“Go on, then,” said the dust-wife, flicking her fingers dismissively. “Back to the water, and mind you don’t pull down a traveler unless they break the covenants.”
The drowned boy hunched his shoulders and turned away. The moon dripped light over him as he walked down the riverbed, sinking deeper with each step, until he dove like an otter and was gone.
“Bleah,” said the dust-wife. “The ones who die by water go bad as often as not. Something about the water turns them dark. Give me bones in the ground any day.”
Marra held her hand over her mouth and concentrated on breathing until her stomach stopped lurching. “Why did you summon that?” she asked finally. What kind of monster is walking with me? What am I about to unleash? She’s not just an old woman with a chicken …
You knew that already, she answered herself. You knew that, which is why you came to her. You want to kill a prince. Don’t get squeamish now.
“Directions,” said the dust-wife. “Which he gave, although he would have liked to pull a much higher price than I was willing to pay.”
“Directions?”
“Indeed. Now, follow me, and let’s see what they were worth.”
Apparently, they were worth a great deal, because within twenty minutes they reached a gnarled tree that overhung the bank.
“There,” said the dust-wife. One of the tree roots stuck out over the water. “Earth and wood and water.” She reached into a pocket and pulled out a cord with a stone tied to the bottom, then tied it to the root so that the cord fell down into the water. “Hold your breath,” she said, almost as an afterthought, then ducked into the arch formed by the cord and the root and the overhung bank.
She took two steps, splashing, and passed through the arch. She came out the other side, looking just the same to Marra, and yet the sound of her footsteps in the water seemed to come from much farther away.
Bonedog cocked his leg meditatively on the tree root. Nothing happened, but it seemed to satisfy him. Marra supposed that he was already holding his breath, insomuch as he didn’t breathe at all. She took a deep gulp of air and walked through the root archway.
Nothing obvious happened. It wasn’t like the gluey sensation when she walked out of the blistered land. But a few steps later, her ears popped, and when she turned her head, everything seemed to move a fraction of a second slower than it should have, as if her eyes were struggling to catch up.
She scrambled up the riverbank. The dust-wife stood impatiently, tapping her staff. The brown hen grumbled.
“Does the chicken hold her breath?” asked Marra.
“She’s got a demon; she doesn’t have to.” The dust-wife turned and began to walk back the way they had come.
Wait—that wasn’t just a figure of speech?
“Do you mean that your chicken has a literal demon in her? Not that she’s just a … a bad chicken?”
The words sounded incredibly foolish as she said them, and the dust-wife’s look indicated that they did not improve upon hearing.
“Girl, have I given you any indication in the last week that I joke about anything?”
“How did you get a demon in your chicken?”
“The usual way. Couldn’t put it in the rooster. That’s how you get basilisks.”
Marra opened her mouth to ask what the usual way was, then stopped because there was an enormous staircase in the ground that had most definitely not been there when they had walked by earlier.
It had broad stone steps, easily wide enough for two horses to pass abreast. Marra could not possibly have missed it. The steps ran straight down into the ground, ignoring the existence of the nearby river that should have turned them into a waterfall. The dust-wife walked down them without pausing, not even ducking her head.
It was dim for the first few steps but green light illuminated the lower stairs. Marra looked around for the source, then wished she hadn’t. In alcoves on each side of the stairs, a firefly the size of a house cat blazed with light.
“Where does this go?” she whispered, hurrying to catch up with the dust-wife. The fireflies ignored her, but their antennae moved slowly in the air. “Who made this?”
“To the goblin market,” said the dust-wife. “But in answer to your second question, I don’t know. I’m not entirely sure it was made, in truth. Some things come into being once it’s inevitable that they will exist.”
Marra was still trying to parse that one when the stairs ended at a landing above a sunken room, and Marra gazed down into the goblin market.
* * *
It looked like a market, but such a market as Marra had never seen. There were jeweled pavilions crowded next to mud huts and hide tents and things that looked like upside-down bird nests. The aisles between were crowded, but the people within them did not move like a crowd. They moved like dancers, some light, some heavy, some in circling, solitary waltzes. They reminded Marra far more of the courtiers in the prince’s palace than of the town on market day.
She had been a little afraid of the courtiers, and now she was more than a little afraid of the people here. The courtiers, for all their cloth and starch and politics, had been human, and some of the crowd here were obviously … not.
And I am here with a dog skeleton at my heels and a woman with a chicken on her staff, so what must they think of me?
“Don’t stare,” murmured the dust-wife, “but don’t look away if someone looks at you. Show as little weakness as you can. Agree to nothing and accept nothing until you know the price.”
With that, she stepped forward into the crowd, and Marra hurried after her.
The majority of the crowd had looked human from a distance, but once she was among them, she had her doubts. Some were human shaped but had green or blue skin. A number had horns rising from their foreheads, short and pointed as antelopes’. One woman walked by with a rack of antlers that would do any stag proud, and small black birds seated on each tine, wearing silver collars around their necks.
Others were not even human shaped. A trio of boars in starched collars, walking on their hind legs, went grunting past. Six white rats, each nearly three feet tall, carried a palanquin on their shoulders. And who could guess what lay beneath the pale braids that covered that figure from head to toe?
Where did they all come from? Are they from other parts of the world or are they all from here? But how could they be from here?
You heard stories, of course. Stories of the Fair Folk, of little people that lived behind the world. Stories of old gods that had never learned how to die. But Marra had never imagined that there might be so many or that they might be right here, on the other side of a tree root, not far away under the hills.
Even the blistered land had not prepared her for that.
“Hmm,” said the dust-wife. She had stopped at a table that held a little wooden tray divided into squares. In each square lay a moth, apparently dead. “Hmm. That one.” She pointed.
“Shows you what you need,” said the woman behind the table, sounding bored. She was old and wrinkled, with thin gray braids coiled around her head. “You sure you don’t want the one that shows you your heart’s desire? It’s much better.”
“Also a lot more expensive, I suspect.”
The woman grinned. She had no teeth. Instead her tongue was banded with red and black and had a snake’s golden eyes. “Five years of your life. But you get the rest to spend with your heart’s desire, so it’s worth the price.”
“I’ll stick to needs, thank you.” The dust-wife tapped the moth. It flicked its wings, startling Marra. It was white, but there were broken black lines all over, like writing.
“Ugh. Six weeks of your life.”
“Six days.”
“One month.”
“One week.”
“A fortnight, and that’s my final offer. And don’t blame me when it lands on a bucket because what you need is to drink more water.”
“A fortnight’s fair.” The dust-wife beckoned Marra. “Two weeks of your life, child.”
“Uh,” said Marra. “What?”
“That’s the price in this place, unless you’ve something to barter.”