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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.”
