Chapter 43
Rue
“No!” Rue reached out towards her sister and her fresh betrayal, only to find herself stretching towards the retreating shore of the river.
Somehow, she was already on the ferry, gliding across the racing waters, though the ferryman kept just one hand on his pole.
“But I didn’t…”
She saw her bronze mark resting on the bones of the ferryman’s other hand. To take your own life was to place the money in his palm. That was what the rhyme said, albeit a grim doggerel for children.
Rue opened her mouth to protest but no words came.
Instead, she choked on the sudden memory of Mother’s last words to her.
True-born, fostered out. That Mother and Father, Night or Day or both of them together, were her actual parents was not a fact that wanted to remain inside her.
She fell to her hands and knees on the planked belly of the boat, retching as if to vomit so deeply that even truth might leave her.
The man she had killed after all his crimes against both her and Bek was not her father, not her blood.
She had cut his throat after the depth of his betrayals had broken both her mind and spirit.
Patricide could be struck from the list of her sins.
But it meant that Bek had never been her blood either, and that felt a greater loss than anything she might have gained.
She retched again, more violently. Her mother could not have been that witch in the basement.
Her father could not have been the spider in the parlour, the ravening wolf who ran the halls.
She had known herself to be evil, to have been polluted by experience, but now, in the moment of her death, to be told she had sprung from so foul a source, and to carry that curse across the river with her… it was too much.
The termination of a black thunderbolt against the planking in the bows shook her from her anguish. The new arrival missed the water by a foot at most, and Rue by inches.
“Senna!”
The bird lay stunned in the confusion of its own feathers.
Senna lifted her head unsteadily and gave a low caw. “Who followed who this time?”
Rue heaved herself up using the side of the boat. For a moment the receding banks distracted her. A knotting of the half light had caught her eye, there, higher up where the bank stepped towards the Badlands and tangled thorns grew in leafless profusion. “I’m not sure…”
The knot in the light became a swirl, sweeping darkness into its gyre beneath the black sun’s eye. The thorns leaned this way then that, caught in a great wind, stones and grit flying. Even across the expanse of water Rue heard the squall’s fury, though no hint of it stirred the air about her.
“Mother…”
The creature dropped from the heart of the gyre and the wind blew itself out as swiftly as it came.
“That’s really your mother?” Senna hopped onto a bench, dishevelled such that one might think she’d wrestled a cat and lost.
“I don’t…” But it felt true. Horribly true but true nonetheless.
“Can she come after us?”
“That I don’t know.” Rue gripped the ferry’s edge. “I hope not. But I wouldn’t put it past her.”
The boat’s speed had reduced Mother to a dot, one that would have been invisible save for the knowing that she stood there, stark and irreducible.
In her life Rue had held many riches, but she had had few things that were precious to her.
In one tiny, private corner, deep and hidden, Rue kept the memory of an unseen garden, a pathetic collection of mushrooms, shared first with Milk-Eye and then with Tune for the gift of the petals that had decorated them.
It was both pathetic, a child’s dream, and yet incalculably dear to the old woman who visited the memory often, even in her final years.
A second precious thing that she had kept was the knowledge of Bek as her true sister.
And now that had been ripped from her. She was the product of monsters.
Milk-Eye her sister—and one other, a third—perhaps it had been Lip-Scar.
Perhaps one of those others she’d killed and she had merely swapped patricide for fratricide.
Either way, it had hollowed her. If the strength of this body she’d been given for the afterlife matched those of her emotions, the boat’s gunwale would have been reduced to splinters where her fingers gripped it.
The crunch of the prow against gravel and the sudden deceleration took Rue by surprise. Save for her tight hold of the wooden edge, born of an entirely separate concern, her arrival on the shores of the Underworld would have been headfirst, flat on her back, mouthing obscenities.
“Where to now?” Rue turned to the boatman, whose only reply was to indicate with a sweep of his bony hand that she should leave the ferry.
“Is this because I told you to fuck yourself last time?” Rue shook her head and clambered onto the shore. She was careful not to touch the water. Some things even the dead fear.
She stood, bare feet on the grit, looking ahead into the gloom.
The river ran more slowly here, and although it had seemed straight on the far side, on this shore it appeared that she was on the inner curve of some great meander.
Her naked body was neither young nor old, and her injuries were gone.
As Senna took to the air, squawking, Rue clothed herself by force of will, choosing her peasant smock, wool stockings, and a thick coat rather than the newly purchased finery she had died in.
She had better memories of the years she’d spent penniless, battling only the seasons and the soil.
“Time to see what’s next.”
She climbed the bank’s slope without her habitual complaints.
Age had left her. It had leaked from her joints, unbound her chest, taken with it the blur in her eyes and the fog in her mind.
The absence of that weight of years was a kind of euphoria, and Rue resisted the urge to whistle as she strode ever more confidently up the broken ground.
If not for the parting memory of Milk-Eye’s panic and the understanding that of all her false sisters, it had been her true one she’d first betrayed, Rue might have thought herself in the borderlands of paradise.
Youth, it seemed, was a drug she had forgotten during the course of its slow weaning.
But returned at a stroke it felt like intoxication.
From the far bank, the Underworld had loomed like an approaching dust storm.
From this side of the river, mystery replaced that threat of violence.
It seemed that a great fog swelled above the shore, filled with the glow of many lights, some static like distant stars, others drifting like fireflies in the air.
There was in that luminous unknown a great promise coaxing its echo onto Rue’s lips, placing onto the tip of her tongue answers that need only be spoken.
Premonition trembled in her. The life that she had been torn through, left scarred by as if it were the densest thicket of thorns, that life could be shrugged from her shoulders like discarding a worn-out cloak, and in its place…
better. She had had the potential for so very much more.
That small child, that little girl, that young woman, all of them could be reborn into her past, and loved as they should have been.
All of it waited for her. All of it lay just beyond sight, needing only for her to truly want it and, in that wanting, be revealed.
As Rue crested the bank, two figures were emerging out of the mists.
Bek and Einsa came trailing curling tendrils of fog.
She recognized them though they were no longer children, but of indefinite age now: Bek free of the wound that had killed her, Einsa dry at last. These were not the ghosts of her memory, but the spirits of the friends she’d lost. As she ran towards them, the chains of bitterness that had bound her since their deaths fell away.
There was in that three-way hug a comfort and a joy that Mollandra had always ached for, one that had never been found in the arms of her true mother or the false one. It was, she thought, heaven encapsulated in a moment.
“All right, all right…” Einsa rumbled, pushing them both from her and rubbing at the damp patch Mollandra’s tears had left on her tunic. “Let’s not forget the message.”
“Message?” Mollandra pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, wondering why her nose still ran in the afterlife.
“Message.” Einsa nodded.
“From Aello.” Bek wiped her eyes.
“Aello?” Mollandra said the name to shield herself from what was to come. Aello had been the first of her daughters to enter the world, arriving with the dawn, with Ocy born at noon and Cela coming at sunset.
Aello, always first, had been the first to die too.
“Of course Aello.” Bek rolled her eyes. “She’s waiting for you, back there.” She nodded towards the glowing fog. “But she needs to stay where she is so that Ocy can find her.”
“Ocy?” Mollandra repeated.
“I’m guessing it was a blow to the head that killed you,” Einsa said. “It’s the only way to explain the stupidity.”
“Ocy’s still alive?”
“Well, if you can call it that.” Einsa shrugged.
Bek pushed the larger woman aside. “Ocy has a foot on both sides of the river. It means she can tell Aello what Cela’s up to.”
“And?” asked Mollandra helplessly. “What is Cela up to?”
“It’s not good.” Bek twisted her mouth and sucked a breath in over her teeth. “The emperor’s coming for her.”
“Sunder?” Could Rue not escape the Morrigan’s games even on the far shore of death’s river? “Emperor Sunder?”
“Yes.”
“My little Cela?”
“Yes.”
“What in the world would an emperor want to go chasing Cela for? Baron Mancer’s just started a new war for him to play with. Hasn’t he got enough on his plate invading Tavoland? King Armand’s widow…whatshername…” Mollandra snapped her fingers. “They call her the Battle Queen. She’ll keep him busy.”
“Exactly.” Bek nodded.
“Exactly what?”
Bek took Mollandra’s hands. “Cela’s the Battle Queen. You didn’t know?”
“Oh fuck.” Mollandra shook Bek off. “I’ve got to go back.” Cela might hate her, but you couldn’t leave your child, not with High Cruelty Sunder and all his iron might swarming across the borders.
“She didn’t get to be Battle Queen without learning a thing or two about winning,” Bek said. “She’s tougher than you give her credit for.”
“You don’t know Sunder like I know him.” Rue felt that old fear, the fear she’d learned the first time she went up against the man, but now multiplied many times over when she thought of what he would do to her child.
“Maybe that’s because you never told us,” Einsa said gruffly.
“He…” For the longest time Rue thought Father must have stolen Strong from some royal crib, and that he might even have been Sunder’s true brother.
Back then she’d hoped that he really had escaped the mansion even though that would mean he had turned his back on her and broken all his promises, including the one he carried in his very person.
She’d hoped that he would somehow return to his true family and be accepted into the warm luxury of their lives.
“He killed…” But Strong had never been part of Abrona’s royal line.
He had crawled from the mansion choking on a dose of the Ingredient higher than anyone had ever survived, more than Mother even, with only his youth to keep it from twisting him, at least on the outside.
“I thought he was good.” It had been a child’s notion, she knew that, but even now his memory wore the glow of the hero’s robe she’d placed around the wideness of his shoulders.
He had been her standard for hope and truth and goodness in the world.
When she had abandoned the others she had betrayed his memory, and could find within herself no forgiveness for that crime.
But Strong, whether twisted by his final dose of the Ingredient, or whether always a false idol, had taken a darker path even than Rue had.
With Father’s invisibility he had killed the true Sunder and taken the boy’s place.
He had made the prince’s noble parents forget the face of their own child and accept him as theirs.
Every member of that household found themselves nudged into a new truth.
“I thought he was good. I was…wrong.” Rue met her friend’s gaze. “I need to stop him.”
“Well,” said Einsa. “You could try. But you might be better off running because—”
Mollandra spun on a heel, took one stride towards the river, and stopped.
“—because there’s that,” Einsa concluded.
Across the river’s flat swirl something reached, a dark claw, smoke blooming like blood drops in a glass of water, and in the midst of it all, borne by the chaos and lined in her own non-illuminating light, came Mother.