Chapter 39
Rue
Rue and Sharp stood over the unconscious chamberlain whose name they had both forgotten.
The iron-bound door that had resisted the man’s involuntary headlong charge remained closed and locked.
If this “Minor Remon” who had organized Sharp’s care at the mansion by the Wentwash was inside, they were showing no inclination of opening up for unannounced visitors.
“Where are we?” Sharp looked around speculatively.
“Baron Mancer’s keep.”
“Why?”
Experience had taught Rue that if she answered enough of Sharp’s questions she would find herself back at the start, repeating the cycle.
“I’m not entirely sure myself. I suppose I was hoping that if I murdered him I’d feel a bit better about the whole dying business.
I’m not so sure I will, but I’m still ready to give it a try. ”
Sharp nodded thoughtfully. “It’s quite clean.”
“When did you start worrying about dirt, Sharp?” The old Sharp…the young one…had never been so fastidious.
“Tmanga said it was a whatchamacallit—a metaphor—for guilt. The whole clean…thing.” Sharp mimed washing her withered hands.
“Oh, so you remember Tmanga all of a sudden?”
“Who?”
The doors to the main corridor opened, saving Rue from answering. Five figures blocked the doorway, two guardsmen still pushing the doors wide, two black-clad men with crossbows trained on the women, both wearing black leather face masks, and in the middle, a slight individual in a blue robe.
“My name is Minor Remon,” the robed figure said in a voice that sounded neither male nor female, a crop of short black hair steered Rue towards male, but the band of embroidered gauze bound across their eyes was a more delicate touch. Smooth skin and the absence of grey put them in their thirties.
“I remember you!” Sharp pointed at the Minor.
Rue puffed dismissively. “You don’t remember what we ate for breakfast.”
“I do!” Sharp insisted. “Bacon. And this Minor person…I remember.”
“It was porridge, and the Minor here put you in the place I found you—”
“No, before that! I remember…”
Minor Remon raised a hand to indicate that they should proceed along the corridor before them. “The baron will see you now.”
“I was going to speak with you first, then move on to the baron,” Rue said. “Why are you paying Sharp’s board at that rather elegant graveyard by the river?”
“I’m afraid that the baron’s business claims precedence over any other.” Minor Remon gestured again to the corridor, inviting Rue and Sharp to precede the escort.
Rue shrugged. “It is his keep, I suppose. We’ll talk later, young…Minor.”
She took Sharp’s hand and led her from the room.
The armour of the Kindnesses had ever been their reputation.
The order produced dangerous warriors and assassins, but, apart from a small number of well-documented cases, it did not make them superhuman.
It was the fear that they might turn out to own extraordinary powers that had kept every common guardsman, roaming knight, or local bravo from unloading a crossbow into the back of a Kindness’s neck.
Also, the certain knowledge that even if it worked, many more Kindnesses would soon arrive seeking vengeance.
Walking in front of the Minor’s crossbowmen, with the Minor bringing up the rear, Rue knew that such protections had long ago worn thin.
Senna rocked quietly on Rue’s shoulder, ignoring several chances to fly away through high windows.
She appeared to have more faith in Rue than Rue herself did.
Rue had no great plan for besting a mighty lord in the heart of his domain.
All she knew was that she had nothing left in the world that she wanted to do more, no person that she would rather die beside than Sharp, and an arrogance born of a life which, while hardly charmed, had shown her many opportunities to depart it over the years and yet still couldn’t shake her.
“Where are we going?” Sharp asked.
“To a reckoning, Sharp dear. To a reckoning.”
“A reckoning?” Sharp clapped and grinned, and a spark of her old fire lit her eyes. “Oh, I like those!”
Rue walked through the great halls and chambers of the baron’s keep, not needing to be directed.
The path to power announced itself in the grandeur of the doorways and the width of the staircases.
She wondered if these would be her last steps.
If her body would be carried from the place, discarded with Sharp’s as so much garbage, old bones for the rats.
It felt a small end to what had been at times a large life, the path behind her at once both achingly long and shockingly short.
She remembered the woman beside her as a wild-eyed child, and surely it had been only yesterday.
But there had been so many yesterdays. Enough to drown in. And so many had drowned.
“You never once met a kind person,” Senna crooned by her ear, the soft warbling that crows reserve for when they are among their own.
“Bek was kind,” Rue muttered, thinking it an odd conversation to have with a crow at any time, more so when the crow was Senna Weaver, and especially so when they were marching towards what was commonly known as “certain doom.” None of the others seemed aware that the bird’s talking was anything but meaningless noise.
“From a grown person. You never once had a drop of proper kindness in your life from the people who should have given it to you.”
“What would you know?” Rue muttered, even now embarrassed to be thought mad, even by the people who were going to kill her.
“I’ve flown back and forth from death to life. You think I can’t fly to other places? To other times? I watched you at that academy. The day you entered. The day you left. The years between.”
Rue gave her passenger a sideways glance.
The crow’s eyes had turned to a luminous hazy grey.
She felt that she remembered those eyes, though she couldn’t say from where or from when.
It no longer sounded like Senna, or rather it did, but a different Senna, one who might have been but never was.
Rue supposed that everyone, including herself, was just the might-have-been that got to be.
She’d often wished to be someone else, which was, she understood, a foolish wish.
But to be herself but different—that held meaning, it could have happened, given a different life.
“You can fly through time now?” Rue hissed.
“It’s not so hard. Maybe every crow can. We can’t change it, though. Nothing can.”
“Good.”
“Good?” Senna croaked.
“If it could be changed it wouldn’t ever mean anything.”
“What would you say to her?” Senna crooned. “To Mollandra back then. Back in the crow tower?”
Rue shrugged. “If it couldn’t change things, why say anything at all?”
Senna made no reply.
“I’d tell her what she knows already. To fight.
To never give in. To protect her friends because she won’t have many, and to avenge them when they’re gone.
I’d tell her that she’ll never be rid of the anger they put in her.
So, she might as well use it. I’d…” Rue pressed her lips together, remembering when she had heard her own words across the gulf of time.
Senna had been right. It hadn’t changed anything.
The bird on her shoulder cocked its head at her and its eyes darkened, returning to normal. Rue tried to imagine who might truly be watching her through those twin drops of midnight. Was the crow still in there? Did the Morrigan watch too?
“You watched me? All those years?” Rue didn’t know how she felt about that.
If Senna wasn’t lying, then the crow had seen more of her childhood than any of her parents, the false and the true.
There had always been crows at the Academy: the place stank like a charnel pit.
A single crow could have watched her unobserved from among the many, following through all the days of her life.
At least they could have once she’d wriggled out of the mansion’s chimney, born back into the world, soot-black and full of terror.
What had happened beneath that roof was beyond even Senna’s vision, shared only with those who had suffered beside her.
“Sharp and Tmanga were bad friends,” Senna said.
Sharp was glancing at the crow now, not seeming to understand what was being said but made curious by its warbling.
Once, Rue would have defended Sharp and Tmanga vehemently, and later, she might have agreed with Senna’s judgement. Now she saw both sides. “They were as good as they knew how to be.”
“You deserved more.”
And Rue, who always had a sharp answer for pity and had been marching clear-eyed towards her death, faltered beneath the weight of this simple truth.
The soft pain in her chest, so different from any wound, made her throat constrict, her voice tremble, as if she were a child instead of an old woman, harder than nails. She gathered herself. “Fuck you.”
At last, they reached tall doors scrolled with elaborate ironwork, guarded by so many swords that only the baron could wait beyond.
They would die with, or at the hands of, this stranger.
There could be no escape. Rue wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Was it better to fall to a stranger? Live long enough and strangers were all that were left…
The doors opened noiselessly on oiled hinges, and once more Rue was striding unopposed into a seat of earthly power, facing a ruler beneath their own roof.
The old days echoed in her footfalls. Perhaps to the callow youths arrayed in the finery of their master’s armour standing around the pillared chamber, it seemed that two old women had hobbled into view.
But perhaps they would learn today that although age might twist people in its grip, that too might be an ordeal that, like the work of the Academy, revealed strength.
Sharp tugged at her sleeve. “I need the privy.”
Or perhaps not.
“Watch for the sorcerer,” Rue told Sharp without great hope.