Chapter 41
Rue
“Eldest.” Milk-Eye nodded her acknowledgement of Rue.
“When Mother dealt the baron his hand in the game—forced it on him really”—she circled her left wrist with the fingers of the right as if to pinch it off—“it was in order that he use it to seize power. I am impressed that you turned his own hand against him so effectively.”
Mention of Mother put a chill into Rue. She wanted to ask how long ago this plan had been laid, how long ago the baron had been maimed. Mother had been dead for many years, surely?
She felt snared now in a way that even Milk-Eye’s appearance hadn’t made her feel. There were plans here decades and more in the making…“You! You put Sharp in that place!”
“A lure for you, Eldest. You were a long time coming. I’d lost faith that you would. I thought you’d abandoned your new family as completely as your old one.”
“You’re so young.” This talk of new and old had brought Milk-Eye’s age into focus.
“So many years thrown away…” Without time’s tether the girl was a floating point, trapped in an endless now.
Rue had cursed her age more in the last few days than in the previous ten years, her weakness highlighted at every turn.
But without the foundation of memory she wouldn’t have cared about Jayne or Ambeth or even known Sharp or felt the bonds they’d earned after the Academy.
“You threw us all away, Eldest. All our years.” The woman, who Rue recognized only from the peculiarity that had named her, sneered. “What do you care whether we keep our years or cast them aside?”
The truth of it lay beyond words. She could say that she had also been a child.
That both of them were victims. That if Milk-Eye had held tight to her experience, then age would have taught her perspective too.
But there was no home for these words behind those mismatched eyes, so Rue answered with a question.
“If Sharp was bait, who was watching her?”
Sharp, hearing her name, looked up in confusion, no recognition in her face. “Me?”
“Who was watching her?” Rue continued. “And why didn’t they close the trap?”
Milk-Eye nodded to the masked figures left and right, only now starting to stand, having rid their minds of the echoes of the baron’s death.
Concentrating on the pair, Rue could now sense beneath the damping shield traces of the bones they carried, the baron’s fingers, linking them to his corpse.
She sensed the Ingredient in them too—a new generation of Cruelties.
“When they saw you were heading in the right direction, they followed you here. No need to step in. You were in the baron’s grasp for a long time before you…broke it.”
Milk-Eye watched her, half-amused. Savouring the moment. Watching different levels of understanding surface on Rue’s face.
Rue needed help and she knew it. Without Sharp she had no chance at all. Even if she were to regain her friend, a three-legged donkey in a thoroughbred race would have better odds. But at least she wouldn’t feel she was dying alone, unwitnessed.
Megaera’s poison, whatever it was they’d fed Rue—scavenged from the Fury’s earthly remains—had allowed her presence to stir Sharp’s depths, bringing her partway out of the catatonia that age had mired her in.
But she needed more and she had never been trained in the subtleties of that power.
Rue had fled too young to learn the Cruelties’ craft.
She needed something more than the ability to dredge memory from the darkness or press it back into black oblivion.
In the face of this disease, that was too blunt a weapon.
She needed something…sharp. Something personal and so deep that it would bring up with it the delicate webs of recollection that constituted her friend’s being.
“I’m sorry, Sharp…” Rue moved to her friend’s side. “But I need you.”
Sharp’s confusion deepened. “It must be time for dinner by now. Where’s Maria?”
Rue pushed forward with the darkness even now unwrapping from her bones. She needed an arrowhead, though. Something to pierce deep and open the way.
“Matrin Smith.” She whispered the name, just as Sharp herself had whispered the man’s name at seventeen when she shared her deepest and most secret hurts a lifetime ago and a world away.
A soft cry of hurt escaped the old woman, and she staggered. Rue caught her arm, pouring in Megaera’s power.
“Matrin Smith.” Rue spat the name now. “Remember how we killed him? The three of us?”
“I…” Sharp straightened. “I do.” Her face hardened. Her gaze became focused. She shook her arm free.
“I remember this one.” Sharp stepped past Rue, pointing with her sword at Milk-Eye.
“I told you that I knew her! The eye-girl. Came to our dormitory with a bunch of stabby children.” Sharp nodded.
“I burned them all up. We threw them off the wall. Down where the shit goes. She ran away. Now she’s back to finish it. ”
How much she’d been able to restore to Sharp, Rue had no idea, but she clearly had more of her friend with her than she had moments before. Rue narrowed her gaze at Milk-Eye. “Sharp’s right? That’s what this is about?”
Milk-Eye looked surprised, as if she hadn’t imagined that there would ever be any doubt about that, of all things. Somewhere far away a bell began to toll, though whether to raise the alarm or to note the baron’s passing, Rue didn’t know.
“Of course that’s what this is about. You might have grown old and forgotten what you did to us.
You might have hidden yourself away in some pigsty village and played nice with the peasants.
But I didn’t, we didn’t, the ones you left behind.
Father and Mother taught us all about memory, sister.
We forget our years but never the wounds we’re dealt. ”
Beside Milk-Eye, the masked Cruelties had recovered and brought their crossbows to bear once more.
Rue knew she should have attacked when they were weak, but somehow she didn’t think Milk-Eye had nursed this grudge for half a century only to end it with a bolt to the stomach. She’d want a more personal revenge.
To Rue’s despair, her own backup, Sharp, seemed to have forgotten about Milk-Eye and the others entirely. Instead of watching them, she stared at her reflection in the various mirrors around the walls, swaying this way and that for a better angle.
One of the crossbow men, with exaggerated motions, drew a bead on Rue’s head.
“Kill me, then. If that’s what you’re here for.
” Rue raised her eyebrows at the man aiming his weapon and touched a fingertip to her forehead, daring him to loose the bolt.
She snorted at the thought they might call her bluff.
Sharp, thinking the same thing, or perhaps remembering a joke from thirty years ago, laughed, sounding unaccountably young.
“Time hasn’t healed me.” Time had told her that truth itself.
Something as small as a slap could echo through decades.
Rue knew there had never been any chance to recover from what they did to her.
“I am what they made me.” She caught sight of herself in one of the mirrors on the wall: a used-up old woman, or in the next moment, a queen on her throne of bones, and a heartbeat later, both at once.
She would have liked to meet the Molly who might have grown into the old woman she’d been pretending to be.
But that was another life, another Earth, another story.
“I’m a toxin, a wound in the world…” Time had soured her rather than healing.
Rue knew herself a crack that ran through things, breaking them.
That same crack had run from her, through her children, fracturing any love before it flowered.
She met Milk-Eye’s fierce regard. “Kill me, then. Lip-Scar knew how to do it. There’s nothing but old magic and stubbornness holding me together. ”
“That would be too easy. They call us Cruelties after all. First we destroy what you love. Your precious peasants. Their dung and straw huts. Your friends—” She raised her hand and one of the crossbows jolted with the release of its bolt.
Sharp, whose swaying fascination with the mirrors had yet to cease, flinched only when the bolt shattered on a pillar behind her.
“Ouch!” Her hand went to the crimson rawness where the very top of her left ear had been. Her cry, more one of outrage than of pain, coincided with Rue’s own strangled “No!”
If Rue hadn’t seen Sharp in so many fights, she might have imagined it an improbable accident and dismissed the idea that any human could dodge a crossbow’s bolt.
As the second crossbowman raised his weapon to his shoulder, she knew with grim certainty that such overconfidence would not be repeated, and that even in her prime Sharp could not have sidestepped a chest shot at such short range.
Desperation can flower in a heartbeat. A prayer, as long as it is wordless, can be thrown nearly as swiftly. Rue found herself gripped by unexpected terror.
Almost before the bucking of the second bow, Sharp staggered backwards, clutching her side. “Oh, you cunts!”
The first of the masked Cruelties closed on her and, having underestimated Sharp for the second time, found himself impaled on her blade.
He stepped back, blood jetting from the wound in his chest, and collapsed to his knees.
For her part, Sharp straightened and with an oath pulled out a small black book from her waistband.
A single lazy drop of blood fell from the tip of the bolt protruding from the back cover.
“The Creed?” Rue shook her head. “You’re trying to tell me the fucking Creed saved your life?
” She felt the Morrigan’s hand all over this.
The intervention she had begged for in one broken moment, made wordless promises for.
But the Creed, though bound in leather and thick with hypocrisy, was surely insufficient to arrest the death that had so pointedly rushed towards Sharp’s vitals.