Chapter 20 #2
Rue wouldn’t have got all of her denial out even if she had been able to speak.
It was true, though she’d never admitted it to herself.
If she’d admitted it she would have seen it as weakness and felt compelled to do something about it.
But she had liked her life. Something she had for many years never imagined was possible.
She had enjoyed pottering in her vegetable rows, walking too slowly down the street, passing houses beneath whose roofs little happened that wasn’t shared as gossip, watching the village folk craft and weave the necessities of their existence.
She had cared for some people more than others.
She wondered even now if Soosa Smith had made it to the woods, and how the foolish girl would live in the wilds all by herself.
She had liked being someone they knew was solid, whose word they knew was hard-given and hard-kept.
She had liked that they knew she had an edge but had no inkling of how many it had cut.
She had liked that mothers left their babies in her care, and that they were nervous asking to do so.
They knew that she might make them sweat but if the wolf came it’d likely tuck tail and run when Molly Plight turned her scowl its way.
“What was she looking at?” The lieutenant, a beefy man with a sizeable gut and a black beard, was still staring at Einsa, entranced.
Rue felt the dead as if they were candles flickering to life one after the other in some cathedral vault, each a faint star in the consuming void.
She would have breathed the words “so many” had she been able to speak.
She would have moved swiftly to anger at their stupidity.
How could they be such ignorant peasants?
They had so little, was it that hard to leave it behind? Why…why hadn’t they just run away?
The anger would turn towards herself later—she knew that too, though it made no difference now. She understood what had tied them to their homes, their animals, their plots of land, their families.
As she tried to spit and bite at the hand across her mouth, Rue drew the candle flames closer. Their heat burned across her skin. They were flames because the corpses of the villagers were burning in their burning homes.
On the table the eyes in Sebrin Weaver’s discarded head suddenly swivelled and found Rue where she hung on the wall.
Rue sought and found Soosa, not ablaze but just as dead, discarded in a ditch after cruelties no less than that of the fire.
Rue rejected the girl’s fate, cursing behind unclean fingers, watching both the one corpse and the many.
Gressa was approaching now, a gutting blade glimmering in her hand.
Rue reached out to the dead, to the ruin of the life she had loved.
And as she did so, Soosa Smith rejected at least part of what had been imposed upon her too.
Rue sensed them all, those whose names she hardly used, and those whose company she might seek, pretending it to be an accidental wandering.
As Soosa stood up, bloodless in the gutter running by Shymon’s field, every other corpse in the village stood too, many thick with flames, some shouldering aside burning timbers or shaking off hot embers.
“Stop her!” Baron Mancer shouted silently with Sebrin’s cold lips. “Kill the bitch!”
“What in fuck’s name is that?” Gressa turned towards the shuttered windows.
Those among the dead that could howl roared their anger. The others mouthed it, some lipless with blackened teeth between which smoke issued as if the fire had given them kinship with dragonkind.
The first corpse to come crashing through the shutters was on fire.
In the main street beyond, Rue could now see what she had only sensed before: in the village’s single street a score of mercenaries found themselves assaulted by the peasants they had recently slaughtered.
The people of Pye might have been terrified in the moments of their death, but they returned filled with such anger that their flesh could hardly hold their bones.
The strength in their smouldering hands tore heads from shoulders and launched men into the blazes they had started.
The remains of a young woman staggered beneath an axe blow: then, with the blade buried deep in her chest, she seized the near giant of a mercenary who had swung the weapon.
Together with a blackened child she took him to the ground.
“Kill her!” Gressa yelled, now echoing the unheard baron. The hoarseness of pain infected her voice as she wrestled with the burning peasant who’d been first through the window. Her yells rapidly became howls.
The bald man, whose hand had slipped from Rue’s mouth as his attention strayed to the screaming corpses breaking through the remaining shutters, had the presence of mind to draw his knife and stab Rue in the chest.
“Gods dammit!” Rue shouted as two peasant women dragged the man down, pulling the blade free. “That hurt!”
She hung, throbbing with the pain of her wounded lung, as the dead increased their number.
Gressa died screaming in the end, her toughness seared away by the flames of the man who burned like a melting candle as he wrapped his arms around her while others sought to tear her flesh from her bones with their teeth.
Rue didn’t direct the actions of her servants: there were too many for that.
She simply aimed them towards their targets, and even that was probably unnecessary.
At last, with the great majority of the mercenaries slain and the rest having run off, the dead’s anger abated and they fell to aimless wandering.
The room had filled with smoke and heat, tearing at Rue’s eyes, filling her good lung with knife blades of its own.
“Get me to the street.” She coughed a breath out, wheezed another in, instantly regretted it, and coughed again.
She had Artur Tanner’s corpse lift her from the wall hook and carry her outside before setting her on her feet.
She staggered and almost fell, her legs uncertain of their task.
Under her direction, Artur, a tall, greying man killed by a single sword thrust through the heart, strode back into the smoke-filled hall, eventually emerging once more with the knife that had been used to stab her.
Rue directed the remainder of the still-smouldering dead to leave the house and focused her attention on other individuals, setting one to beating out the flames that had taken hold among the shattered ruins of the shutters.
Rather than rely on the dead man’s jerky knifework to free her hands, Rue would have preferred to have him hold the blade steady and to have sawed herself free.
But her arms hung like pieces of rope, paying no heed to her commands, which she found strange since they were the deadest part of her.
With a sigh, she focused on Artur, who was not the tanner that his surname suggested.
It was his father and grandfather who had tanned hides, though some claimed the stink still clung to the man decades after his sire and grandsire had quit the business owing to being dead.
Right now, however, all anyone in Pye, living or dead, smelled of was smoke.
Many other corpses, especially the burned ones, dropped to the ground as Rue shifted the bulk of her attention onto Artur.
Although her various wounds hadn’t killed her or even slowed her down, each felt deeply wrong, like an unanswered insult or a spider on the skin.
She had no wish to have her wrists opened in the act of setting them free.
When her hands came loose, Rue released the dead.
Some remained for a few moments, gazing about them as if they might stay of their own volition.
Soosa Smith was the last to fall, confused in her mud-smeared beauty, too young to let go of that which she had owned so briefly.
She hit the ground like a grain sack and lay vacant in the street.
A pain flowered in Rue’s chest as if the body hitting the earth had been a punch she had herself sustained.
With a snarl she pushed away the image of her own daughters that had intruded into her thoughts, cursed and spat and told herself that the peasants had been nothing to her, just cover.
As if the decade she’d passed among them had been merely a prolonged mission in which they served as camouflage, and she an actor, simply playing the role of an old woman.
She set her back to Soosa and the others. Her lies offered no comfort. There had been a time when she could fool herself. That time had passed. She wiped at the tears that the smoke had wrung from her—the smoke and nothing else—and stalked back towards the burning house she’d just escaped.
“Gods damn…” Her arms were strangers to her, lifting only fractionally when commanded. The thatch smoked and flames had climbed the table where Gressa unfolded her maps. Rue found Isik in the root cellar where they’d left him.
“You were the one I wanted all along.” Rue shuffled to stand beside his head, feeling old once more.
She raised her voice. “I would have let them go.” She doubted Gressa would have heard her above the crackle of flames in Tamaster Sams’s “hall” even if she weren’t dead and on fire herself.
But it was true. Mass slaughter was never the Kindnesses’ chosen path.
It was the Kindnesses’ creed to find the person responsible for the crime’s existence, not those following the order to carry it out.
In this case, Rue wasn’t sure any grand crime had been commissioned.
Wars, for example, were not forbidden. But she was no longer a Kindness, and this was personal.
Despite this, she would follow her old methods.
Even with the Morrigan’s gift, Rue was never going to be able to knife to death every mercenary in the Southfold Margins, and doing so would offer no justice.
Baron Mancer had paid this company to slaughter their way across the lowlands.
Rue wanted to know more. The “why” was of interest but the “where” was paramount.
She decided to take a page from Gressa’s playbook.
It took five blows to decapitate Isik, but Rue’s arms had largely woken up by the time his head rolled free.
She carried the head away from the heat of the burning house and set it on the Round Stone by the gate to Sarah’s Field.
The locals said giants had left the round stones scattered across the fold.
The giant children had tossed them like Pye’s children tossed bobstones.
At the Academy, Rue had been told a great sheet of ice had smoothed them as it flowed across the land and left them stranded when it finally melted. Both stories were hard to believe.
She positioned Isik’s head on the rock, and dark rivulets of blood oozed sluggishly over the curving stone. He looked to be asleep. One of his braver comrades must have closed his eyes a second time before they threw him in the cellar.
“Isik.” Rue flicked the man’s forehead, no enchanted bone required, but then she wasn’t planning to talk to people far away. “Wake up, Isik!”
His eyes opened and his lips curled in a voiceless snarl.
“Answer my questions and I’ll let you go.
” She made it seem like a choice. The answers would be less slippery if she didn’t have to squeeze too hard to get them out of him.
The dead couldn’t refuse to reply, and she would be able to get the truth from most, but a strong will might defy her or twist out a half lie.
Dead eyes fixed on her, a growing spark of recognition amid the hate that filled them.
First a question she knew the answer to. “Who hired the Iron League?”
“Mancer’s woman.” Isik didn’t need lungs to reply, and she didn’t need ears to hear him.
“Woman?” She supposed the baron would have had his agents make the deal rather than lower himself to such negotiations. “Why does the baron want villages burned?”
“What’s it to you, you old bitch?” Isik had more bite to him than most dead men. The dead didn’t tend to ask questions.
Rue squeezed and Isik howled in silent pain. Starlings in Mako’s field took flight, hundreds of them rising from the furrowed ground.
“They’re his.” Isik narrowed his eyes. “He can have them burned if he has the notion.”
“His?” This was new. “Ain’t it some duke that’s got dominion over the Westfold?” Rue reached for the man’s name. She doubted he or any of his forebears had been out as far as Pye in generations. “Cataract?”
“Duke Cataras.” Rue could almost hear the sniff of contempt Isik would have made had his lungs not been left thirty yards away. “You peasants don’t—”
“So it’s Mancer now…” Rue nodded. It wasn’t as if anyone in Pye had cared much what happened in Chaim City.
“Why would he do this?” She glanced around at the burning homes, the corpses, the drifting smoke.
Pye, Stones Corner, more beside most likely.
They were his villages, held in the emperor’s name.
Goods and taxes flowed his way. Slowly of course from so poor a region, but many villages paying taxes for many years might buy the man a new hat or two. “Why burn them?”
“I don’t know.”
But Rue knew enough about speaking to the dead to press the point.
“You might not know but you would have had suspicions. You weren’t an idiot, Isik.
Well, not completely…You did let me cut your throat, though.
” She lifted his head by the salt-and-pepper grease of his hair.
“Why do you think he wanted them burned?”
“To start a war.”