She knew what waited for her on the opposite shore. Judgement. Judgement and a balance in which her soul would be weighed. Rue spat into the iron-grey earth at her feet.
Cawwww!
“Gods eat me!” Rue spun round, angry at being made to flinch, even in a place like this.
Caw! The crow eyed her, somehow revealed by its blackness rather than hidden by it.
“Senna-fucking-Weaver?” Rue would have spat again but found herself too dry. “Did you try to peck those bastards to death?”
The crow hopped self-consciously from one foot to the other. “You pulled me down. Like I said: I’ve got to follow you.”
Rue made a quick advance on the bird, clapping her hands. They barely made a sound—here on the shores of death, nothing did—but it proved enough to startle Senna into the air amid a dark explosion of feathers.
“You’re not dead, then.” Rue let disappointment colour her voice. “Not properly. Should be after that arrow in the face…” She shook her head. “But the dead can’t fly.” She turned back to face the river, the grit of the shore coarse beneath her bare feet. “Only one way across for the dead.”
Already she could make out the ferry as a faint dot on the roiling smoothness of the river.
Unimpeded by the frightening speed of the current it made its way lazily towards them.
Rue straightened herself, ignoring her nakedness—clothes were for the living: such comforts couldn’t follow into the underworld.
“There’s nothing for you over there,” Senna croaked. She’d flown only a yard or two, and that ponderously.
“Oh right, I’ll cancel the whole being-beaten-to-death thing, then.
” Rue tasted blood, faintly. Her own, since she couldn’t remember biting any of them.
She shrugged and scowled at the approaching ferry.
She could have done better. Should have done better.
A lot better. But at least she got their leader—Osick, was it?
Asak? Failing to remember the man’s name pleased her.
He would have reached this shore before she did.
Senna hopped closer. “You should—”
“Should what?” Rue snapped. “Should have fought harder? Been better?” She waved the anger away with a quick flap of her hands.
“Besides, there’s plenty for me over there.
The great majority of the few friends I managed to make.
A daughter. One and a half really. Have you buried a child, Senna?
If you had, you’d know what any mother who has knows—part of me has already crossed this river and is never coming back—” She bit off the words.
Senna had a son in Pye, grandchildren too. If not dead yet, then soon. “I—”
The prow of the ferry ground into the gritty bank.
Rue imagined that not everyone saw the same vessel or indeed the same ferryman.
Hers resembled a rowing boat stretched to three times its length, with benches for perhaps a dozen.
The sole occupant stood at the rear, tall and clothed in darkness from which only the coldness of his stare emerged, together with the pole with which he improbably propelled the ferry.
Rue shivered and ground her teeth. On the far side of the river, Aello would be waiting.
Perhaps her other daughters would be too.
Ocy she had left with the nuns in Thellamid.
The sisters had prayed around the girl as she lay on their altar beneath the diesis of the risen Christ, resurrected and crucified a second time.
Her child had lain there cold and limp in the shadow of the order’s double dagger—the symbol of their martyr’s inverted cross superimposed on the first. The convent’s reverend mother had said they could keep Ocypete’s heart beating, but she would never rise from the death-sleep, the koma that held her.
And Cela, youngest of the triplets by half a day, the child who had given Rue the deepest of her scars, she could well be there too, across the river. Cela had burned too bright to endure. As warlike as the mother she so hated.
“You don’t have to go,” Senna croaked. The crow fluttered heavily up the bank, landing by one of the bare thorn bushes. “She gave you something—but you have to take it. She can’t force it on you.”
“She?” Rue spat. “Say her name.”
“She has many—”
Rue turned towards the ferry.
“The Morrigan.” Senna croaked it at her back. “Maiden, Mother, Hag. Badb, Macha, and Nemain. Three who are one. The Norns. The Fates. Your precious Kindly O—”
“She forced you to be a crow,” Rue retorted, tearing her gaze away from the waiting psychopomp.
“No…”
Rue snorted a laugh. “You chose that? And now you want me to make an idiot’s choice too?”
The crow looked away, its beak pointing to a hitherto unnoticed fruit, hanging all alone amid bushes barren of everything but the cruelty of thorns. The lone berry managed to glisten in the deadlight, a single drop of midnight blood, pregnant with possibility.
“It’s her gift,” Senna croaked. “But you have to go and take it.”
Rue glanced towards the ferryman who had waited for her through all the long years of her life, ready to steer her way at a moment’s notice. “What kind of gift?”
“Power, of course. What other kind is there? You want ribbons for your hair?”
“Careful, Senna! I might suspect you have a backbone.” Rue looked out over the river and at the emptiness of the far shore.
What lay there was beyond her imagination.
All her dead. The ones she’d lost and the legions she’d sent ahead of herself.
The many maybes that age had stacked up for her, and of a certainty, little Aello, who she had washed in a mother’s grief and buried in the heartbreak of a grave smaller than it should have been.
How would such a reunion work, if there even were reunions?
Rue set her back to the ferryman and walked to consider the gift, easing her way among the thorns and cursing when clumsiness tore her skin.
“Will she give me back my youth, Senna?” Rue spread her arms, staring sourly at the ruin the years had left in their wake as they’d trampled across her.
She had been strong once, tight, supple.
Did she want youth back, truly? Would it be harder to lose a second time?
Would she learn the lessons better for repetition?
Hadn’t she tried? Wasn’t she tired? Due a rest?
Then she remembered the looks on those faces as they’d closed in to stamp on her.
That raw, animal hate. And even here, on the shore of the river, here beneath the ferryman’s gaze…
she felt a flicker of that same flame in her chest, that same shame.
She hadn’t finished with them yet. “Will she give me back my strength, Senna?”
Cawwww! The bird fluttered closer. “What do you think? Her gifts aren’t kind.”
Rue pulled the berry free. The juice of it stained her fingers, darker than old blood. She thought of the heel pressing between her shoulder blades, bringing her back when she’d lain among the corpses before. There had been no river then, no gift dangling from a thorn bush.
“Hear me, old one!” Rue glanced around at the off-white sky, seeking a lone crow and finding none. “Choose me as your weapon at your peril. I cut both ways.” She pressed the overripe berry into her mouth, trying not to gag on its foul sweetness. “I cut always.”
A shock ran through her. Invisible lightning.
It threw her arms wide, and the remnants of that strange fruit flew from her splayed fingers.
She staggered back. One pace. Three. She fought for balance, fought to master the fire chasing through her veins.
The crow that was Senna cawed a warning, but too late.
Although Rue caught herself before she fell, when she looked down, the heel of her left foot had touched the river.
In the open grave Rue had had to shrug off the cold bodies, free herself of their intimacy, and fight to find her feet.
Now it seemed as if she had been buried fathoms deep and needed to dig, to crawl, and to worm her way higher and higher, fighting the dead for every yard.
And yet when she finally reached the surface, she opened her eyes to find herself alone.
She lay with her cheek to the hardpacked earth she had fallen on. She could see the dim interior of Debban’s ale hut, his shitty tables and worse chairs, the backs of three mercenaries who had returned to their drinking.
Rue tried to flex the hand she could see before her, palm pressed to the dirt, fingers splayed. It curled and rose like a pale spider, bones grating. Whatever the Morrigan had given her, it wasn’t youth.