Chapter 30 #2
Rue knew now what she had only suspected when she had lived beneath the mansion’s roof.
They were being fashioned, all the children, moulded into creatures like the one that stood before her.
They were being poisoned, tainted, changed.
Ten centuries ago, the Kindly Ones had walked the world, summoned perhaps by an excess on Earth of the wickedness they had traditionally punished in the heavens.
Three sisters, Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera.
And somehow, when those bodies had been relinquished, having hounded the last of mankind across the endless ocean to beach itself on Gog’s shore…
those celestial corpses had lain imperishable, shunned, then forgotten, then covered by time. Lost until they were found.
Night-Father and Mother had fed their children the Ingredient. Some distillation of midnight. The mind of Megaera. The black matter of her brain. The Kindnesses had made their charges drink the elixir. The essence of fire. Alecto’s blood.
It had taken Rue decades to unravel and there was still much she didn’t understand, but the desire to know had left her.
She had hidden in her pretend life and pretended that such things no longer concerned her.
But the past had come to find her. Lip-Scar had become the Cruelty that the monsters had always intended him to become.
“We don’t have to fight…” She muttered it again, knowing as she looked into her onetime brother’s eyes that they did.
A shrug deepened Lip-Scar’s hunch. He lifted a narrow hand towards her, showing his palm. Megaera’s darkness pulsed between them, bringing down the leaves on all sides in one great fall, as if they’d forgotten the season. Megaera, keeper of grudges. She would never let this go.
“What was the point of—” Pain cut off Rue’s question. Blood flooded from her chest wound, pouring hot from the hole Isik’s knife had put in her. She sank to her knees, unable to sustain her own weight. “…Oh…” and fell face forward into the cold embrace of the forest floor.
“Shit…”
Rue stood once more on the banks of the river whose dark and rushing waters have to be crossed before a soul can be judged. On the far side, whatever rewards or punishments her life merited would be levelled. There would be only punishment—she had never been good.
“Damnation!” She lifted her hands, finding them empty, the knife gone.
She hadn’t expected to win the fight, but she thought she would at least get to try.
She’d been going to mock the Cruelty for trying to nullify her rage.
She would have shown him the empty vial she kept close to her heart, long since drained of elixir.
But his pulse of negation, whatever it might have been aimed at, had found the goddess’s magic, the enchantment that had sustained her past human limits, and had emptied her of it.
Rue understood the Cruelties’ power far better now than she had when she first faced them.
Alecto’s rage seemed a simple thing. Fire and rage.
Her gift was destruction. Megaera kept grudges.
Memory, Kindness Marta had taught them in Creed, was misunderstood by the masses, and by many of those who called themselves wise.
Memory, they claimed, was the record of time.
Megaera’s flesh taught a different story.
Memory is time. The mind remembers but so do rocks.
Iron remembers. Worlds remember. Where the most powerful Kindnesses could destroy armies and level castles, the most powerful Cruelties could, on the scale of an individual or single object, work a great range of far more subtle magics affecting memory, the mind, and the state of matter.
“Was that it?” Senna descended angrily from an iron sky, breaking into Rue’s reverie, all feathers and flapping wings. “All that talk just to fall over dead the moment you saw him?”
“It wasn’t the plan.”
Rue turned away from the terrifying flood that reached to within inches of her toes.
The banks shelved up, the tiers studded with dead thorn bushes.
One had borne the fruit that had been the Morrigan’s gift and had returned her to her body after Isik’s mercenaries had stamped the life out of her.
The dry limbs lay bare of all but thorns now.
She had been expecting to see Bek and Einsa, sitting among the briars, frowning their disapproval at her, but found herself alone save for the feathered annoyance describing great circles through the still air.
Rue felt the approach behind her much as she had felt the Cruelty tracking her from the Vale.
A pressure on the back of her neck as if the touch of a stranger’s gaze had become two cold fingertips pressed to her skin.
Inevitability turned her to face the river more than any movement of her feet.
Her body, after all, her true body, lay face down in a forest she’d never learned the name of, waiting for the worms to gather their courage.
“That’s not good.”
The skiff had already covered half of the distance from the opposite bank, propelled by sure strokes of a long pole in the hands of its cloaked boatman.
The river’s current should have swept the craft away, and its depth should have made the pole all but useless.
Even so, the boatman and his boat grew swiftly closer.
The boatman’s identity was hardly a mystery.
The lands had many faiths, but certain truths ran beneath them all.
Whatever songs the clerics sang, they all spoke of a guide who led souls along the last mile of their journey, or of a gatekeeper, and while these psychopomps might wear many forms, they all sprang from the same source.
And for Rue it was the river and the ferry, and the ferryman.
She stood and watched. Some things could not be run from.
She should have stood her ground and faced the Cruelty in the warmth of the inferno that had been her home rather than fleeing to the cold forest. She could hardly have announced herself as a Kindness without having to face one of her family sooner or later.
Though it did seem strange that one of her brothers had been so close.
As the skiff grounded itself on a bank that would offer no purchase to any other boat, Senna descended, landing on Rue’s shoulder.
“Get off me, you filthy animal.” Rue growled it out of the corner of her mouth.
“I can’t…” Senna croaked.
“If you shit on me, I’m going to pluck you.”
The boatman’s pole thumped against the skiff and the tall figure crossed half the length of his craft, the cowl of his robe obscuring his face. He held out a bony hand, palm up.
“He wants you to pay,” Senna croaked softly.
“I know what he fucking wants,” Rue hissed back, patting the pouch of her bloodstained smock where she typically kept split pegs for the line, bits of twine, a cloth to wipe the snotty nose of little Kera from next door when she wandered over to chase the chickens—
Something chinked beneath her fingers. Too heavy to be a bent copper or an Ibral penny that she might sometimes carry for trading.
She reached in and drew out a handful of bronze marks, each heavy coin stamped with the head of King Amtal, or of his son Orrin, who was king after him and whose sister once visited the Academy at Tandra-ah.
“This.” She closed her fingers around the nine coins. “This is what they paid me…”
Half a century ago Kindness Marta had paid the fathers of nearly a hundred girls nine marks each. Little Molly, however, too young for the Academy but willing to lie, had sold herself and taken the coins in her own small fists.
Rue lifted the handful closer to her face, habit only, for in this place the tricks that age had played upon her eyes were undone.
On every coin the three whips of the Academy had been neatly incised like three nested S’s.
The whips of the Furies. Placed to mark the coins as payment for a life.
It had been done not to shame those who took the money—though it did that too—but so that when they entered circulation and pulsed through the veins of first the city and then the nation, they would remind every person whose hands they passed through both of the existence of the Kindnesses and of the existence of another market for girl-flesh.
It was, to put it bluntly, a form of advertising.
The boatman’s hand stayed where it was, palm out.
The river rushed by, hissing at the delay.
Rue clenched the coins until her hand hurt. This was what they had bought her for. Less than you’d pay for a sturdy mule, as Kindness Marta had so unflatteringly put it.
“Pay him!” Senna squawked, unable to endure the tension.
Rue glanced back to the riverside and the thorn bushes where Bek and Einsa had spoken to her before. She looked along the banks, left and right, wondering what strange sea the river might reach and from what mountains it had sprung.
“Pay.” The boatman’s voice grated like one vast stone across another.
Rue put her hand back into her pocket and stared at him, daring him to raise his head and meet her eyes.
“Fuck you.”