Chapter 37
Rue
Sharp stood in the gardens of the mansion in which she’d been left to rot alongside a few dozen old women whose wits had leaked from their ageing skulls. The rapier she’d claimed from the dead Cruelty was now levelled at Rue’s heart.
“You don’t want to kill me, Sharp.” Rue felt this was probably untrue but decided it was worth saying even so.
“I’m very angry with you.” Sharp’s anger had always been a scary thing to witness, and from the pointed end of her blade it proved considerably worse.
“I had to leave.” Rue hadn’t been fully trained to use the powers of a Cruelty, but the Ingredient, the black remnant of Megaera’s earthly form that her parents had hidden in their food, still laced her flesh.
In the past she had made people forget inconvenient truths or remember helpful lies.
Grievances, though, seemed to thrive on the power rather than be erased by it.
It appeared that the Cruelty had inadvertently woken the memory of their falling-out more than thirty years previously.
“I couldn’t stay. You know that. Nothing we were doing was right. None of it was for us.”
“You shouldn’t have run. We would have protected you.” Sharp moved with terrifying swiftness, the point of her sword pricking the soft hollow of Rue’s throat. “We. Were. Sisters.”
Rue felt the old anger catching light. “You! Wouldn’t! Listen!”
“We were a three. You gave me your coin, Mollandra. How could you walk out and leave us to die?” Sharp held the blade steady, the tremor in her voice not reaching her hand.
“You could have given it back and asked me to stay. You knew I was going to go, but you didn’t do that.” Rue closed her fingers around the blade. “And the Cruelties didn’t move on the Academy because I quit our trio. That was years later.”
Senna flapped over them, cawing.
“That your crow?” Sharp’s gaze stayed locked on Rue.
“Sort of.”
Senna cawed her outrage.
“It’s stupid.”
“Agreed.”
“I’m angry with you.” Confusion crept into Sharp’s eyes. “I don’t remember…yes! You abandoned us. We were the three who are one. You abandoned both of us.”
“I’m sorry.” Rue really was sorry, though she would do it again.
“I’m sorry too.” The steel bit deeper. “But there are rules. Lore. I have to kill you now.”
Rue could see a new clarity in Sharp’s vision.
She was a heartbeat from death. Three at most. She forced the darkness to flow.
Since the Cruelty had killed her it had become easier to release what they had put in her.
Not as easy as biting off your own finger, but easier than it had become over the years as age wrapped itself around her.
She couldn’t dull the memory of Sharp’s grievance against her.
This power was Megaera’s, and the keeper of old grudges would not suffer such a trick to be played with her mastery of memories and time.
Instead, Rue woke within Sharp an older need for revenge, a desire for retribution that ten years of instruction had long ago twisted into a kind of love for the Academy and all its creed.
Rue took hold of the hatred they had once shared for the Academy and the horrors it had inflicted on them.
She grasped it in both hands and set it on fire, overwriting Sharp’s current anger.
“Oh, those fuckers…” Sharp lowered her sword. “We should go and get them.”
“I think most of them have already been got. But let’s give it a go.” Rue turned and set off back towards the river.
“I’m still angry with you too,” Sharp said, following. “Whatever your name is. But…”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Rue replied over her shoulder.
“Bugger that,” Sharp spat. “But you kill the biggest bastard first. That’s what they taught us.”
Senna waited for them perched on the prow of the skiff.
“It’s going to be cosy,” she croaked.
“Won’t be for long.” Rue took the tie rope, ready to pull the boat back into the water. “Chaim City’s, what? Twenty miles downriver? I need to find this Minor Remon, and I can’t just leave Sharp to wander.”
“Who and who?” Senna croaked.
“Her.” Rue nodded to Sharp, who was still standing at the edge of the grass, prodding the mud ahead of her with the Cruelty’s sword. “And some bureaucrat who, conveniently, works for the very baron I plan to prune from the nobility.”
“Why see this bookkeeper?” Senna asked.
“She’s the one who put Sharp in that place.”
“What’s she going to do with a demented old biddy?” Senna asked. “Didn’t she put her there so they could keep an eye on her instead of having to do it herself?”
“Well…” Rue didn’t like where the conversation was heading. “Just come over, Sharp. It’s only mud. It doesn’t bite!” She looked back at the crow. “Well, I want to know why…”
“Because she’s lost her wits. Happened to Bessy Grain, you remember?
Her son let her roam, and people kept bringing her back, until they didn’t.
Probably fell into a river or some such.
It’s a kindness really or you’ll just end up trying to spoon food into them quicker’n they can drool it out again.
Keep ’em too long and you’ve got an oversized, wrinkled old baby whose arse you have to wipe. You should just let this one—”
Senna took off with a squawk, leaving a feather spiralling where Rue’s fist passed. Everything the bird said was true, for all that Senna had been an old biddy herself and prone to mixing up the names of her grandchildren. “She’s getting better!” Rue shouted. “They said I’m making her better!”
“Who is?” Sharp climbed barefoot into the moonlit skiff, her shoes and stockings sucked off her by the mud.
“Sounds like she should stay with you then rather than some minor demon!” Senna cawed overhead.
Sharp sat in the skiff while Rue squelched around in search of her footwear. She started to sing some children’s rhyme about row-row-rowing your boat, all the while tapping out the rhythm on the gunwale with the blade of her sword.
“She can’t stay with me.” Rue tossed both shoes and the lone stocking she had been able to find into the boat, all of them thick with mud.
With a grunt of effort she tried to shove the loaded skiff into the water.
It seemed easier than negotiating Sharp back out of it again.
Fortunately, the skiff shifted. She splashed after it through the icy water, got in, took hold of the pole, and manoeuvred them into the current.
“I’m cold.” Sharp sniffed.
Rue realized she should have brought blankets from the mansion’s parlour.
“Bring me my slippers. And some candles. It’s terribly dark in here.”
“We’re in a boat, Sharp.” Rue kept her voice soft, suddenly overburdened with sympathy for her friend’s confusion, hurt constricting her throat and prickling at her eyes.
“You might be. I’m certainly not. I don’t like boats at all.” Sharp looked around as if the starlight were insufficient to break the night’s blindness for her. “And my feet are cold.”
“We’ll find somewhere,” Rue promised. “Somewhere with a bed.”
“One bed? I’m not sharing,” Sharp declared. The shiver in her voice could have been cold or revulsion. “You’re very old. So no thank you. Not even in the dark, with a bag on your head.”
Rue barked a laugh. Age might have blunted Sharp’s mind, but her tongue still had edges. “Two beds, Sharp dear. Two beds.”
Rue kept them on the river for a couple of hours, enough to put some space between her and the corpses left in their wake.
She focused on the water, cautious in the dark, letting Sharp’s complaints and musings flow over her.
She wanted to ask questions. Questions about who had survived and who hadn’t.
Which of her few friends had been moved into the “lost” column, and which, if any, remained in play.
But Sharp’s answers couldn’t be trusted and wouldn’t help one way or the other.
For a while Sharp pretended to read her book despite there not being the light for it, talking all the while. The book turned out, disappointingly, to be a copy of the Creed, probably illegal now and liable to get the owner burned along with it.
Sharp’s rambling discourse resurrected acolytes who had been dead forty years and more, touching off memories Rue had been glad to forget.
It seemed that her friend’s years-long catatonia had been replaced by something very different, the deep pools of her mind stirred up by the Cruelty’s power and Rue’s answer to it.
Her discourse never followed a single path for long, though often it would cycle round the same two or three questions many times, as if the passage of a few hundred yards of riverbank had wiped the fact she’d already asked them from her mind.
New memories, observations, and points of discussion bubbled up periodically, given voice as they appeared in Sharp’s broken thoughts.
It was as if someone had shattered the woman Rue had known and thrown the pieces into a boiling pot in whose churn they would appear without sense or order.
“It’s funny but sad,” Senna said from her place on the prow, an ill-omened figurehead.
“Mostly sad.” Rue watched her friend, the planes of her face caught by starlight, back straight, head erect, still holding on desperately to her pride, to her dignity, amid the confusion.
“Mostly sad.” She let out a long slow breath, willing the hurt to leave with it.
How did this happen? How did we get like this?
she wanted to ask but would not, because it was too clichéd, the answer too obvious.
They had met as children, and the years had washed over them, and somehow, against all odds, they were still here.
And wasn’t that what every old person thought and felt?
A constant astonishment at the change around them, and at the change inside, just as swift and just as thorough, and at the things that had not changed—those most of all left the bittersweet cuts on the soul.