Chapter 27 #2
She would miss the village and many of the people in it, but she hadn’t been born there.
It wasn’t the totality of her experience: she had suffered loss before.
Even so, she really did wish she’d brought her heavy coat, a skin to hang over bushes for when it rained, a flint and kindling, some salt, the coins she’d kept under her hearthstone…
so many things. A cartload really. She was too old for tramping across the wilds.
She’d been too old for it ten years earlier when she’d tramped her way to the Vale.
Now the great outdoors resembled a do-it-yourself torture kit.
A decade of straw mattresses and woollen blankets, albeit thin grey ones that harboured a variety of wildlife, had made her soft.
The years themselves had made her soft, comforts aside—the soft decay of age had found its way past her hardness and the barriers forged at such cost.
Among the trees the gloom already anticipated evening. Senna fluttered overhead, cawing irritably when she lost track of Rue. Though Rue reasoned that if the crow was compelled to follow her, then surely that must come with some sense of direction…or how was it a compulsion?
“He’s closer. Gaining on you.” Senna landed in the clearing Rue had just entered, by a spring that bubbled up near the middle of the glade, carpeting the ground in moss before running off among the thirsty roots. “He’s reached the trees.”
“He’s better at following me than you are,” Rue commented, patting her skirts for the twentieth time in search of a heel of bread or any other vaguely edible thing.
She hitched the folds of cloth up and sank to her knees with a groan, cushioning them on the green carpet as she bent to drink, scooping water to her lips.
In peril’s grip she had fought, demanding obedience from her body, ignoring its complaints.
In the relative safety of the forest every action even slightly out of the ordinary seemed to require that she herald it with a grunt, groan, or the puffing of breath, as if her limbs needed each service to be individually acknowledged.
Rue stayed on her knees. It wasn’t exactly comfortable. The moss was soaking and cold. But she really didn’t feel ready to stand again. She wondered what it would be like to lie down and refuse to move until he found her.
“Get up!” Senna cawed.
“I thought you wanted me to face him down, burn him to a crisp!”
“Can you burn him to a crisp?”
“No.”
“Get up, then!”
“I’m tired. I can’t outrun him. And Kindnesses don’t hide. It’s not in our nature.”
“You’ve been hiding for years! Pretending to be a normal person!”
“Normal?” Rue forced the bitterness from her voice, spitting it out as a laugh that made the crow startle.
She had learned early on to consider herself something different—as if as a baby the true Molly, sweet and pink in her innocence, had been offered up on an altar and replaced by a changeling, stained in her sin.
It was easier to imagine all that had been taken from her removed in one bright stroke of a blade than torn away a scrap at a time.
Easier to stop herself believing it could return to her.
And yet despite the iron of her resolve, age and ten quiet years had let those feelings seep past her barriers.
She had been steeped in peace and normality.
“I have been hiding. That’s true. I wasn’t a Kindness anymore. I had set that aside.”
“I saw a Kindness walk out of that inferno.” The crow’s unnerving stare skewered her.
“They should never have come.” Rue saw the single mercenary again, back in the alehouse in Stones Corner. A harbinger of doom, like the first hunger-bug dropping from a clear blue sky, of little consequence by itself, but herald to a million more.
The icy wetness of the moss received her, softer than any bed. The sky showed the cold grey heart that beats behind the blue, the bare fingers of a dead tree reaching in from the corner of her vision.
“You hated me because you were never happy there, Senna. Pye gave you everything you had, and you resented it for choking you, keeping you, hemming in your horizons. You hated me because I’d seen what the world had to offer—the sharpest edge of that in any case—and I’d chosen to come to the Vale. Worse, I chose to stay!
“Yes, I was angry and short-tempered, and I didn’t have the spoons to be nice—but old women don’t divide into grandmothers and witches based on whether they smile and nod and bake oatcakes or…don’t.
“But some of them saw past that when they looked my way. Some of them saw someone whose opinion they cared about, and I appreciated that. Jayne could see I had scars and they called to her—she had her own. And Ambeth, gods bless her, she couldn’t pass by a hopeless case if her life depended on it.
She thought I was all bark and no bite, and thankfully I never disappointed her, even though I’m mostly bite with a little bark showing above the waterline.
“The goddess put you in that crow because, of all of them, you’re the one who most badly needs to learn something, however old you are. And she put me in this…half corpse…because I’d made a trio. And she might be an evil, crazy bitch…but she was right.”
Rue sat up and pulled the knife from her belt.
“I made a trio. And they took it from me. And someone has to pay.”