Chapter 16 #2
“Justices rather than witches.” Rue could hear a whistle in her voice.
From her missing front tooth, no doubt. She was sure she looked a state.
She’d never been vain but even so…She probably looked like a witch to them.
A hag. Justices…it had been a poor sort of justice to let slide so very many crimes and excuse others for wergild, but it had perhaps curbed the excesses of a savage world.
It had perhaps given a taste of justice to the many who then craved more. “Avengers rather than justices…”
“You made a corpse walk,” Gressa said.
Rue shrugged. It hurt. “Witches then. If it pleases you.” Her body ached but somehow it was being forgotten that hurt more.
Rue would have happily ground the Academy to dust beneath her heel.
But that would have been vengeance on the avengers.
To have those two centuries of suffering—the deaths of all those little girls—erased so completely in a few scant decades that this woman had to stretch for the name that had once inspired terror across the lands… that hurt.
Gressa reached up to slap Rue across the face. “Who sent you?”
“I live here.”
It was true. Kindnesses were not schooled to resist interrogation save through the general hardship of their forging. A Kindness’s motivations were not intended to be secret. The deaths brought by Kindnesses always came with a message and with the intent that it be easy to read.
“Lie to me again and we’ll skip the warm-up. The irons are hot enough already.”
“I live here. There are many ways to verify this fact, child.” Rue saw no point in appeasing her captors. Hot irons were never allowed to cool without being used. It was in the nature of the species—power existed to be exercised.
“Why would an old witch live…here?”
“Where should I live? A cave?”
“A witch should not be suffered to live,” growled the young man who had taken Isik’s place at the table. Rue remembered his angular face looking down at her before being hidden behind a descending boot.
“Why did you attack us?” Gressa frowned as if genuinely puzzled.
“What you should be asking, and will eventually end up asking, is what I wanted with Isik.” Rue’s patience had always been her weakest point. That was why the lesson about waiting was one she had needed so badly.
Gressa sank a fist into Rue’s belly. She had a good punch for a relatively small woman. Rue sucked up the pain and let her necromancy crackle around it.
“Why,” snarled Gressa, “did you want Isik?”
“I would have settled for his head,” Rue said.
“I was going to ask him who told him to come here and who directed the sacking of Stones Corner. And when he’d given me your name I would have asked who told you to do it, and so on and so forth until I came to a person worth killing.
Someone who wasn’t just earning their living.
That person owes me their life. Or the wergild of seven ounces of gold. ”
Gressa huffed in amusement. “I can tell you that for nothing, much good it will do you—”
“You really shouldn’t,” Rue said. “Information is power. Don’t just go giving it away.”
“Baron Mancer’s agent was the one who hired the Iron League.”
“The Iron League?” A wry smile twisted the corner of Rue’s mouth. “That’s what you call yourselves?”
Gressa narrowed her eyes. “You seem less scared of hot irons than you should be, old woman.”
Rue met Gressa’s gaze. “Seen worse. Had worse. Done worse.”
Gressa’s anger faltered, more likely at something cold in Rue’s stare than at the bravado in her words. The commander turned her back on Rue. “You’d kill Baron Mancer of the Regon Heights over a handful of dead peasants?”
“Over two dead peasants. Ambeth Potter and Jayne Clay.” Rue cricked her neck.
“And Mancer doesn’t have to die. You people don’t seem to know how to listen.
He could pay the seven ounces.” Wergild was a strange thing.
A very old thing. The recognition that money was life.
That gold could sustain a family, a whole clan, allowing many of the victim’s kin to survive when otherwise they may well have died.
Blood money. The tariffs the Kindnesses used were far older than the Academy.
They valued rich above poor, young above old.
They put the price of a murder beyond reach of the commoner, made it a costly mistake for the landed class and a minor indiscretion for nobility.
Rue had offered the option of wergild out of habit, as if in returning to her former role as an agent of retribution she should adopt all the trappings, all the rules.
But she had said it and she would stick to it.
It was what it was. The goddess’s power ran through her, and while she hoped to use it she would walk within the bitch’s rules.
After all, without the Morrigan’s strength in her veins Rue would die within moments, killed by the wounds she had already sustained in this self-imposed quest.
“You could always shoulder responsibility,” Rue told the mercenary. “Pay the gold over. You must have way more than that between you. Sacking all these villages. Pay up and put all this to bed. I’m too old to go marching off after Baron Mancer.”
Gressa’s lips thinned, her eyes narrowed. She looked like a woman who understood herself to be the butt of some kind of joke without yet knowing what that joke was. She shook her head, a small, sharp shake. “No. You didn’t do all this for fourteen ounces—”
“Seven.”
“This is a lie. You’re playing a bigger game and I’m going to know what it is. I’m going to break you, witch, and you’re going to tell me the truth.”
Gressa placed her hands to either side of her on the tabletop, leaning over the maps. For a long moment she held the room’s attention with her silence. She sucked air in over her teeth, favouring Rue with a slow, speculative look. “Everybody out.”
Nobody moved.
“Now!”
The mercenaries made for the door to the hall, exchanging glances, some puzzled, some annoyed.
“Berric!”
The ageing mercenary who’d hung Rue on the hook paused at the door.
“Bring me a head.”
“Sorry…what?”
“A fucking head. A fresh one. Quickly!” Gressa sounded nervous. As the door closed behind the last of her men she glanced up at Rue. “You drove me to this.”
“To what?”
Gressa ignored the question and went to rummage in the saddle bags tossed against the far wall. “Pray he leaves you to me and the hot irons.”
She removed a small leather-wrapped bundle from one of the bags, bringing it to the table gingerly, in both hands, as if worried it might burst into flame.
Slowly, she unwound the bindings to reveal what looked like a bone, one of the longer ones from within a hand, but jet black.
Rue recognized it instantly as the source of the power she’d sensed earlier.
Trying to intimidate this woman with necromancy had been a mistake.
Shouts and screams rang out in the middle distance, along with the raucous cawing of a crow.
Berric returned carrying a head, holding it by one ear since its thinning hair looked insufficient. Blood still dripped from the severed neck. “It was the killing that was to be fresh?” the mercenary asked. “Not the person. There’s still children out there if—”
“Yes, the killing.” Gressa took the head off him by the other ear and waved Berric away.
She set her trophy on the table and turned it to face Rue, who found herself looking into the vacant eyes of Sebrin Weaver, father of five, and son to the late Senna. Unlike his mother, Sebrin had been friendly if rather dull. His children had loved him, though.
“Right…” Gressa picked up the black bone at one extreme, between finger and thumb. With trepidation she used the bone to strike Sebrin’s forehead, one sharp tap, two, a third.
“What! What is it?” Sebrin’s lips moved, and frown lines ploughed across the dead forehead as the eyes cast about, left and right. “Where is this?” The eyes fixed on Gressa. “And who are you?”
The voice echoed painfully in Rue’s skull although the head, lacking both lungs and quite likely vocal cords too, could force no actual sound past its bloody teeth.
“Well now, you ain’t Sebrin.” Rue knew that for a certainty. The live Sebrin would have been incoherent with fear, and the dead one raging. Whatever had installed itself in the farmer’s skull was merely annoyed.
“And who’s she?” the head demanded.
Gressa, her stare jumping between the head and the finger bone, which seemed to be vibrating in her grasp, appeared to be sharing the head’s struggle to make a noise, but finally swallowed and found her voice. “I-I’m Gressa Saramant, third captain of the Iron League, Baron.”
“Never heard of you, where’s that Ossot fellow?”
“First Captain Ossot died in the frosts, Baron. Died of his wounds.”
“Wounds? They’re peasants, for gods’ sake!”
“Saddle sores. An infection. Blood soured. I…uh…I took charge of his effects until a new first captain—”
“Why am I here?” The baron wrinkled Sebrin’s nose. “Wherever ‘here’ is. It looks like a shabby, oversized privy. Who’s the old hag?”
“The prisoner is a Kindness who has killed seven of my command—”
“Eight,” Rue corrected.
“—and wounded several others. She has also…uh…raised the dead. She claims to be seeking a wergild of fourteen ounces—”
“It’s seven,” Rue interrupted again.
“Seven ounces of gold for the villagers we killed.”
“Just two of them. Jayne Clay and Ambeth Po—”
“This elderly peasant killed seven Iron League mercenaries?” The baron—presumably the same Baron Mancer that Rue had been told about earlier—studied Rue with eyes he didn’t own.
“Ten if you count the two in Stones Corner. And she’s ashamed it was so few,” Rue said.
The head’s eyes widened. “She can hear me?”
Rue had been waiting for her moment and took it.
Surprise, even if caused by something wholly unrelated, has a paralysing effect.
She reached out with all the necromantic muscle remaining to her, attempting to get beneath the skin of the severed head, past its watery eyes, and into the brain, where the baron nested like a macabre cuckoo.
“Fuck…” The pain splitting her forehead surely had to be worse than Gressa’s promised irons.
She had no chance of evicting the baron, and still less of exercising any sort of control over him.
Wherever the bone came from, its enchantment was far stronger than hers, certainly in this narrow function.
“Ouch!” The dead face twisted up in pain. “The old bitch hurt me! Tell her if she—If you do that again I’ll have the captain cut your teats off. Hurt her a bit right now, Captain.”
Gressa dropped the finger bone as if it were a piece of fox dung and came towards Rue, smacking knuckles into palm.
Since it seemed that it might be touching the bone that let Gressa hear the baron, Rue lied.
“He’s saying he changed his mind.” She had always been of the opinion that you should enrage torturers.
They were going to do their best to hurt you anyway.
And they’d probably do the job less well when angry.
Plus, you might as well have one last laugh.
Gressa looked doubtful but turned around and went back to the table, unable to hear the baron’s heated denials until she once again picked up the bone. She made to set it back down, but the baron stopped her, his anger growing with every word.
“Nobody would come at the Iron League over a shithole village. She’s pathfinding for some resurgence of the Kindnesses, any fool can see that! Nobody would do this for ten ounces of gold, not for a hundred.”
“It’s sev—”
“Shall I get the irons, Lord Mancer?” Gressa sounded almost obsequious.
If Sebrin Weaver had ever once revealed in life the narrow snarl that Baron Mancer now fashioned for him, then it was a secret face kept for the privacy of his ramshackle home to terrify his family.
“Keep the irons hot. But since she’s so partial to the locals, let’s start this way.
” He raised his silent voice, blood and spittle falling from his lips. “Kill everyone! Burn everything.”
Rue hadn’t come as the village’s saviour, but to be the one to initiate their massacre was too much.
If she couldn’t stop it, then at least she would no longer endure it.
Perhaps it was cowardice to run away—it felt like cowardice—but to give Gressa and the baron anything back would only encourage their cruelties.
Rue let her chin fall to her chest. She rolled her eyes into her head in the manner Kindness Undu had taught them in front of the gates to the Bone Garden, leaving only the whites to watch the world.
Her vision changed. The low rush of water became the only sound. And she stood once more by the banks of that river which divides worlds. Her gaze found the far shore, where the mysteries of death would be unravelled and where so many that she had known now dwelt.
“Hello, sister.” A breathless wheeze from her right.
“Sister.” A bubbling voice to her left.
“My sisters.” Rue’s vision blurred as unbidden tears crowded her eyes. She found herself unable to turn, unable to breathe, paralysed by deep-sunk claws of emotion that she had believed the years to have pried free.
A dry hand took hers on the right. A wet one on the left.
“Ghosts…” Rue struggled to speak.
“Ghosts,” wheezed the first speaker.
“Still here…after all these years?”
“Always.” From the second speaker.
“Always?”
“For as long as we’re remembered.”
Rue let them go and stepped back from the black flood so she could see them both. Still children. Shocking in their youth. Bek, pale and bloodless, still carrying the wound that Kindness Terra had made with her own knife. Einsa drenched, water running from dark hair plastered across her face.
“Oh, my sisters…” Rue fell to her knees.
“Little Molly.” Einsa knelt beside her.
“Mollandra.” Bek knelt too. “You haven’t changed a bit.”