Chapter 42
Rue
“You left us.” Every rigid angle echoed the accusation. Milk-Eye hunched against an old unhealed pain, ready to strike. “You left me.”
“I’m not a good person.” Rue kept all passion from her voice. “I never have been.”
“I was there. Right below you!” In her face the desperation of that child could be seen, there among the lines experience had drawn. “You could have reached down.”
“And I didn’t.” Rue would sully neither her own tongue nor Milk-Eye’s ears with the word “sorry.” Instead, she opened her arms, showing her wounds and her blood. “But I’m here now, and you should strike your blow.”
When she was young, when she had been Eldest and Mollandra, Rue had imagined that as you grew old, as your grip on life began to loosen, nail by nail, finger by finger, it would become easier to let go.
Pain would become a blurry thing, just as vision failed and taste dulled.
The truth was that death had always seemed an approaching fire, and whatever a person’s age they felt that heat and struggled all the more as it drew closer.
Rue, in spreading her arms before Milk-Eye’s blow, hadn’t lightly surrendered the tail end of a long life.
She had faced the flames and offered the price her guilt had demanded.
Without the passion and blinding speed of the fight, the bright blade in Milk-Eye’s hand looked all the more terrifying, and Rue flinched before it as she had not before the swords of Isik’s mercenaries nor beneath Gressa’s glowing iron.
Soldiers from the garrison began to pour into the baron’s hall. The sharp sounds of order being imposed could be heard above the tramp of booted feet.
Rue scanned the soldiers piling in, some half-armoured, some missing their spears and helms, hair awry as if just roused from sleep. “Do it now, or lose your moment.”
Milk-Eye’s face tightened as if anticipating a blow.
The milk of her clouded eye bloomed crimson, as if drops of blood were falling into the whiteness.
A red hue like that of stained glass, lit from behind by a summer day, glowed within it.
“I see you, Eldest.” Her voice fell through the octaves to a croaking whisper.
“No?” Rue stepped back, her arms falling to her sides. She knew then another moment of true fear, deep as that felt when Sharp was going to die, but of a very different flavour. “No?” It was a trick. Imitation.
The glow from the Cruelty’s bloody orb intensified, sucking the life from the flaming sconces, and it seemed also that the daylight from many high windows failed as if a storm cloud swallowed the sun.
Far above Rue, wings flapped, and Senna’s wild cawing grew faint.
Milk-Eye raised her hand and the weight of Rue’s many wounds took her to the ground. Soldiers crowded in from every side.
“Bind her. Bring her.” The voice that came from Milk-Eye’s throat was one she had never owned.
Rue didn’t allow herself the indignity of struggling.
She had surrendered her defence against the Cruelties’ power, and by mistake or design the Morrigan’s gift was helpless before it.
In truth, the darkness in Milk-Eye was just another aspect of the triple-goddess’s strength.
And since one person making war upon themself was human nature, old as hills, deep as hunger, then no eyebrows should be raised at one aspect of the triple-goddess fighting another.
Four soldiers brought Rue along behind Milk-Eye, carrying her by her arms and legs, her spine skimming the flagstones. Four more followed.
Rue didn’t struggle because it would be useless to do so, but every fibre of her wanted to fight.
Screams demanded release. Her hand ached for the sword beneath her skirts.
The voice had been one she’d not heard in half a century save in nightmares throughout her time within the Academy, and still sometimes beneath the moon or beneath the shingle roof of her peasant hut, an old woman haunted by a child’s terror.
She had imagined Mother with both fathers, Night and Day, mouldering in a grave, their war against the Academy long since won.
The alliance they’d had with the warlord was ancient history now.
Sunder had claimed the Cruelties for his own—and perhaps they had always been his in some sense.
The uneasy alliance he had entered into with Mother and Father had seen them edged out of their own family, undermined by princely power and the ability to navigate the seas of the real world rather than of a bricked-up mansion.
It must have taken nerve, though. And strength.
And it had most definitely taken something more to resist the tricks of memory at their disposal.
Soldiers of Cessation Emperor Sunder had named Rue’s former brothers and sisters, though “Cruelty” was too fitting to leave the common lip.
His soldiers’ role was to root out sedition.
Also, to cow any challenge from what remnants of conquered nobility survived amid the sprawl of an empire so fresh that much of it was still bleeding.
Hunting a handful of Kindnesses in hiding was very low down the list. Mere chance had picked the Vale and placed Pye among the villages that needed to burn so that a new invasion might wear the oh-so-thin robe of legitimacy.
But for that misfortune Rue’s gentle slide into antiquity would have seen her buried in the garden behind her hut after a peaceful decline.
But what had looked at her out of Milk-Eye’s face had struck too deep a chord to have been theatrics. Even now, Rue could see Milk-Eye bend her head and press a hand to her brow as if trying to squeeze away an agony, as if a spike had been driven into her brain.
They passed unchallenged through the chaos of the baron’s household, the news of his demise having spread as fast as his fleeing bodyguards.
Servants ran hither and thither, some clutching stolen vases, silver candlesticks, wine from his cellars, other staff in pursuit, shouting about consequences.
Some sentries had joined in with the looting and were draped in stolen tapestries, while those whose sense of duty ran deeper stood their ground and doled out the justice of fist and boot.
Milk-Eye led the way down one flight of stairs, then another. Lanterns punctuated the journey along corridors and through chambers where winter’s chill still lurked, and dampness glistened on brickwork older than the castle above.
More stairs, these a spiral, sharp edges striking Rue’s back every few steps.
Decay hung here in the cold air around the central column as they circled down into the darkness.
No lamps had been set, no brave little flames danced in wall sconces.
Milk-Eye held the only light, a storm lantern, filigreed brass glimmering in the reflection of its own glow from wet and curving walls.
They reached the catacombs, passing through an arch framed by twin angels of death, their stone faces half flesh, half skull, divided vertically along the bridge of the nose, like the ancient goddess Hel.
The soldiers’ boots rang on the stone, shocking the silence and returning in many-tiered echoes. Milk-Eye led them through the vaults, the statues of lesser kings and queens looming out of an ancient night to wear the lantern’s glow before the darkness swallowed them again.
Farther on, the masonry grew more crumbled, some fragments scattered on the floor, and the drip of water counted out the years, stacking one century on the next.
“Here. Hold her fast.” Milk-Eye came to a stop beside a tomb whose heavy top slab had been shattered by the fall of a block from the ceiling.
Draperies of rotting velvet curtained the alcove, held back by tarnished silver cords. A large cauldron of blackened iron stood to one side of the broken tomb, its yawning mouth hip-high and wide enough to swallow a large sow whole.
Rue tested her strength against that of the men holding her limbs.
She’d seen the cauldron once before. Mother had dragged her to her bone-strewn nest in the deepest of the mansion’s cellars.
The cauldron had rested there amid the mouldering skeletons and when Mother had laid her hand upon it the iron had lit with the same light that shines upon the last river, its rim heavily wrought with coiling vines, black grapes, glaring boars’ heads, wheat sheaves, and other symbols of plenty.
The soldiers felt her approach at the same time Rue did.
Free now of the Ingredient, there was nothing in Rue to tremble in anticipation.
Sensibly, the men fled. Even without a light to guide them to the surface, not one of them felt that the darkness held greater horrors than that dry rustle behind shattered teeth of stone.
Rue managed to sit up, and watched as Mother clawed her way, hissing, into the light.
Rue had never seen the creature they’d called Mother by anything other than blindsight, the woman limned by the non-illumination of her own being.
Now, for the first time Rue saw her, licked by the light of Milk-Eye’s lantern.
How someone so obviously broken could show no identifiable break, Rue couldn’t say.
Mother seemed unchanged by fifty years and more.
The same gaunt limbs, and a wild, straggling explosion of hair, revealed by the fire’s light to be black but edged with grey.
The rags that hung from her were so far gone that it was impossible to say if they had once graced a queen or a farmgirl.
“Eldest.” Her slithering voice the same that had haunted the mansion’s cellar. “My child.”
“I was never yours. You stole every child you ever twisted. Stole or bought.”
“I have missed you. You were always my favourite.” Mother climbed out of the tomb. It was her movements that marked her as something other, as if though her body were human, what animated it was something very alien.