“Twine and snail shells, wires and bones,” sang the glamour seller, half to themself, while their ears flicked and swiveled. “There!” The twine was a grid, then a net, then they flung it over Bonedog, who bounced on his feet as if he were being given a treat.
The glamour settled around him and left a smell like burning dust. Marra saw the outlines of flesh, a shadow of fur, and then Bonedog shook himself and he was a great gray dog with a skull like a battering ram and a blaze of white across his chest. His tail was still a narrow, bony whip but there was fur across it. He had immense jowls and when he looked up at Marra, they all sagged into a gigantic smile.
“Oh, Bonedog,” she said. He licked her hand and she could feel his tongue, not quite substantial but more than it had been.
“Enough of this place,” said the dust-wife. “Everyone have their souls still? Shadows still attached? Then let’s go before that changes.”
They went up the stairs very slowly. The staircase seemed much longer going up than coming down. Perhaps that was always the way in a fairy world. The man she had ransomed, the man she needed, had his arm locked around hers. They leaned against each other, shoulder against shoulder, two humans in a place where no humans should ever have come. When Marra looked over at him in the sickly firefly light, she could see a silvery terror in his eyes, mastered but very much alive. Bonedog walked beside them, Marra’s hand wrapped around the rope collar. She felt the illusion of fur against her fingers, except when she didn’t and he briefly felt like bones.
The square at the top of the stairs became deep blue instead of black. It grew closer one agonized step at a time, bisected by the dark figure of the dust-wife. Stars began to appear in it, but the outline seemed restless, as if there were a shadow laid across it that should not have fallen just there.
There is something waiting at the top, Marra thought. How many teeth will it take to get past? How many years off my life to buy our way free? She exhaled on a long, shuddery breath and the man beside her half carried her up the next step, until she found her strength again.
It will take as many as it takes.
There was something at the top. She never saw what it was. The dust-wife reached the opening first and a shadow reared up, but the hen threw back her head and crowed like a rooster at dawn.
The shadow fled. The hen settled, making an indignant errrk. “I know,” said the dust-wife soothingly, “I know. Crowing is always so embarrassing for a lady.”
Rrr-rr-rrrk, muttered the hen, shaking out her neck feathers.
They emerged, stumbling, into the starlight. The man at Marra’s side gasped in air as if he had never breathed before. “Free,” he said. “Am I free of that place?”
“Almost,” said the dust-wife. “Not quite yet. We’ve got one foot in the other world, and it isn’t safe to linger.” She led them back along the river, toward the tree root. The man still held Marra’s elbow. She did not know whether to feel trapped or to be glad of the touch.
The drowned boy was waiting on the other side of the roots, chin-deep in the water. He gargled at them and the dust-wife made a noise of annoyance and gestured at him, swift and rude and backed by magic. The drowned boy sank down into the water and swam away, fast as an otter. “Now,” said the dust-wife, leaning on her staff. “Now we’re all the way back. Now you’re free.”
Chapter 9
“I am Fenris,” said the man. He started to say something more, to add another name or a rank, perhaps, but cut himself short. “Fenris,” he repeated instead.
“Marra.”
“Fenris,” said the dust-wife. She snorted, looking over at Marra. “So you built yourself a dog and found yourself a wolf. If a fox shows up looking for you, we’ll have a proper fairy tale and I’ll start to worry.”
“Why?” asked Marra. “If I’m in a fairy tale, I might actually have a chance.”
“Fairy tales,” said the dust-wife heavily, “are very hard on bystanders. Particularly old women. I’d rather not dance myself to death in iron shoes, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Perhaps you’re the fox,” said Marra.
“Ha!” The dust-wife’s laugh really did have a bit of a fox’s bark to it. “I deserved that.”
“Do you have a name, Lady Fox?” asked Fenris. Marra could not tell if he was amused or irked by the conversation.
“Yes,” said the dust-wife.
The silence stretched out. Marra picked at a thread of the nettle cloak, waiting.
If there was a battle of wills, the dust-wife won. Fenris’s laugh was not terribly unlike the dust-wife’s, the short, self-deprecating sound of a man who could still recognize absurdity. “What do you wish me to call you, then, ma’am?”
“Ma’am will work very well indeed. I am a dust-wife.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “One of those who live among the dead? We do not have them in my country, but we know of them.”
The silence grew again. Marra wondered what he was thinking and what he made of them. A shy nun and an old woman who communes with the dead. I don’t know if I even know what I think of us …
He’s a killer, the yellow-eyed man had said. The thought was alarming. Fenris was large enough to break her in half with his bare hands, and however imperious the dust-wife was, she was still fundamentally an old woman with a chicken. Did he think he was still a prisoner? They’d ransomed him from the tooth seller, but they hadn’t exactly set him free, had they? She’d gabbled something about needing him in the market. If he decided to escape his supposed captivity, their only defense would be a dog who was currently bouncing in the water to make it splash.
“You don’t have to stay with us,” she said.
Fenris looked over at her, his eyes unreadable. “Beg pardon?”
“I mean…” No, don’t explain about the moth—the moth is too complicated and sounds ridiculous if you say it out loud. “Uh, there was magic that took us to a thing we needed. And it picked you. But you aren’t a prisoner anymore.”
“Magic said that you needed me?” He was smiling now, but it was a smile like his laugh, not so much humorous as incredulous at the shape of the world.
“Don’t get any ideas,” said the dust-wife. “Might turn out that our fate is sealed inside a jar and we need someone to loosen the lid.”
His laugh that time had genuine humor in it, which seemed to surprise Fenris as much as it surprised Marra.
“Do we have time for me to wash?” he asked, as they left the river. “It has been a long time…”
The dust-wife shook her head. “Not here. The dead are restless and won’t settle for a day or two. We’ll find you a pond where no one’s drowned.”
“Well, I do like not drowning.”
It took them perhaps half an hour. Even though Marra felt as if an age of the earth had passed in the goblin market, the moon had barely moved in the sky. It splashed a white reflection across a stock pond. Several sleeping cows stood on the other side of a fence, black shapes on the moonlit grass.
“How did you end up in the goblin market?” asked Marra, as Fenris sat down by the edge of the pond and began to unlace his boots.
“I was a fool,” said Fenris. “I slept in a fairy fort. I knew better, but I…” He looked away.
“What’s a fairy fort?” asked Marra.
“A ring of earth. Trees grow up the sides, but the centers are usually clear. Ruins, some say, of an old people. Dwellings of the hidden ones. Uncanny places. I should not have been there.”
“You were on the run from something,” said the dust-wife crisply, “or you were trying to kill yourself but didn’t have the nerve to hold the knife. You’re from Hardack, by your accent, and no Hardishman would sleep in a fairy fort, not dead drunk with two broken legs.”
Fenris’s lips twitched. He inclined his head to the dust-wife. “As you say.”
“Well?” The dust-wife plunked herself down. The brown hen regarded Fenris with a baleful eye. “Which was it?”
“Both,” said Fenris. He rubbed his forehead. “I am … was … a knight. In Hardack, as you say. I served the Fathers, not any particular clan. The Fathers rule the clans, but their rule is not absolute. Those who serve them work as diplomats as much as enforcers.”