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“Wait! Don’t!” Everyone croaks when they’re choking, but a crow double-croaks.

Rue squeezed a touch harder, then with an oath threw the bird away. It landed poorly and stared up at her, eyes black beads of malice.

“Killing you would be a waste of a good joke. Stay a crow.” She turned her back. “I hope you like worms, Senna.”

“Why didn’t you kill me when I was a person?” the crow cawed after her. “She said you’d killed more people than the cholera.”

“I’m not a killer,” Rue muttered.

The path before her wound around a rise where thorn bushes and stunted trees huddled together, toughing out the wind. On the far side, sheltered by the ridge, the village waited for her. Her small house, her narrow bed, the peace that had become her normal far faster than she had ever expected it to. “I’m not a killer.”

“Everyone said you were. Everyone said back in the day they called you—”

“The only person who said that was you, Senna Weaver. Stirring up trouble for me from the day I arrived. Starting rumours. You took against me—” Rue clamped her jaw shut to keep back the loose thoughts spilling from her rattled skull. She might not want to be a killer, but to say that she wasn’t didn’t make it so. She had to be again the thing she had once been, the one who wore this name. The Rue who succeeded in part because of skill, in part because of venom, but truly because she was part of that rare fraternity of individuals grouped only by a single characteristic. Namely that they were, for some gods-touched reason, hard to kill. That where others would fall or freeze or be overtaken by the horror of violence and adversity, Rue’s kind evened the odds by stabbing someone in the throat. Rue was the sort that somehow washed ashore when everyone else from captain to cabin boy drowned. The kind found limping from the bloodiest quarter of the battlefield. The kind that crawled from the grave spitting earth and ready for vengeance.

She’d said more to this crow along a dusty mile of road than the old Rue would have said to any person in the course of a typical week. If death had kept her this time, Rue thought, it would have been an ignominious end, sucker punched from behind. Her time might be coming soon, but she planned to put on a show more in keeping with her reputation. Certainly, she intended to take a lot more people down with her when death came knocking again.

Another wave of pain flooded her head. Rue snarled and bared her teeth, challenging any more sentimentality to try its luck.

“You shouldn’t go back,” the bird croaked. “The sell-swords will have burned it all.”

“No smoke.” Rue nodded to the pale sky above the trees’ reaching arms. “Don’t you want to warn your friends, Senna? Your boy? His young ’uns? That niece of yours?”

Senna had been quick enough to warn everyone when Rue came to settle in the village. The stranger wasn’t to be trusted. She was dangerous. A witch perhaps. Children had started to avoid Rue in the main street within days of her arrival.

Senna made no reply. A talking crow wouldn’t last long in Pye. Senna would have been the one to cast the first stone too. In a place where the young men had chased off a stranger for “wearing foreign clothes,” anything bearing even a hint of magic about it was treated with deep suspicion. Even the worthless healing charms they purchased at the grey markets were worn beneath their clothes, too shameful for the light to see.

On the long slow climb to the ridge, recent memories returned, images surfacing in Rue’s mind every few paces: a horseman black against the sky as if seen from hoof height, Maddy Spinner’s face twisted by terror, the pounding of Rue’s heart becoming the gallop of mercenaries charging from the field.

Rue paused at the halfway point, shaking her head to rid it of the pictures. “Shit…” The shaking was ill-advised. She put her hands to her temples and squeezed, trying to contain the hurt.

“Bad?” The crow could have been asking about the pain, or the memories, or both.

“Seen worse.” And Rue had seen worse. Worse than a band of hired blades cutting down peasants on their way back from market. But not for many years. Years spent trying to forget, trying to divert herself with the scratching of a living from unforgiving soil, raising goats, haggling for grain, all the dull, hard business of normal lives that can be lived without others having to die to make room for you.

Rue stopped again just shy of the ridge and whatever scene would be revealed to her on the far side. “Why are you a crow?”

Her head still ached as if ten devils were trapped in her skull and wanted out in a hurry, her wits still felt loose and apt to spill from her if she made a sudden move, but she wasn’t mad, she wasn’t barking-at-the-moon mad, and this bird was Senna Weaver…which made no sense at all.

“I don’t know.” The crow fluttered to the branch of a nearby tree where the buds were still green fists clenched against the last breath of winter. The bird managed to look guilty.

“You do know.”

“I think…” The crow pecked reflexively at some unseen thing. “I think she sent it. This crow. And…I…” A shivering of black feathers. “It picked me.”

“Picked at you, more like.” Nothing drew carrion crows faster than a heap of corpses.

“It was…I was…” Another convulsion and the bird took off, aimed at the sky. “An eye. I was eating—”

The distance devoured the words, but Rue had heard enough. The crow had eaten Senna Weaver’s eye and now it was Senna Weaver. That made no more sense than before, save now at least there was a reason for the connection, for the choice.

Rue walked on. She had been stupid, and she had been weak. How could she have fallen so easily? By rights she should be dead, still with the others rotting in the sun. Age: she blamed age. It had stolen all her sharp edges and paid her with aches, with grey hair, wrinkles, and confusion.

Fifty yards brought Rue to the ridge top from where Pye could be seen nestled in the bend of the river that wound its way down the shallow valley. The Rill—little more than a stream—and Aaron’s Vale. It had been “a” river and “a” valley when she’d arrived ten years ago. Now they had names and characters. Characters she liked more than many of those she shared the village with. Even so, she had time for some of the inhabitants. Or at least the woman they’d tossed into the grave had. That old woman had had friends. Rue felt herself to have become something different now. Something both new and old. She had undergone a thing most unexpected in a person of her advancing years: change.

That other woman, the one she’d been, had had time for the children too, of course, even if they feared her. Children always eased her soul and tightened her heart, their chatter more soothing than the river’s, but so much more vulnerable.

The chimneys in the valley below still smoked, but the thatch did not. She could see no fresh graves. Even so, there were a dozen horses in Steffan’s field that had no business being there.