Chapter 24
Rue
“I was wondering where you’d got to.” Rue rolled Isik’s head into the ditch and turned back to the bloodstained round stone where Senna now perched, having landed in an inelegant thrashing of wings.
In truth Rue had forgotten all about the bird and the attendant strangeness of it also being Senna.
But exposing weakness wasn’t something she’d ever been inclined to do.
“It’s not just here. Trens Town is burning. Smoke in the east. Probably Ginta, and that little place on the Ripple,” the crow said.
“What about survivors? From here?” Rue asked. “Someone must have got away.”
She wanted to sit down, needed to: age had never weighed on her so heavy.
Yet she stood with the crackle and spit of fire all around her and the sting of smoke wafting over every time the wind shifted, pausing the upwards gyre.
She stood like a spike driven into the hard soil, and though she wanted to sob and to rail against a world that allowed such horror, she did neither.
Bek watched Rue from the fire, Einsa looming at her side, though both seemed small now, reduced to little girls who should have been at play, chasing through forests, running through alleys, doing the thousand and one soft things that the girls of Pye had done despite that many would have called their lives hard.
Two little girls who should have been doing literally anything except learning to murder each other.
Though Rue thought of thirty-year-olds as girls now.
The shades of her friends, standing now as shadows among the flames, didn’t see Rue, didn’t see the creature that the years had fashioned. Their eyes saw through time. It was Mollandra they watched, bent and twisted even then, but not yet broken.
I’m not her—I carry around the imprint of that child.
Her hurts and truths are my foundations, but I am not her.
I was the castle built upon that hill, and now the ruin.
I am haunted by the ghost of myself. By the ghosts of myself.
By the little girl, the young woman, the mother, wife, by the widow fresh in her grief.
Even yesterday watches with a stranger’s caution as it stands at my shoulder.
Rue returned her gaze to the crow, who seemed hardly to have moved at all. “What about survivors, damn you?”
Senna cocked her head. Whether the bright beads of her eyes held sorrow or a hunger for the carrion her fellow villagers had become, Rue couldn’t tell. “Didn’t see any.”
“Dammit, Senna, these are your people, not mine. Your son—” Rue bit the words off, aware that she was being cruel, trying to force out of Senna the emotions she couldn’t find in herself.
“My son…” Senna cawed, something closer to a low moan than any bird’s cry.
“I’m a crow, Mollandra Plight. I can’t cry.
I can’t smile. I already died once. And so did you from what I can tell.
Don’t ask me how to feel. This is an evil dream that bitch goddess of yours has trapped us in.
And if it’s all the same to you I’m just going to follow it along until I’m allowed to leave and try not to think about it too hard. ”
Rue eyed the crow. She’d not expected Senna to be able to frame such thoughts when she was a gossipy, mean-spirited old woman. To have them spoken through a beak had her wonder what contribution the bird had made. Crows were uncommon clever after all.
“Scout the roads—”
“I’ve already looked.”
“Do it again,” Rue barked. “Everything coming and going from this spot. If there’s a lone donkey heading our way, I want to know about it.”
“I’ve alread—”
Rue took a quick, threatening step towards the crow, sending it cawing into the smoke-scarred sky. Rue nodded at the bird’s dwindling dot. Bitch or not, Senna shouldn’t be here for what had to follow.
With Senna gone, Rue returned to Tamaster’s hall, the only house not yet fully ablaze.
She held her breath against the wafting smoke and narrowed her eyes against the sting.
It took longer than she wanted to locate the finger bone.
She picked it up still in its smouldering leather wrap, not ready to touch it.
Sebrin’s soot-stained head she found in a corner where it must have rolled after being kicked.
She carried it out into the day’s grey light, checking first that Senna had not returned.
“You’re still in there. Don’t hide.”
Sebrin’s eyes angled sharply towards her. “Enjoy your last hours, old woman. Someone is already coming for you.”
“You should have paid with gold when you had a chance, Baron. Now you pay the hard price.”
Baron Mancer’s sneer appeared once more on Sebrin’s lips.
“Why are you trying to start a war?” Rue asked. “It seems a big thing for a little baron to want.”
Mancer just stared at her. Rue shrugged and drove a thumb into one glaring eye. Sebrin’s face spasmed.
“Perhaps it wasn’t your idea?” Rue said. “Is there someone else I need to talk to?”
“You won’t last till dawn.” The baron’s voice sounded strained. He’d felt the eye, but not as much as Rue had hoped. “There’s only one more person you’ll ever talk—”
Rue pitched the head into the burning ruin of Carter James’s shack. Senna’s dark form was arrowing towards her from on high, not yet close enough to have recognized her son.
The crow landed on a nearby wall.
“So, what else did you see up there?” Rue’s gaze flickered to the heavens. “How many mercenaries?”
“I’d already looked.” Senna cawed bad-temperedly. “Hundreds. A dozen bands. Spread out over twenty miles and more to the Wiseman’s Wood.” She leaned to scrape some scrap of carrion from her beak. “But just now—”
“Just now what?”
“Why should I help you?” The crow fluttered to a fence post out of Rue’s reach.
“You’re part of this. The reason for it.
You did this to me. To them.” She flapped a wing towards the burning village—the roof of Debban’s ale hut chose that moment to collapse, sending a tornado of swirling embers climbing towards the vault of heaven.
“You said you had to follow me,” Rue pointed out.
“Maybe she just wanted me to watch you die. I ain’t forced to help you.”
“I killed the people who killed everyone, you know.” Rue gestured to the bodies smoking in the main street.
“I know what you are!” Senna cawed. “I know what you are!”
“And what am I?”
“You told them. I am she the gods fear. My sisters walk ever by my side. Well, I don’t see any sisters but I’m old enough to know that the Kindnesses didn’t just walk through stories.
They were real. The nightmares were real.
You started this! You started it! I knew you were trouble the day you came.
I told them. I told them all, but would they listen? I said you weren’t right—”
“I’m not right.” Rue nodded. “Never was. Not once. Broken from the beginning. But Kindnesses don’t start things. They end them.”
Senna watched the fires, another roof collapsing, the blaze reflected in her eyes.
“I had daughters, not sons.” Rue surprised herself by speaking. “Three of them. Triplets. Came closer to killing me than the Academy did.”
Senna’s caw sounded more like an old woman’s than a crow’s.
“One died young, so I know a mother’s loss.”
“Ain’t the same. Kids die young. Babies die like flies. Can’t love them till they’re—”
“Don’t spoil it, Senna. We’re having a moment here. And you know that ain’t true. We love the babies just as much. More maybe, because they’ve never had a chance to disappoint.”
The crow shrugged, like crows don’t. “Still got two then.”
“One’s as good as dead. Left her with the convent. I doubt they’ve managed to keep her alive this long. The other, Cela, hates me. She’s probably dead too. Never could back down from a fight…”
Senna wiped her beak on the fence post. “Sebrin was an arse. Got that from his father. But he loved his mother and his children. I will miss—” She cawed low and long. “It’s done. Burned. Tomorrow it will be ashes.”
“So, what did you see?” Rue still didn’t trust the bird but she felt she understood the woman now.
“A man in black. I think it was a man. Walking alone on the Trevvan Road, coming this way.” Senna shook as if trying to rid her feathers of dirt.
“What was special about this one man?” A chill of premonition ran the length of Rue’s spine. “Did he have a bigger axe than the rest?”
“Couldn’t see a weapon. But he looked like he knew exactly where he was going, and he’s heading our way.” The crow glanced to the north. “And…when I looked at him…”
“Yes?”
“I felt like I was falling. And not just because my wings failed me or something. More like I didn’t have wings. Like I’d never had them, and I was back in that market, falling backwards, not understanding what had hit me or even where.”
“Shit.” Rue turned south and began to walk off swiftly.
“Wait!” Senna took to the air, cawing. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know where we’re going, but me, I’m running away.”