Page 5

To begin with, it felt like an escape, from the inn’s dim confines and the crashing of the dying man, to the brightness of a day still bitter with winter’s trailing edge. It took longer than it should have for Molly to understand the new danger. Ahead of her the beefy frame of Senna Weaver seemed to be ploughing into the emerging crowd, fighting the flow.

As the panic of the inn’s patrons began to ease, an entirely new set of shouts and cries started to override their protests, underwritten by the thunder of hooves. The noise came from the direction of the market square. Senna, blocked by a farmer in overalls, turned her head to look back the way she’d come. The woman jolted, then fell like a discarded sack of grain.

As the crowd scattered, Molly saw the arrow jutting from Senna’s eye and the loose line of horsemen charging from the square.

“Fu—”

Something hit her from behind.

4

Rue

Two bodies lay on Main Street, which was about the only street Pye had. The pair of corpses were a reminder in miniature of the slaughter back at Stones Corner Market. Molly Plight had died a kind of death in Stones Corner and been reborn as Rue in a stinking hole a quarter of a mile from where she had fallen. The spot where ten years of peace had come to an unexpected but perhaps inevitable end. The market town had been on fire when Rue had clambered from the open grave they’d tossed her into. The mercenaries gone. So she’d walked back to the place she’d called home for the last ten years and that had, for the last few of those years, even felt like home.

“Padrick Tanner and Lorrie Smith,” Rue said to nobody in particular.

The old Senna knew them well enough to recognize both, even like this, though the new Senna would perhaps be more interested in their eyes. But the crow said nothing and made no move, only watched.

Padrick, who had once served in the town guard at Reddik, had been beaten. His thinning hair was thick with blood. The mud received his battered face, hiding the worst. He’d been loud, large, a bit of a bully, but hardly a bad man in the grand scheme of things. Lorrie had a single wound in her back, perhaps from a hatchet. She’d ended in an untidy sprawl of skirts and limbs. Rue wondered where the woman’s daughter was. Soosa Smith had turned sixteen and flowered like a hedgerow primrose, breaking young boys’ hearts left and right.

Senna hopped forward and landed on the blond tangle of Lorrie’s hair. She folded her wings, head cocking left and right in the quick, canny fashion of crows.

“Seriously?” Rue narrowed her eyes.

“What? I wasn’t going to…” Could a true crow look guilty?

The street stood empty, but Rue felt watched. The villagers would be hiding in their homes, except for the clever ones who had already left. Rue cricked her neck to the side, the bones making audible clicks.

Pye had no formal inn, but a bundle of hops always hung above Debban Tanner’s door. He’d given up his father’s trade and turned to brewing, selling sour pints in the cramped confines of his main room, or the sheds out back when custom was good.

“In there?” the crow croaked.

“Where else?” It wasn’t as if Pye had a library or as if sell-swords would visit one while they still had grass to wipe themselves.

“You’ll just get killed…again.” Senna’s warning carried a note of panic. “Isn’t this just going to be a repeat of what happened before?”

Rue’s cricked neck hurt. “Maybe. But don’t count me out. I killed someone with a candle once.”

The crow’s croak was one of surprise this time. “That’s not possib—”

“I burned them. Not my finest hour. Hours. I’m not who you think I am.”

Rue wondered if she even knew what she was now. But it was time to find out. She walked slowly to Debban’s door. Men’s voices reached her through the shutters, loud and unconcerned. She paused, setting a hand to her ribs. The pain in her head had eased a fraction—enough for the rest of her body’s protests to be heard. The years had washed over her and left her brittle, like driftwood. And the fight in the inn, such as it was, had broken what remained. She would not have won even that contest if she’d begun it in this state. She didn’t have so much as a knife. Even her knitting needles were gone.

She stopped with her hand upon the latch. Did she want to die here? The two locals she’d best liked—Jayne and Ambeth, women she had called friends—were rotting in the grave she’d clambered out of. What did the rest mean to her? She could walk away. Start again. Just as she’d started here. Let the winds of chance blow her tumbleweed life to some new resting place.

The flood of years had swept her up and left her useless. Good for nothing but waiting for the end. She thought of waves now, imagining the distant sea as she stood in the too-bright street with her head aching like the devil, and the withered claw of her hand on the door latch. It seemed a stranger’s fingers rested there, ringed in wrinkles. How had she let herself get so old?

Somewhere behind her a crow was cawing, crying warnings. Rue had first seen the sea forty years ago. Seen waves wash upon beaches of hard, wet sand. Human lives, she thought, were like those waves. We rush into life, all fury and flow and a tumbling, churning hunger for the next thing. We smash ourselves upon that shore, and spread, and slow, climbing the gradient, starting to feel its pull for the first time. And then, either soon or late, but with the same inevitability, we reach our terminus and the sea and the slope start to pull us back into the whole. We leave a crescent of foam to mark the limit of our progress, a froth of bubbles, popping as they realize they’re alone. And before the next wave comes, we’re gone, taking all trace with us.

A shadow loomed across her. “Who the fuck are you?” A rough voice, moments from anger.

Rue turned, took the knife from the man’s belt, and pushed it up into the softness where jaw meets neck, pressing it home with the heel of her other hand. She had not been fast, but she had been sure.

The mercenary staggered back, gurgling, then fell onto his arse, clutching at the knife’s hilt, more confused than angry. Ill-advisedly he pulled it free, and a flood of hot blood painted his chest.

“A Durong,” Rue muttered. The man’s skin was the colour of old oak, darker even than each summer’s sun stained Rue’s own. Whoever had assembled these mercenaries had spread a wide net, gathering every creed and caste.