Chapter 35
Rue
All the insults to Rue’s flesh, both the sharp and the blunt, began to cry their outrage. She fell to her knees and focused on the effort required to draw air into her lungs, one punctured by Isik’s blade.
Lip-Scar kept his place in the doorway, seeming content to let the darkness within him hurry Rue towards her third, possibly fourth, death. Sharp stood there in her faded dress, looking from Rue to the man in the doorway and back again as her faded mind struggled to make sense of the scene.
“I knew a girl called Mollandra once. Fierce little thing she was.” The old woman turned away. “Where did I put my…Never mind. Is it time for dinner yet?”
The Cruelty, Rue’s brother as much as Sharp was her sister, leaned against the doorpost, watching them both.
As a child Lip-Scar had been forgettably average, marked only by his streak of meanness.
He wasn’t an impressive man either, neither young nor yet properly old, not handsome, not—despite his title—visibly cruel, just…
forgettable. In another life he might have been one of the farmers Rue saw from the river, or the orderly lying by the door.
She tried to hate him but found only guilt. He was owed his grudge, his vengeance.
“Taking…longer this…time,” Rue grunted. She wondered why.
The Cruelty frowned and, holding a hand out before him, slowly made a fist, as if crushing some invisible thing.
Rue felt the black waves roll towards her, made suddenly aware of the ocean she had always been adrift in.
The waves would quench whatever fire the goddess had put into her, and the truth of her wounds would kill her.
As the first pulse of darkness reached her, Rue felt its answer shudder out of her core. Her own blackness rushed out to wrestle with her brother’s, one wave cancelling the other, peak to trough, trough to peak.
With a snarl, the Cruelty drew the thin sword at his side and came forward, his advance more cautious than Rue’s condition deserved.
She might have negated the negation that would have killed her but, weighed down by her wounds, she still couldn’t get off her knees.
The knife at her hip felt out of reach, not that it would match her brother’s sword, even if the strength behind each was equal.
Sharp, meantime, had forgotten about her dinner and returned to her dancing. Her slow twirl carried her towards the Cruelty’s path.
“Don’t…don’t hurt her.” Rue nodded in Sharp’s direction.
Lip-Scar sneered, but as the old woman spun into him he shoved her aside without particular violence. Even so, it was enough to set her staggering, clutching one birdlike arm to her side as if fragile ribs might have broken.
Rue struggled to reach her knife with numbly disobedient fingers.
She caught the hilt in an awkward grip as the Cruelty loomed over her, still too far to reach even if she could have slashed at him with sufficient speed.
Sharp resumed her dance, tottering on the edge of a hip-breaking fall at each turn.
“Mollandra Plight.” Lip-Scar spoke with the soft vowels of Tandra-ah. “You have betrayed every family you ever had. Time to—”
“Ha!” Sharp twirled past, the skirts of her dress flaring out.
Something had sprouted from under the Cruelty’s chin. A dark object…like a handle. As he opened his mouth—shut by the flickering impact a moment before—Rue saw the bloody gleam of the blade whose hilt reached down from beneath his chin.
“No…” Rue raised her hand. Salvation carried no relief. She had deserved what was coming to her. She had betrayed every family she’d ever had. Her brother had deserved his vengeance.
The Cruelty fell to his knees facing Rue, burst veins spreading crimson in the white of his left eye.
His skewered tongue twitched, but whether with threats, regrets, or apology, Rue couldn’t say.
He keeled forward, and for a moment Rue supported her onetime brother against her chest, whispering her own apology, the one she had carried with her for a lifetime.
Then finding new strength and knowing that he stood now beside a river she knew well, Rue pushed him aside and stood as his face hit the floor.
Sharp, executing yet another slow twirl, stopped on catching sight of the fallen man. “The staff here are so lazy…” She looked away. “Is it time for dinner yet?”
Trembling, Rue took her friend’s hand in hers. “How can you still be so fast? You killed him with his own dagger.”
Sharp met her gaze, eyes widening as if registering her presence for the first time. “I’m not fast, silly. We’re old and we’re slow. But I was always faster than you, little Molly. And that’s not going to change.”
“Sharp!” Rue reached for her other hand, finding it heavily bandaged.
“Ouch! Not so rough, Molly.” Sharp pulled the hand away.
“Yes! Molly! I knew you knew me.”
Sharp’s eyes widened in confusion. “I do? I think…Little Molly? You’re one of the ones who work here?” She shook her head. “You’re so dirty. I should tell Maria!”
Rue kept tight hold of Sharp’s good hand.
They’d killed Ambeth and Jayne. It had made her angry.
They’d torched the Vale, and the anger had become a flame.
But this…she wanted to cry. Sharp Mahalla had burned so bright.
She’d been destined to die a glorious death.
She’d been certain to go out in a blaze of hellfire taking a hundred enemies with her, or plummet over an achingly tall waterfall in a boat full of treasure while fucking a prince, or a princess. This wasn’t her. It couldn’t be.
“Come with me.” Rue led her from the room, meaning to avoid the Cruelty’s corpse. As she passed by, though, she both saw and sensed a trembling within Lip-Scar’s body—necromancy’s dark flicker.
Releasing Sharp’s hand, Rue fell to the ground, pinning Lip-Scar’s neck beneath her knee. Dead eyes sought hers as Rue wrenched free the dagger that Sharp had used to kill him.
The dead man’s eyes widened in recognition. His tongue, wounded but released from the knife’s skewer, formed a single word, rough but comprehensible: “You!”
Rue returned the knife, this time through Lip-Scar’s left eye, working the blade to ruin all that lay beyond.
She searched with both her mind and her fingertips, quickly locating in an inner pocket a small piece of the void-beyond-the-river.
She withdrew the jet-black finger bone, wincing at the scalding cold of it, and hastily added it to the one she had taken from Gressa, wrapping the worn strip of leather around both of them.
“Baron Mancer has a long reach…” Rue got to her feet, slower on the ascent than on the descent. She looked down at Lip-Scar, surprised at the deep, hollow ache in her chest. He looked older now she’d killed him. “I’m sorry.” Too late. Too little.
Sharp had gone into the hall and was peering through the front doorway at the burly servant who lay just outside with his head reaching in across the doorstep. Rue took Sharp’s hand again and steered her in the opposite direction, towards the double doors at the far end of the corridor.
“I was dancing!” Sharp protested every step of the way. “I don’t want your muddy paws on me! Let go!”
As Rue pushed into the room at the end of the hall they met two women coming the other way.
Both of them appeared to be orderlies, wearing a similar uniform to the man who had opened the front door with his face.
The room itself was a lounge of sorts. A score of stained armchairs were scattered across a floor thick with rugs, as if abandoned by some giant child who’d been in the act of playing house.
Half a dozen were occupied by old women, several of them asleep in their outmoded finery, brooches and feathers, silver chains and poorly applied rouge, all signs of futile attempts to cling to the glamorous lives that had abandoned them.
“Senna really did bring me to an old bird’s nest,” Rue muttered. “Or a nest of old birds.”
One of the two orderlies planted herself in their way. She opened her mouth to speak.
“You!” Rue stole the woman’s thunder, replacing any questioning with her own demand for an explanation. “What’s going on here?” She had meant to ask a better question but found when the time came to make the words that she had nothing more useful to say.
Perhaps it was only that the light was better inside and that the two orderlies could properly read the warnings written over every inch of Rue, the ones their colleague in the doorway had had the misfortune to miss.
Or perhaps they were better judges of character.
Either way, despite the fact that both clearly wanted to have their muddy intruder swiftly ejected, they made as nice as they could.
The younger, blunt-faced woman, whose bristling hair reminded Rue of a hedgehog, closed the door behind them, while the older one addressed Sharp with apparent concern.
“Lady Mahalla, are you all right?”
“Maria!” Sharp put her hands dramatically over her heart. “I’m so hungry! What has Anton prepared for lunch?”
For a moment the woman seemed too astonished to reply. “Maria left us some years ago, Lady Mahalla. I’m Cheva. And Anton is making stew for dinner.”
“Stew?” Sharp’s face fell. She noticed Rue beside her and blinked in surprise before rallying herself. “Do you like stew…Muddy? It is Muddy, isn’t it?”
“Molly,” Rue said.
“Gulla, take Lady Mahalla to her chair, please.” As Rue reluctantly released Sharp into the care of the chunky young orderly, Cheva looked her up and down with a disapproving eye.
“I don’t know who you are, and I do know you’re not supposed to be here, but you seem to have had a remarkable effect on Lady Mahalla. ”
“I make her worse?”
“Worse?” The woman’s brows lifted. “She hadn’t spoken for a year. Catatonia of the old, our doctor called it. Then a couple of days ago she said something that upset the other ladies, and she got up out of that chair she’s been sat in most every day since she arrived here, and…”