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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…”

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.”