Chapter 42 #2
Rue struggled against her weakness and against her pain, at last wrenching the sword free from her skirts.
The same narrow blade that Lip-Scar had carried, and that Sharp had killed him with.
“I’m not a child.” Planting the point of her blade on the stone floor, she used the sword to help her stand.
“I’m older than you because I hold my years inside me.
You, you’re just a moment in time, a collection of wounds you can’t let go of.
” With her endless forgetting, spilling time from her shoulders as if it were no more than rain, Mother seemed a far smaller figure than the one Rue had carried with her for so long.
“So proud,” Mother whispered. “We were always so proud of you.”
“How can you serve this?” Rue turned her head to Milk-Eye, gesturing at the monster in front of them. “If you’d kept what life taught you, you’d see her as she is. You’d see how pathetic the creature that stole us truly is. If not for the awfulness of her crimes you would pity her.”
Mother’s hiss at the word “pity” carried a dangerous edge. “We need you, Eldest. It was always our plan. You the strongest. You the warrior. Sunder would never have treated us so with your strength still in our family.”
“Family!” Rue barked a laugh decorated with a dark spray of blood, halted by a chest full of razored pain. “Family?”
“You’ll come back to us now. You were our first. We fed you first. Gave you the finest of Megaera’s feast. Throw away this useless age you wear. With you on the field the throne can still be mine. Ours.”
Rue wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand and showed her teeth.
“It was the Academy that Father wanted to bring down. But it’s hard to stop, isn’t it?
Once power’s been taken, it hurts to let it go.
” She spread her arms, wincing. “Look at me. The poison you put in me is gone. I found a way to spit it out.” Rue pointed at Milk-Eye.
“She has it now. Make her your champion, to fight your battles if you must. Leave me out of it.”
Mother turned her hollow gaze on Milk-Eye. “What have you done?” There was horror in her voice.
“All I need from you, ‘Mother,’ is seven ounces of gold, and I’ll be on my way.”
“Seven ou—What madness is this?” Ghost-eyes found Rue again, haunted and haunting.
“Seven ounces of gold,” Rue repeated. “For the deaths of Jayne Clay and Ambeth Potter. It’s the lowest tariff on the Kindnesses’ books, three and one half ounces, the least that can be paid in wergild for a life.
For a prince it would cost a thousand ounces to wipe the slate clean.
It’s old lore. Megaera and her sisters held to it.
The baron was your creature. This debt is yours. ”
“Ah!” Mother raised a crooked stick of a finger and bent her head. “Ah ha ha!” Her face snapped back up. “Eldest is still in the game. Still fighting. Still the warrior she pretends has gone.”
“Seven ounces. Why does no one—”
Mother extended an empty hand, palm up. She clenched her fingers like a trap closing on prey, and with a cry, Milk-Eye fell to her knees. “This one was always weak. She can no more hold what we gave you than a cup can contain an ocean.”
Milk-Eye uttered a strangled sound, her good eye turning black, her white one shading through the greys, darkness painting every vein in her throat like the rising limbs of a winter-bare forest.
“What are you doing?” Rue took a half step towards Milk-Eye.
“Killing your sister, of course. So you can have your power back. Then I’ll teach you to use it, and we can forget all the unpleasantness that has passed between us.”
“She’s not my sis—” But Rue could see it didn’t matter. Milk-Eye’s mouth opened in a scream though no sound came, just a misting of blackness, the Ingredient being drawn from her mind.
The fire that the Kindnesses had put into Rue as a child had burned for a generation, and if her anger had been given unfettered access to it, she might have incinerated half the cities on the island before she consumed herself in the rage-storm.
What the Kindnesses had given her in the elixir had been wrapped within what the Cruelties had given her in the Ingredient.
Megaera’s blessing shielding her from Alecto’s gift, and perhaps it had been Alecto’s fire that had kept her from being seduced by Megaera’s darkness.
That protection had gone now. Milk-Eye’s silent scream could have ignited the spark of Rue’s anger by itself.
The betrayal on her face, echoing what had been there when Rue had abandoned her as a child, fanned those flames.
What brought it roaring from her skin was Mother’s angular horror, her brew of hate and madness, and that twisted love of hers, which was worse than both together.
For a moment every small stone, each unanchored hair, rose unchecked by the world’s pull.
The catacombs drew their breath, leaving an airless silence to anticipate the flames’ crackle.
And in the instant of Rue’s breaking cry, the wind howled in, swirling a spiral inferno to taste the stones above her.
Mother’s darkness swatted down the firestorm in the same heartbeat. “Foolish girl!”
The Furies’ strengths had worked together, Alecto the starter, Megaera the finisher, Tisiphone standing between her sisters, the bridge that joined them.
The Cruelties were a force fashioned to undo the Kindnesses and their Academy.
Rue had never believed her rage would overwhelm the deep well of Mother’s darkness.
She had only needed a distraction, but even as she reversed her blade, setting the point to her chest in the moment that Mother’s attention left her, the monster had her in focus again, reaching to stop her.
Senna arrowed out of the darkness, swooping beneath a stone arch, an explosion of feathers in Mother’s face. Stabbing beak, small sharp claws. Mother snatched the crow away, slamming the crushed carcass aside. It fell soundlessly into the cauldron’s maw.
But the moment Senna had purchased proved sufficient.
Lip-Scar’s blade transfixed Rue, cold steel thrust through her chest. Through her heart.
Not even the Morrigan’s enchantment could enter Rue’s heart uninvited.
And it would not sustain her past this wound.
She fell like a hewn tree, her gaze on her sister.
Mother couldn’t kill Milk-Eye now. Not when she’d lost her prize. The monster released Milk-Eye, instead throwing herself at Rue and catching her in emaciated arms just inches from the ground.
“You stupid child!” Blackened teeth, a dry tongue, the enfolding tomb-stink.
Rue twisted her lips in a fierce grin, then rolled her head back, listening for the flow of the river that she was ready now to cross.
Mother clutched Rue to her chest, strong in her madness. “The burden’s on your sister now.”
Rue could no longer steer her gaze, but she could see Milk-Eye flinch.
“If not our firstborn then the second true-born.”
Milk-Eye shook her head, more scared than when Mother had started to kill her.
“The rest were stolen, but you three, Eldest…” some mockery of grief shuddered through the monster’s skeletal chest “…we should never have left you with a foster family. Your father didn’t listen.
” Her voice began to fade behind the rushing whisper of a black river. “…Keep them with us…fruit of my womb…”