The dust-wife.
In this part of the kingdom, every graveyard of any size had its dust-wife. Marra was vaguely aware of their existence, but she came from the western side of the kingdom, and there was a definite difference. On the seacoast side, churchyards buried a dog to guide and guard the dead—church grims they were called. On the eastern mountain side, there were dust-wives. (In one or two places in the middle, there was both a dust-wife and a church grim. “They’re no trouble,” said one dust-wife of the grim, “and it’s good to have a dog about the place.”)
Dust-wives lived in little houses by the cemeteries. They operated as combination witches and gravediggers, digging the holes and laying out the dead. Even when a dust-wife got too old and frail to dig the graves herself, she would totter out with a spade and move the first spadeful of earth before hired hands did the rest. Otherwise, there was a chance that the dead might think the diggers were graverobbers, and their curses would be upon them, if not for the dust-wife’s blessing.
It was said that the dust-wives could speak the language of the dead and that they knew all the secrets that lay beneath the earth. When a dust-wife died, she was cremated and her ashes were spread across her graveyard, so that each dust-wife who came after might keep the wisdom of her predecessors near at hand.
Marra pulled her cloak’s hood up over her hair and went out to find the dust-wife. The convent had its own tiny cemetery, but those souls belonged to Our Lady of Grackles. She had to go into the town to the big church, consecrated to Our Lady of the Harvest, to the graveyard there.
The dust-wife was working outside, tending the graves. She was a fat, sturdy woman with a pink face. “Good afternoon,” she said, smiling. “Can I help you, lass?”
“I need a spell,” blurted Marra, then stood there, unsure if she had committed some dreadful social error. Were you supposed to make small talk with a dust-wife? Beg? Offer money? “I’m sorry. I don’t…” She put her hands to her cheeks. They felt hot.
The dust-wife pushed herself to her feet and patted her hand gently. “Let’s start at the beginning. My name’s Elspeth. What’s yours?”
“Marra,” said Marra, before it occurred to her to lie.
“Good, solid name. Like our princess. Come sit down and tell me what’s wrong.”
Marra took a deep breath. Her mother’s warning hung heavy in her mind. How much could she say? “My sister is married,” she said, sitting down on the wall beside the dust-wife. “He’s … he’s not good. She stays pregnant so he won’t beat her. But it’s hard on her. She loses them sometimes, and then it’s worse. I can’t … I have to help her. But he’s … um. Not going to let her go.” She stared at her hands.
“Poor girl. That’s hard. Does he have the rank to get away with it?”
Bursting into hysterical laughter would not help anyone, so Marra simply said, “Yes.”
Elspeth leaned back, face grave. “What would you have me do, child? It does not sound like barrenness will help her. I could give you a charm to make childbearing easier, but I tell you true, it’s little enough and it cannot save a babe that does not wish to come into the world.”
Marra closed her eyes and thought about treason and regicide and whispered, “Can you give me a spell that kills him?”
The dust-wife was silent for a long time. Marra opened her eyes, expecting to see horror, but Elspeth’s eyes were full of sorrow and understanding. “No,” she said. “If I could, I might, though I’m not an executioner and I’d need to know more before I bloody my hands. But the sort of magic you’re asking for is far beyond me. That’s real power, not charms and knowing and listening to the dead.” She looked away, apparently measuring her words carefully, then said, “If you go to the capital, there is a woman, I am told, who knows much of poison.”
Marra shook her head. The prince employed a food taster, of course, but she could not very well explain that. “If he was poisoned, they would think of her immediately,” she said instead.
Elspeth reached out and took her hand. Marra thought for a moment that the woman was offering her comfort, but the grip was too tight. She looked up, startled, and the dust-wife’s eyes had gone strange and slack, the pupils huge, the irises nearly gone.
The eyes of the dead, Marra thought, and then, Damia’s eyes must have looked like this.
Then Elspeth blinked and her eyes were normal again. She dropped Marra’s hand and rubbed at her face. “Well,” she said, almost to herself. “Well then. So that’s how it is.”
“I’m sorry?” said Marra.
“The dead could help you,” said Elspeth. “But you need a real dust-wife, one married to clay and bone and grave dirt, not an old herb witch good at digging holes.” She squinted and winced, as if the brightness of the day pained her. Marra watched a tear leak from the corner of her eye and run down her cheek.
“Where do I find someone like that?” asked Marra.
“South,” said Elspeth. “South and east. Not here. Go around the south side of the mountains. The dry plains, you know?”
Marra nodded. Her father had taken the princesses there once, part of a royal procession, the whole land bone-dry, stone-dry, kicking up vast clouds of white dust as they traveled. “I know it.”
“There’s a great necropolis there, but you don’t want that. Stop before you get there. The mountainside and the carved caves, the abandoned dwelling and the skulls of bulls. There. There’s a dust-wife who’s worth the name. The dead would crawl on their knees to give her their secrets.”
Marra nodded again. “Thank you,” she said, sliding off the wall.
“Don’t thank me,” said Elspeth. “Come back to tell me, after it’s over.”
Thinking of the long journey southeast, Marra shook her head. “I may not live to do it,” she admitted.
“I know,” said the dust-wife gently. “But I’ll still be able to hear you.”
* * *
It was a long road. The only person she told was the Sister Apothecary, who looked at her with steady eyes and then handed her a purse full of coins and a bag full of tea leaves. “Magic,” she said. “Magic is beyond my skills. Come back as you can, and if you can’t, I hope fate is kind to you.”
Marra no longer had much faith in fate. She had been born a princess, which should have been lucky, but the price for never going hungry was to be caught in a struggle between people too powerful to call to justice.
She also rather wished that the Sister Apothecary would tell her not to go, because then she would have something to push back against. She was used to being stubborn, but having people agree with her was off-putting and didn’t give her much to work with.
With the Sister Apothecary covering her absence, she pulled up her cloak and went into town again. The dust-wife directed her to a shepherd taking fleeces to market in Low Bandai to the south, and Marra rode with him clear to the city. The shepherd seemed to like company but did not talk a great deal, and that suited Marra, who had little to say that wasn’t Oh god oh god what am I doing oh god …
From Low Bandai, there were coaches that traveled in all directions. She parted ways with the shepherd and took one southeast as far as it went, then another. She hoarded her coins for food and slept either in the coach or on benches while waiting for coaches. She was tired and snarly and often the hood of her cloak was to cover the wreckage of her hair, but her stock of coins did not go down as quickly as they would have if she demanded rooms at an inn.
No one would have mistaken her for a princess.