Chapter 33
Rue
“Oh…that hurt.” Rue rolled over on the wet ground and stared up at a sky as black as the one she’d left behind, only sprinkled with stars. She pushed herself up into a sitting position. “Dear gods, this hurts almost as much.” She sniffed. “Did he…damn him. I think he pissed on my corpse.”
A flutter of wings and a nearby branch creaked under new weight. “We’re back, then. I earned my mark.”
“Damn, I’m cold.” Rue’s flesh presumably had cooled to the temperature of the ground during her absence.
She thought it must be the night of the same day since nothing had come to chew at her fingers yet or peck out her eyes.
If the Cruelty had thought to cut off her head, this return might have gone very differently.
A good cremation could have sealed the door entirely.
Unpleasant as Lip-Scar’s final disrespect had been, it could have gone a lot worse.
As it was, with the Cruelty and his negation gone, the Morrigan’s blessing, or curse, was able to reestablish itself and allow Rue to function despite fatal injuries and a distinct shortage of blood.
“Won’t he just find you again?” Senna croaked from the tree.
“Depends how close he is and what I do.” Day-Father had found her the first time she’d used the power he’d raised her to inherit. The Ingredient had saved both her and Sharp from the Kindnesses’ elixir, but it had told the Cruelties where to find her.
“The smoke might have drawn him towards Pye, but it didn’t follow you here, and he found you anyway,” Senna cawed. “He found you the same way the Cruelties found every other Kindness.”
“Not all of them…” Rue had never believed they were all dead, hunted to extinction.
When she’d heard that they’d burned the Academy she’d found the nearest tavern and drunk a pint of ulik.
Since it was a liquor even Ambeth drank in thimbles, she had of course thrown up, been thrown out, and ended up sleeping it off in a ditch.
But for one night she had been gloriously, disgracefully drunk.
And the long-dammed tears had flowed, joy, anger, shame, and sorrow all there in the mix.
When they had started tracking down every Kindness, she had been glad that she had taken her leave of the order some years previously and was already well hidden.
All the Cruelties had been bred to hunt Kindnesses, but the oldest of them, the ones who had suffered through their childhoods with Rue as their leader, were better at hunting her than any other. A bond had been forged.
Despite Rue’s vulnerability, her trail had been thoroughly erased at the time she had escaped her own order, and had only grown colder since.
Rue had simply kept her head down and waited to see what would happen.
To say she’d hoped they wouldn’t find her wasn’t strictly true.
Part of her had wanted them to. And part of that part wanted it so she could leave the world with blood on her teeth, making the fuckers pay.
And part of that part wanted it because she didn’t deserve peace and because she was the fucker that should pay.
“So, where next?” Senna cawed. “There was some baron…?”
“I need…” Rue clambered to her feet, wondering what exactly it was she did need.
It felt as if there were too many things to say.
“To wash. Then rest. I need a roof.” She had never needed a roof when she was a Kindness.
Always on to the next thing. Putting down roots had made something less of her.
“I need somewhere to regroup. They burned all my things. I need weapons…”
“You had weapons in that hut of yours?”
“You wouldn’t believe what I had in there, Senna Weaver.”
“And you said I was just making up stories!” the crow squawked.
“You were. The fact that some of them were true was a lucky guess.” Rue turned, slowly, boots squelching in cold mud.
The black forest offered no paths. She should wait for dawn, but despite her pain and her exhaustion she needed to be on the move.
“You knew the way back to my body. What else have you been hiding? Lead me somewhere useful.”
The crow cocked its head, eyes catching the starlight. For a moment Rue wondered where her coin had gone but discarded the question.
“Follow.” And Senna took to the air.
Dawn found Rue emerging from the woods, having been poked and scratched by innumerable branches, tripped by every root in the forest, torn by every bramble, all while following the caw of an unseen crow somewhere in the treetops.
Senna led her stumbling into the crimson glory of a sunrise that doubtless owed much of its reach to the smoke of smouldering villages.
Trailing the crow had taken away the need for choices, and in the trackless forest Rue hadn’t even considered any of the alternatives.
Here, with the land unfolded before her, she paused.
To follow Senna was to take the Morrigan’s direction, but Rue had already been treading the path of vengeance.
Someone needed to bleed for the hurt that had been done to her, for Ambeth and Jayne.
That’s what she’d told herself, the Academy taught that lesson, but Rue had known it before she went through their gates.
Age had other lessons to teach, some bitter ones, but others that were gentler, that spoke of letting go.
Rue looked to the south. She had borne three daughters.
It had been a different life, an attempt to escape, to have what had been taken from her.
It had been another lesson. They came together, birthed on the morning, noon, and evening of the same day.
Aello, Ocypete, Celaeno. The morning child, born to greet a sunrise much like this one, was long gone, taken cruelly.
The child born when the sun was at its zenith lay between worlds, her warm corpse tended by the nuns of Thellamid, or perhaps by now she had joined her elder sister.
And Cela, child of the night, always the baby, if only by half a day, she had gone west.
The love of a mother for her child had been something Rue had never properly experienced until it blossomed unexpectedly in her chest when she suckled the first of her girls.
It had scared her, terrified her, and that had never changed.
She had given the world precious delicate things that she had to defend from the hurts and harms that lay waiting—many of them too subtle to be kept at bay with a sharp edge.
She had never stopped being scared for them, but she’d found a joy there too.
A delight she had never thought would be hers and that she knew herself unworthy of.
The pain of losing them had undone her. Cela worst of all because she had stalked off shouting things she couldn’t possibly mean, vicious, violent words that cut so deep.
Rue still couldn’t think about that day or the dark paths down which her vengeance had taken her…
The last word of Cela had her crossing into Tavoland, back when Sunder’s hands had first reached beyond his late uncle’s borders to wrap around the lands where Rue now stood.
Regon had fallen swiftly but the freshly minted emperor had burned his fingers when he poked Tavoland.
Only now, two decades later, had Sunder returned his gaze to the west, where Cela’s footprints led.
Long years had seen him campaign in the north and to the south, taking the kingdoms of Svellard and Kintcha.
Perhaps when his empire reached the coast in all directions his ambition would be sated. Perhaps not.
Rue’s eyes rested on those distant mountains, Tavoland’s walls. Should she follow her daughter, look for reconciliation, even after all these years? Had age worn the edges from the hatred that Celaeno bore her?
“Did you feel that?” Rue shuddered, her attention redirected.
“Feel what?” The crow landed beside her.
“That! That…” Something had touched her. A nothingness, sucking at her flesh like Father’s fingertips. “That…thing.”
The bird watched her silently.
“He’s understood his mistake. He’s coming after us again.”
“After you.” Senna didn’t ask who was coming.
“Me then.” The Cruelty didn’t care about the crow.
Rue pressed a hand to the knife wound in her chest. She’d no desire to have the last of her blood come leaking from it as she died again.
And her brother would be certain to finish her properly this time, whether it meant a fire or simply chopping her into pieces. “Let’s go. Quickly.”
Lip-Scar would catch them if they fled towards Tavoland, where Rue’s instinct pointed them.
She would have aimed herself out beyond the borders that Emperor Sunder had drawn on the map, recently enough for the ink to still be wet in some cases and the ground red.
But the nearby river was their best chance to outpace him, and it flowed northeast, the direction Senna was leading her.
Following the bird, Rue headed east across a bleak scrubland, striding briskly among the gorse bushes where scrawny sheep eked out an existence.
Senna led her towards a lone house beside a broad river—the Wentwash.
They approached along the west bank and reached a boathouse on the edge of collapse.
Two skiffs mouldered away in the dank interior, one half-sunk with only the prow and stern proud of the water, the other rotten but still afloat.
“We need to go downriver.” Senna perched on the boathouse gable.
Rue eyed the farmhouse, which was almost as ramshackle as the structure before her.
No dogs barked. No smoke rose from the chimney.
She began to uncoil the skiff’s rope from the mooring post. Senna made no mention of the owners.
Doubtless the crow could smell the death all around them almost as clearly as Rue could hear the corpses calling to her from within their home.
Why the place hadn’t been fired, she couldn’t say.
Perhaps the mercenaries were planning to return, or were still there.