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“Ouch!” The dead face twisted up in pain. “The old bitch hurt me! Tell her if she—If you do that again I’ll have the captain cut your teats off. Hurt her a bit right now, Captain.”
Gressa dropped the finger bone as if it were a piece of fox dung and came towards Rue, smacking knuckles into palm.
Since it seemed that it might be touching the bone that let Gressa hear the baron, Rue lied. “He’s saying he changed his mind.” She had always been of the opinion that you should enrage torturers. They were going to do their best to hurt you anyway. And they’d probably do the job less well when angry. Plus, you might as well have one last laugh.
Gressa looked doubtful but turned around and went back to the table, unable to hear the baron’s heated denials until she once again picked up the bone. She made to set it back down, but the baron stopped her, his anger growing with every word.
“Nobody would come at the Iron League over a shithole village. She’s pathfinding for some resurgence of the Kindnesses, any fool can see that! Nobody would do this for ten ounces of gold, not for a hundred.”
“It’s sev—”
“Shall I get the irons, Lord Mancer?” Gressa sounded almost obsequious.
If Sebrin Weaver had ever once revealed in life the narrow snarl that Baron Mancer now fashioned for him, then it was a secret face kept for the privacy of his ramshackle home to terrify his family. “Keep the irons hot. But since she’s so partial to the locals, let’s start this way.” He raised his silent voice, blood and spittle falling from his lips. “Kill everyone! Burn everything.”
Rue hadn’t come as the village’s saviour, but to be the one to initiate their massacre was too much. If she couldn’t stop it, then at least she would no longer endure it. Perhaps it was cowardice to run away—it felt like cowardice—but to give Gressa and the baron anything back would only encourage their cruelties.
Rue let her chin fall to her chest. She rolled her eyes into her head in the manner Kindness Undu had taught them in front of the gates to the Bone Garden, leaving only the whites to watch the world.
Her vision changed. The low rush of water became the only sound. And she stood once more by the banks of that river which divides worlds. Her gaze found the far shore, where the mysteries of death would be unravelled and where so many that she had known now dwelt.
“Hello, sister.” A breathless wheeze from her right.
“Sister.” A bubbling voice to her left.
“My sisters.” Rue’s vision blurred as unbidden tears crowded her eyes. She found herself unable to turn, unable to breathe, paralysed by deep-sunk claws of emotion that she had believed the years to have pried free.
A dry hand took hers on the right. A wet one on the left.
“Ghosts…” Rue struggled to speak.
“Ghosts,” wheezed the first speaker.
“Still here…after all these years?”
“Always.” From the second speaker.
“Always?”
“For as long as we’re remembered.”
Rue let them go and stepped back from the black flood so she could see them both. Still children. Shocking in their youth. Bek, pale and bloodless, still carrying the wound that Kindness Terra had made with her own knife. Einsa drenched, water running from dark hair plastered across her face.
“Oh, my sisters…” Rue fell to her knees.
“Little Molly.” Einsa knelt beside her.
“Mollandra.” Bek knelt too. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
17
Eldest
There was a garden and Eldest had not been the one to find it. A night garden where light never found its way. It had been Milk-Eye who discovered the secret corner, and when with soft and infinite patience Eldest’s fingers had mapped out three firm stalks, three smooth caps, three undersides delicate with gills, she had understood the gift her sister had given her.
Eldest had never seen the door by which Father came and went, but when it opened, something changed in the house. The air shifted. Sometimes new scents filtered into the parlour. Several times she had heard the deep challenge of some kind of animal, and once: distant laughter.
The click of a lock reached her through the wood of the parlour door. “He’s gone.”
