Chapter 41 #2
Sharp, still holding her sword out before her at arm’s length, gave a wild laugh and shook the book open. The bolt also transfixed the bronze mark that she had kept sandwiched within the pages. The coin Rue had given her a lifetime ago.
The second of the masked Cruelties closed on Sharp, more cautious than his friend, who chose that moment to complete his journey to the ground. Sharp, perhaps focused by the pain or the remnants of whatever luck the Morrigan had bestowed on her, squared herself to meet his advance.
Rue had seen Sharp bested with the knife as a child.
Only by Wenda, though. And Wenda had been something of a phenomenon with a short edge.
Rue had killed her by seizing her moment rather than through dagger skill.
With a sword, though, particularly a long, light blade, Rue had never seen Sharp’s equal.
Tmanga had been right: life would not present any of them with many duels, neat little contests on level ground where a honed skill could shine. But Sharp had waited for a long, long time, and here was a duel.
Blades touched, a ringing engagement, the young man’s boots scraping the floor as he sought position. Sharp, for her part, stayed still. Her blade might gleam but her skill lay as rusty as her strength. She turned the Cruelty’s query aside, understanding as she did so quite how much she had lost.
She stepped back, holding up her left hand, long fingers bloody.
Still straight, but withered. “I was never meant to grow old. It’s a cosmic joke.
Look at me!” A glance at Rue. “What happened to us, Molly?” She beat down the attack the Cruelty launched as she turned her head, not even looking at him.
“Don’t toy with him,” Rue advised. “He’ll wear you out.”
“Him?” She flashed her teeth. “We can keep his mask after he’s done. Might come in handy. Better than a bag on your head in any case.”
The Cruelty came on, fast and fierce and measured, natural skill evident on top of years of practice. Sharp contained him with taps, with tricks, with experience, with the memory in old muscles, never once showing the breath-stealing speed that had won her fame.
She faltered, flesh unequal to the demands she made upon it, and he cut her, slicing through the expensive dress from elbow to shoulder, cutting rich brocade, plush velvet, pale skin. If it had been her sword arm that would have been the finish.
Sharp swore, filthy as ever, “Whore’s teats!
” But even as blood soaked her sleeve she didn’t advance, didn’t hurry.
She anticipated his feints, anticipated his pride, killed him when, for just a moment, he overreached.
He didn’t die then, of course, but the cut tipped the scales, the second and third tipped them further, and the fourth spilled their contents across the floor.
“Ewww.” Sharp had always complained about the messes she made. Guts most of all.
Milk-Eye raised a brow. The two guardsmen who had helped escort Rue and Sharp from the Minor’s office had slipped away while Sharp was killing the Cruelties.
“The training lacks its old bite since Father…left us, but I still would have bet on Jasper or Samd to take down this dried-out old stick. When I left her in that place, she could barely feed herself…” She smiled, a cruel thing that Rue felt had been made for her, perhaps crafted over years.
“Still, what’s been given can be taken away. ”
Milk-Eye extended her arm, hand clawed, and the darkness pulsed.
Rue felt her wounds twinge with wakefulness, growing damp with their lust for life, even though she wasn’t the target.
Sharp crumpled, as if every drop of the vigour that had animated her was now spilling from her faster than the blood from her arm, faster than the guts that Jasper or Samd still grasped at had slithered from what was left of his belly.
“That’s more how I remember you.” Milk-Eye deployed the razor of her smile once more.
Sharp, trembling and vacant now, clutched her sword with both hands as if it were all that kept her upright. She panted, cheeks hollow, lips bent around her gums as if she were toothless.
Rue stepped towards her friend with empty hands.
“Stay where you are!” Milk-Eye shouted. The blackness—unseen and all the darker for it—pulsed around her fingers, and the pain of the wounds that the Morrigan’s curse, or blessing, had kept at bay blossomed through Rue, staggering her.
Milk-Eye advanced on Sharp, ignoring her fellow Cruelties, the dead and the dying. “You want to help her? Her? Where were you when we needed you, Eldest?”
Somehow the weight of that name, Eldest, was harder to carry than all the hurting of her flesh.
She had traded “Eldest” for “Mollandra,” or perhaps reclaimed it, but she’d worn the name “Rue” far longer than any other.
She had taken it in place of the mourning she had found herself unequal to and had instead worn her grief as a name.
“Don’t hurt her!”
And though Milk-Eye sneered, thinking it was Sharp that Rue sought to protect, in truth she meant both of them, both of them right now, and both of them as children torn from their innocence.
“Don’t hurt her!”
Milk-Eye held her sword ready now, understanding that Sharp’s threat lay in her limbs as much as her mind, knowing that the fog in which the woman drowned could still be parted by the hooks of muscle memory, allowing sudden danger to emerge.
The younger woman closed on the older one as one might disarm a trap, the mechanism understood but filled with coiled potency that would punish any slip in concentration.
A crow’s caw rang out in Baron Mancer’s hall: Senna, forgotten on her perch upon the bust above the door. The cry came again, dark and bitter and old as winter. It shivered through Rue, shaking thoughts and memories loose from their moorings.
Recollection bore down upon Rue to add to the weight of her names, to the burden of her pain and of the years and of the guilt that hung about her neck.
There had been a garden, a night garden, never seen and yet it had held their hearts.
Toadstools in the dark, decorated with spring’s petals: Tune’s gift to them.
Known only by fingertips. Such a small thing, so tawdry and inconsequential, yet so precious to three children drowning in their pain.
“Don’t. Hurt. Her.”
Memory beat at her. There had been a three, forged in the sharing of hardships and horror and the banter of young girls and sealed in an exchange of secret weaknesses around a great tongue that might toll but never tell. “Don’t…”
The cause that had brought Rue to this ruin, an accounting for old new friends, for Jayne and Ambeth, was both true and a lie.
She had held them dear, but those bonds were echoes of older, deeper ties that bound bone to bone, heart to soul.
The twists and turns of a childhood might be random, windborne chance, petty, predictable, unspecial, freighted with neither destiny nor grand design…
but these had been her twists and turns.
Fate had furnished her with Sharp and Tmanga.
At the beat of a sparrow’s wings she might have found other friends, a different life…
She had not. The Furies, the Morrigan, every shadow and reflection of the triple-goddess could go hang. This was her holy. This her faith.
She straightened, shrugging off the pain through no magic but her own fire.
“No!” Her denial shivered through the hall, making a dance of every flame.
As she turned, Rue now wore her curse black across her face, a crow’s wings spread wide, the whites of her eyes bright in the darkness that curled around the sides of her head. She stood, reflected in many mirrors, hardly knowing in that moment which of them might be her true self.
Milk-Eye held Sharp’s gaze now, covering with one hand the old fingers wrapped around her sword hilt, and with the other, aiming her blade at the Kindness’s heart.
Rue ran her fingers into the grey nest of her hair, and in the slow pulling of both hands down across the time-ravaged ruin of her face, she drew forth the poison she’d been fed.
The gift, the curse, the Ingredient. Particles of a fallen goddess, or at least the body that the goddess had worn during many lifetimes of men.
The Ingredient that had stayed so stubbornly within her as a child was easy to release now.
All that had ever been required was to understand its power—that it was a strength in and of itself, a sprinkling of divinity.
Power is hard to surrender at the best of times.
In the worst of times most would sooner shrug off their skins than relinquish the strength that might save them.
That was the hard part. Not the tearing of its eidolons from her mind.
The Ingredient had been impossible to reject as a child, but now she knew its power, the physical act was easy: it was the sacrifice that was hard.
Rue flung it from her in two handfuls. What struck Sharp held memory and purpose and one small but vital blind spot.
What struck Milk-Eye carried forgetting.
Both of them fell back, crying out in shock. Milk-Eye to her knees in the blood of her brothers.
“The hell?” Sharp looked up, bright-eyed, the black of the Ingredient sinking beneath her pale skin, running into her eyes like tears uncried.
Without the trace that already lay within her from that day far back in their childhood, Sharp would not have withstood the invasion.
But what she had once consumed, combined with the long years in between, now acted as a lodestone, drawing the rest within.
She would never wield this power as one raised on it by degrees through a mockery of a childhood, but even this small fragment of the mind of Megaera would brook no unchosen forgetting.
The trace had sustained her even in the depths of her disease.
It had echoed with Rue’s approach, returning some faculty, and now Sharp stood returned, as if dementia, that cruel goddess, had never once laid a finger upon her.
Sharp looked around her, at the bloody sword in her hand, at the dead men by her feet, the baron broken on the steps of his dais.
Her confusion was no longer that of a crumbling mind but of a sleeper waking to inexplicable discoveries.
Not once did her swinging gaze catch on Rue.
Nor did it find Milk-Eye, who rested on all fours now, still struggling with the invasion of her mind.
Sharp, blind to the presence of Rue and the surviving Cruelty, and feeling the pull of the purpose Rue had thrust upon her, strode towards the throne, her energy at odds with her age-wrought delicacy. She tore the golden chain of office from Baron Mancer’s neck, pausing to study the sigil.
Armed with new information, plus a source of funds, she walked towards the main doors.
Sharp passed both Milk-Eye and Rue without a glance, and though Milk-Eye raised her head as the Kindness swept by, she saw nothing.
Rue had made strangers of the two of them, removing each from the other’s consideration and expunging them from their memories of the day.
They could live as so many in the city did, separate yet together, wrapped in their own lives and blind to almost all they shared the streets with.
At the entrance through which they’d so recently come, Sharp paused, remembering her wound, and bound her arm with cloth torn from her skirts.
She stood for a long moment, hunting the pillared hall for something, staring through Rue and through Milk-Eye as the woman struggled to her feet.
Seeing nothing, Sharp shrugged, frowned, and carried on her way, pushing her sword through the belt of her dress, smearing the costly fabric with crimson.
Before vanishing down the corridor she began, improbably, to whistle.
Rue had placed in her old friend the imperative to seek out any surviving Kindnesses and use her new ability to sense the approach of Cruelties to protect them.
So, by most standards, Sharp was off to a particularly bad start, walking away from a much-weakened example of what she was to safeguard.
But Rue only smiled as the echoes of Sharp’s tune died into the distance.
By reducing both Sharp and Milk-Eye to blurs on the periphery of the other, Rue had saved them from each other, at least for now. Leaving just her to pay the price.
“What did you do?” Milk-Eye stared around in suspicion. “You did something.”
Sick as she already was with the Ingredient, Milk-Eye was far less susceptible to the manipulations Rue had used on Sharp. Apart from blinding her to Sharp’s presence, Rue’s sacrifice had only added to Milk-Eye’s power. And the burning eye she now turned on Rue held not an ounce of gratitude.