Chapter 13
Rue
Rue left the bodies behind her. The dead brother had killed the living one and both had fallen beyond her reach.
Tabtha lay lifeless in a pool of her own blood and surprise.
Rue had been leaving the bodies behind her all her life, a trail of murder, retribution, and sometimes justice that punctuated her story all the way to this particular day and this particular moment.
She paused at the door, the cracks between the planking sun-bright.
Her anger had been carrying her forward with its own momentum, and Rue never liked to feel steered, even by herself.
The Morrigan had woken her within the grave they’d thrown her into.
And now with her gift on the shores of the river, the goddess had pried Rue from a second tomb.
Gog and Magog stood alone in the ocean vastness, the only lands known.
But the peoples who dwelt on these islands sprang from an ancestry that had more roots than any tree.
A melting pot of faiths, languages, races, joined only by the fear of what had pursued them across the water.
The Academy taught that it was the Furies, the Kindly Ones themselves, who chased humanity’s remnants to this end.
Among those chased, however, there were many names and aspects for the three-who-are-one, many beliefs, a whole library of stories, creeds, myth, and magics.
The Morrigan, some called her. Sometimes one, sometimes three sisters, three goddesses, sometimes maiden, mother, or hag.
As the Morrigan, enigmatic embodiment of fate and of strife, she was wont to interfere in the affairs of mankind, but ever with her purpose shrouded.
The Morrigan had spoken—or so it seemed in Rue’s death dreams—to Sunder, who Rue had first laid eyes on when he was merely a child considerably more than arm’s length from the throne of one of Magog’s seven nations.
Half a century later, that same man held together an empire, seeking to bring the rest of Magog beneath his heel while the wounds of earlier conquest still wept.
Rue’s association with Emperor Sunder was as complex as it was long, though she was sure he remembered her less well than she did him. He was one of those very few individuals remaining in the world who scared her. A fact she did not like to admit, even to herself.
Likely the emperor had forgotten her entirely, but she would never forget.
She would oppose him, given the chance, simply for his role in the rise of the Cruelties and for his ties with her mother and her father.
But she’d no interest in being the Morrigan’s tool to test him as all those who seek power must be tested in order to determine whether they deserve the fate they’re reaching for.
The goddess could find another fool to play those games.
Rue’s service to any and all aspects of the triple-goddess had ended long ago.
And if that sat poorly with the old bird, then she could take back her gift.
The door to the outside resisted her briefly as if something might be blocking it. But no, the street lay empty. Blood spattered the ground immediately in front of her. The young man…Rakkar? He’d fallen there but they must have dragged him off with Isik and the other.
Rue wiped Tabtha’s blood from her knife and thrust it through the belt she’d stolen from her.
The few remaining Kindnesses might say that the mere fact that a woman could have joined Isik’s band of mercenaries based purely on her size and willingness to do violence was something she owed to two centuries of the Academy.
Rue wouldn’t argue with that any more than she would argue with the fact that a tornado can sometimes clear a forest from land a farmer had wanted to till.
She would just point out that a tornado will often take the farmer’s house at the same time along with the cows and the farmer himself.
Outside, the sun had decided to shine, gifting the village its first fine day since winter loosened its grip.
Rue stumbled into the street, still not comfortable in her broken body or with the unholy energies that held it together.
Necromancy kept her heart beating, her blood pumping, necromancy wrapped her veins, all the while reaching out for the corpses in her wake, questing forward in search of more.
The world had been a familiar place that morning, and now seemed a strange stage on which she was being asked to perform, though they had neglected to teach her any lines.
First it had been the mercenaries in Stones Corner who had torn away one veil, revealing a different landscape, one she knew was there but had forgotten.
Then had come the grave and the crow and the lifting of a second veil, thrusting her back into a world made strange by her own strangeness.
Age had settled on her and made of her something she had never truly believed she would become, even in the unlikely event that the dangers of her calling spared her.
She had understood that she would age. That an old woman’s face would peer at her from the looking glass.
But she hadn’t known what expression that face would wear beneath its wrinkles.
Astonishment? Shame? Pity? Revulsion? Resignation?
She wouldn’t have predicted the acceptance she had begun to see of late, and certainly never the patient almost-pride that in later years met her gaze.
She had thought that age was just a number, then had seen it as a noose when it tightened around her, and then as something else, a type of surrender that she had never allowed herself.
A letting go of sorts. But both those things had been trades that had two sides, something gained and something lost. Not equal trades but neither side without worth.
She had accepted that beneath a sufficient burden of years she would creak and she would ache and her speed would leave her.
But she had not believed in her heart that she would be a different person.
She had been sure that she would remain herself just the same as if she had chosen a different jacket to wear.
Rue did feel exactly that—she felt that her younger self still wrapped these old bones, imprisoned within the inadequate tomb of her ageing body.
However, despite what she felt, what she knew was that the child she had been and the young woman she became were different, just as the young woman and the old one were different.
One might reach back as the other reached forward and grasp the offered hand.
Perhaps even embrace. But they were not the same person.
If they were the same, then what purpose had those passing decades of experience served?
If living life had not changed her, had she truly lived it?
To claim the facts of her existence were simply that—a growing list of things that happened, rather than structural parts of her nature—was to cheapen them, to rob them of meaning.
She saw the village of Pye through new eyes.
Neither those that had first beheld the hamlet as a place to spend the night, nor those that had slowly come to see it as home.
Rue now saw something fragile, something easy to break, easy to burn.
She saw the choke points, the opportunities for concealment, how to hold it, and how to take it.
She saw the lives behind the walls and doors, saw the faint vibrations of their vitality, their fear, and most of all how temporary they all were.
The corpses the mercenaries had taken from her had left trails.
Bloody ones to begin with, but even when the dark smears had petered out and the scuff marks of dragging heels were lost in the rutted confusion of the road, something remained.
A lingering difference traced by the passage of something that touched two worlds.
Warm flesh that had schemed and hated and pulsed, and whose owners now stood beside the last river they would ever cross.
Rue followed the dead down Pye’s main street.
It was not the way of Kindnesses to skulk or hide, though they could do both when circumstances dictated.
The Kindness wore her authority not with pride but with conviction.
She carried the will of the triple-goddess, and any who stood in the path of such retribution placed themselves beneath the same judgement.
A Kindness coming to reckon with the general of some mighty army would stride boldly through his troops, knowing that every soldier to raise a hand against her would, should they succeed in halting her progress, place themself upon the list of another Kindness.
If the chosen target of her ire should prevail, then the matter was settled, but a reckoning must be had.
“Come out! Come out! Wherever you are!” Rue aimed herself at the house of Tamaster Sams, the town’s elder, neither elected nor born to the station but simply a man who people listened to and respected, and who in such a manner led the village when leading was required.
His home, somewhat larger and somewhat grander than the rest, though still a hovel in the eyes of anyone not raised in the wilds, stood at the end of the main street, forcing the scant traffic to turn aside.
“You have something of mine!” Rue called. “Do I need to huff and puff and blow your—”
The front door juddered open and one of the faces that had so recently surrounded her peered out. The man’s jaw dropped.
“Give me Isik and the rest of you can leave.”
The man withdrew, slamming the door behind him, before pushing it open again for a second look then closing it once more.
Rue waited. If the goddess truly had pushed her back into the world, it seemed discourteous not to lean into the role.
She had considered bringing the heads from Debban’s hut and tossing them before her when challenged, but the brothers had been balding beneath their caps, and heads without hair were awkward to carry.
The sound of approaching horses came from behind her, hooves thudding the ground.
Rue turned her head slowly to see who was joining the scene.
In carrying out the business of a Kindness, one can never show fear.
A Kindness is almost always outnumbered.
Fear acknowledges that fact and makes it real.
Even sensible caution undermines the cloak of legend that protects a Kindness where plate armour would surely fail.
Four mounted men had two dozen more horses trailing them.
More than Rue had seen in Steffan’s field earlier.
The front door burst open and a woman in blackened chain mail stamped into view.
The gawper followed—mouth now closed again—with others behind.
If the woman was surprised to see Rue in her rags and wrinkles, blood in the white straggles of her hair, she hid it well.
“Isik,” Rue repeated. “He’s mine. The rest of you can go.”
“Bregar here, he says they killed you.” The woman wasn’t tall like Tabtha, or broad like Tabtha, but she looked more dangerous. Her hair hung in black ropes past skin burned almost as dark. “Where’s Brak and—”
“If I let you go, they won’t be coming.” Rue shrugged. “Are you in charge here, or was it Isik?”
“Enough of this.” The woman waved her followers on. “Do it properly this time. I want her head when you’re done.”
“I bring the oldest lore.” Rue’s cracked voice still managed to summon the gravitas of her station.
The words flowed as if it had been ten hours since she last delivered them rather than twenty years and more.
“I am she the gods fear. My sisters walk ever by my side.” She drew her knife, still bloody. “Stand aside or be forever accursed.”
There had been a time when for lives of men the words she had just spoken would open a path to the object of a Kindness’s wrath through all and any opposition.
The mercenaries hesitated, glanced around nervously at their numbers, and came forward.
Times change.
Cries from the house brought the mercenaries to a halt before they’d closed half the distance to her.
Necromancy involves the working of a muscle.
Not of the body, and maybe not even of the mind, but a muscle even so.
Perhaps it was the spirit that was exercised.
Rue had never had such power, but using what few necromancies she had left the Academy with had been similar to her current experience, albeit on a smaller scale.
The muscle grew tired and needed rest. Pitting one brother against the other had stretched even her newfound might, and having any of the trio she’d killed back in Debban’s ale hut march along with her would not have allowed her to recover that strength.
Now she brought Isik out among his former underlings, staggering like a drunk, his neck crimson below the wound that had killed him, his padded doublet thick with gore.
The men around him cried out in fear. They’d seen and carried out all manner of horrors, but even so, the breaking of a law so fundamental as that of death will unsettle the boldest. Rue still remembered the reaction of fourscore young girls when Lucia Aqualas Divinanar had unexpectedly sat up at Kindness Undu’s request. The hardened mercenaries before her showed a similar response.
“Isik is all I need from you.” Rue met the woman’s gaze since she alone had set her back to the dead man and returned her eyes to the true threat.
“I was wrong,” the woman said. “Take her alive.”