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The crow caws but keeps its place on the broken spear that is anchored in the back of a child.

The man draws his sword, pale steel that looks like a cold flame in the last light of the day.

“Do you threaten me with that?” The crow is gone, and in its place a woman stands in the grave, her bare feet on the uneven ground of stiff limbs and narrow backs. “I have no temples, no statues, no priests, no faithful.” Despite her newfound height the woman’s head is still below the grave’s edge.

“Play no games with me.” The warrior levels his blade at her.

“Games?” She smiles up at him, her face indistinct, flickering, perhaps from that of one corpse to the next as she picks her way among them. “Are you going to jump down and poke at me with your little sword? I might enjoy that, Sunder.”

Sunder’s teeth show beneath his helm’s guard. “I know your names too. Do not think I don’t. Saraswati, Thalia, Woman of the Spiders, Morrigan, many others. You cannot hide from me. This is my empire. There is no space for you here, no souls to steal. Fly away.”

The woman’s face hardens, ages, wrinkles spreading, eyes shading to pale, holding a cold and empty light. “Knowing my names is not knowing me. You have nothing I want, little boy. It’s not in my nature to take…only to test. You wouldn’t want to go untested, would you? Older gods than I would be displeased by that.”

He throws the sword like a spear, swift and true. But the woman is gone, and the returned crow has fluttered skywards, snatched away by the wind. The man remains a few moments longer, sniffing at the air, scanning the blasted heath, peering into the grave’s gloom as the shadows thicken. He does not, however, climb in to retrieve his sword. He leaves between one heartbeat and the next, as if he were never here, as if there had been no man, no woman, just a crow already too full of carrion to dip its beak. And of course, the corpses.

Anight settled in, and later a grey dawn struggled over the horizon. But not until the first rays of the sun reached into the grave and found her outstretched fingers did the old woman draw in a sudden, unexpected breath and raise her face to the world. If any other within the corpse heap were still among the living, then the cold light burning in her eyes would have persuaded them to play dead a little longer.

Rue had been born screaming at the world with an anger that took sixty years to fade. Even then her new neighbours had known that though she might look like them, she carried something else within her. Hard as nails, they said. A mean streak. Something in the way she looks at you. Had they known how deep that difference ran, they would have quietly left their homes in the night and never come back. She had told them a name that was true, though it had been so long since she had used it that it had felt like a lie.

The crow that had been following her since the grave landed close by.

“Stop following me, bird.” Rue wouldn’t normally waste words on a crow, but she needed distraction from her pain. “If I was going to die, I’d have done it back there.” Her head ached as if what had struck her had been an axe and the blade was still buried in the back of her skull. “Fuck off!”

“I can’t.” The bird’s croak sounded like words to Rue’s scrambled brains.

Rue stopped walking and finally reached back to examine the damage. Clearly the blow had fractured her thinking. “Whoresons!” The oath escaped her through clenched teeth, but questing fingers had found no obvious fracture, just the tar-like adhesion of old blood in matted hair.

She turned on unsteady feet to examine the crow, now watching her from a rock five yards back along her trail. She had not expected a reply. Even on a day when she’d hauled herself from an open grave, this was still the strangest thing to have happened.

“Don’t test me, bird.” She eyed the ground for a suitable stone, though the thought of bending to pick one up made her teeth grind against the anticipated pain. Every part of her hurt, and the sole advantage to the agony in her head was that it at least shut out the rest of her body’s complaints—for the most part.

“Test you? That’s not what I’m here to do.”

The crow’s croaking was at once a human voice and also just a bird’s chatter. Rue took it as more confirmation that the blow that had put her down, deep enough to be taken for dead, had rearranged her mind. “Madness” was the word that suggested itself. With a groan, she bent and scooped up a stone from the side of the track.

“I can’t stop following you!” Panic in the croaking now. The voice was somehow familiar.

More madness. Rue raised her arm to throw.

“She told me I had to!”

“She?” Rue knew better than to feed a delusion. But there had been a she. Somewhere in the depths from which Rue had hauled herself, a climb that began long before she could raise her head and contemplate escaping the grave, there had been a woman. A woman of uncertain age. Of uncertain everything. But the climb had begun with her touch. With the pressure of her bony foot between Rue’s shoulder blades, perhaps a great enough pressure to squeeze out a reluctant beat from a still heart.

“She. You know. Her!” The crow hopped nervously from foot to foot, eyeing the stone in Rue’s hand.

Rue did not know, but another thought possessed her. “You sound like Senna Weaver.”

The bird said nothing.

“I don’t like Senna Weaver.”

The bird shifted its feet.

“The only good thing about getting attacked was seeing that old cunt take an arrow in the—”

The crow launched itself at Rue in an explosion of feathers. She caught it around the neck, its beak two inches from her eye.

“I’m slow, but not that slow.” Rue snarled the words while tightening her grip on the fragile neck.