Chapter 32
Rue
“You told him to fuck off!”
“I know what I did.”
“But he’s the ferryman! He’s Death with his scythe! He’s the winged ones who take the warriors straight from the battlefield! He’s—”
“He’s probably used to it. Dying’s enough to give most people an attitude.
” Rue kept to her course, putting both the river and the black sun to her back and striking out into the Badlands, an area scarred by water that never showed itself, deep gullies set around with ridges of coarse volcanic rock, all of it blowing with a black dust that made her skin hurt.
“There’s nothing out here,” Senna croaked. “I’ve been up high. It goes on forever. Just like this.”
“That’s what they say.” Rue trudged on, her feet already sore from the sharp rocks.
“You can be a ghost two ways. When the living won’t let you go they keep a shade of you on this bank of the river.
A shade will stay until it’s not needed anymore.
I don’t know if the person who went over the river even knows that something stayed behind.
Maybe it’s just like a painting, or a reflection and the person has no real ties to it…
” She wasn’t sure if she wanted Bek and Einsa to be aware of her need, of how she couldn’t let them go.
If they had found something good over the river, would her cares reach out and tarnish it somehow?
Or if they suffered, would it comfort them to know that their spectres still owned part of her mind?
“I’m the other sort. The unquiet spirit.
And I’m planning on being as unquiet as I need to be. ”
“There’s nobody here to care.” Senna swooped past.
Without days, without the wheeling of stars, and under the ceaseless stare of a black sun whose light seemed a kind of blindness, it was impossible to measure either time or distance save in units of pain.
In Rue’s youth, pain had been a frequent visitor, but a visitor nonetheless; however excruciating the wound, injury, or flat-out torture inflicted by the instructors, there would be a return to a kind of normal.
Rue’s youth had hauled her from the depths of agony, repaired her damaged flesh, and delivered her to another day.
Some hurts were, of course, irreparable, and the cumulative effects of these would remove girls from the class, leaving a few who by luck or skill or a combination of both endured.
Age had marked a slow changing of that relationship.
Pain became a guest who overstayed their welcome.
Pain acquired its own room, a place it preferred to be and to where it might retreat when all else was fine.
And later pain became a resident, moving in for good, wandering the length of her body in search of new forms of entertainment.
The sharpness of any hurt kept its edge, but added to that were new notes on which torment might play a melody.
Dull persistent aches, deep throbbing hurts, the crawling itch, the dry tickle, the twinge of sockets, and the grind of bone on bone.
Each mile Rue strayed from the river seemed to take her deeper into the territory of pain, as if it were not the physical effort of her journey taking its toll upon her ageing body but the very land itself.
She crested a black ridge and gazed at the unending vista before her.
The scream of her flesh insisted that it was this air, these rocks, this place that was hurting her and would have hurt her just as badly had she been set upon the spot by some great bird without ever once stretching a muscle to achieve the distance from the river.
“Where are we even heading?” Senna demanded, landing to peck at a pebble among the dust. The pain assaulting Rue appeared to give the crow no problems.
“Away,” Rue snapped. “Away from the river.” She bit down on the irritation that hurting had put on her tongue. “I don’t think it matters which route I take. It’s all the same.” A sweep of her hand encompassed the gullies, ridges, distant hills.
“It matters.” Bek’s ghost stood close by, fainter than at the river’s edge.
“It’s not an easy path to walk, and it will get harder each time you walk it.
” Across her phantom knuckles the girl passed the memory of the bronze mark that Rue had once given her, flipping it from one to the next in a complex shuffle.
“Why would you even do this, Mollandra? You had the coin for the ferryman. The world has never once done you a single favour. Aren’t you finished with it yet? Isn’t it time to leave?”
When her ghosts spoke, the bitterness that had never left Rue grew thin, almost as spectral as the girls still frozen in their youth.
She remembered them amid the nightmare of their education, where somehow they had found space for hopes and dreams, for joking, even for the love that friends should share in such hardship but seldom manage.
That bitterness had coloured her vision every moment of her life, fading during the soft years she had spent hidden in the Vale but never fully absent, a wound across the breadth of her soul that refused to heal.
“Isn’t it time to leave?” Bek asked again.
“I don’t know.” And for a moment she truly didn’t. It would be so easy to let it go. To cross the river and leave everything behind. Perhaps something better waited for her over those dark waters.
“Let her be, Bek.” Einsa sat close by on her other side.
For once the girl was dry, the truth of her death left unremarked.
This was the Einsa of her first year, with the rough grin, that mix of resignation and resilience she’d got from her mother.
“You know she’ll go her own way. We never knew it back then, but she was always about righting wrongs.
Hitting back no matter how big the bully. No point trying to stop her.”
“I’m tired.” Rue sat down too, cursing at the pain flaring from hips and knees. Now that she had someone in her corner, her resolve faltered.
“You’re old is what you are.” Senna stalked about, ridiculous on her crow’s legs. “You’re an old woman. A toothless hag.”
“I have my teeth.” Insecurity had Rue’s fingers at her lips. “Most of them anyway.” She spat angrily. She’d thought she’d outgrown her old insecurities.
“You should have the grace to die so that the rest of us can move on rather than hang around you like some ragtag carnival rejects. Go back to the river. Take the boat.”
Rue put her hands to her cheeks, rubbing as if she could rub away the years. She lowered them, looking closely. Bony fingers, wrinkle-clad. They weren’t the hands she knew.
“Leave Sunder to someone else,” Bek said. “He won’t last forever. A hero will come along. A bigger bad. Or time will pull him down all by itself. You don’t have to—”
“Sunder?” Rue remembered him. The warlord on the edge of her open grave, ready to unthrone the gods themselves.
The Morrigan stalking across the dead, defying him.
The boy who had so many years ago visited the Academy with his royal parents.
Those years which bore down on her so hard seemed to have slipped from his shoulders, as if those who called him a demigod had the right of it.
“You think this is about him?” She got to her feet with a snarl.
“I don’t give a damn what the goddess wants.
I was done with her the day I finished with all this Kindness nonsense. ”
“What in seven hells are we doing here, then?” Senna croaked.
“They killed my friends. All I want is a word with the person who made that happen, some fucking baron, Mancer, wasn’t it? I’ll have my pound of flesh from that one and be done with it. After that I don’t give a damn!”
Einsa stood up too. She held a bronze mark, edge on, between finger and thumb. “And what if I gave you this back and told you to use it to pay the fare?” She nodded towards the river.
For a moment uncertainty chilled the blood in Rue’s veins. She met the ghost’s hollow gaze. “You wouldn’t do that. But if you did…I would take the ferry.”
Einsa shrugged. “I wouldn’t do it.” She held the coin out on the flat of her palm. “But you could take it anyway.”
Rue turned from her and looked out across the Badlands.
Somewhere out there were the caves that joined the Academy’s catacombs.
Hidden in the folds of death’s borders were a thousand nooks and crannies through which an unquiet soul could crawl to return to haunt the living.
Her pain flared in anticipation of all those miles.
The untold timeless years of searching. “Do you know the way?”
“I don’t,” Bek said. “But she does.” She stared at Senna.
The crow took to the air with a squawk of betrayal, evading Rue’s grasp.
“Give it up!” A harsh cry from above, where Senna flew against a black sky.
Rue balled her fists. “They killed my friends!”
“I’m not your friend!”
“Fine.” Rue reached into her shift and drew forth a bronze mark. One of the nine they gave her on that day of days. She held it aloft, pinched between finger and thumb, arm stretched out.
“Fine!” A dark shape plucked it from her grasp in an explosion of feathers. “I still don’t like you.” The crow’s cry reached her from on high.
“That’s okay.” Rue shrugged off her ghosts and set out in the direction of the caw. “Friends don’t have to like each other.”