He shrugged. “Thought, mostly. Turned over all the ways that I had failed, and all the places I could have turned aside from my path. Thought about escaping.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t able to talk to anyone else but the Toothdancer. He was not so bad, for all his looks. But it was a cruel place.” He exhaled slowly through his nose. “And I, being a selfish bastard, thought only of getting free. Perhaps I should have told you to take someone else in my place. I deserved my captivity.”
“You’re the one we needed. Or that the moth said we needed.”
He shrugged again.
“Perhaps when this is all over,” said Marra recklessly, “perhaps we could go back. Find the others there.”
The look he gave her this time was surprise. “Will you sacrifice a tooth for each of them, then?”
Her skin crawled at the thought, but what was a tooth compared to someone’s life? “If I have to.”
The silence went on too long, and then he offered her his hand, not to hold but to shake. Marra did. His fingers were callused against her skin.
“So,” said Fenris. “Now that we have pledged to one another’s hopeless quests, may I ask where we are going on yours?”
“The Northern Kingdom,” said Marra.
“I have not been there,” Fenris said. “You must warn me if there are any customs that I do not know that will lead us all into difficulty.”
“I don’t think there are any,” said Marra. She racked her brain, trying to think of anything useful. “But I don’t know if I’d know. I grew up very near there, so my people would do the same thing, I suppose. Um. Don’t hit anyone in the face with a glove?”
Fenris’s expression was indescribable. “Is this a thing your people do often?”
“No, not unless we want to fight duels. Which we don’t. I mean, I don’t.”
“Might save time,” said the dust-wife. “We send him to duel the prince and get it over with.”
Marra considered this. Fenris was a little older than the prince but a great deal larger. Did that matter? “Hmm…”
“A prince, eh?” Fenris glanced at her for acknowledgment. “And you want him dead?”
“Is that a problem?” What if he leaves and tells the prince? No, we didn’t say a name, and he’s never even been to the Northern Kingdom. He can’t know it’s Vorling, and anyway, Vorling’s the king now …
“Does he deserve to die?” asked Fenris, as if they were talking about the weather.
“Very much so.”
“Then it’s not a problem. Do your rulers accept challenges from strangers, though?”
“No…” said Marra. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. “No, I’m pretty sure they don’t.”
“Good. It’s a foolish way to choose rulers, even if it does make things less convenient for us now.”
“They allow it in Hardack, as I recall,” said the dust-wife.
“They do,” said Fenris. “It’s foolish there, too. You get a competent, judicial man who knows the names of each of his vassals, who can balance the needs of the clan against the needs of individuals … and then you get a brute whose only skill is swinging an axe. And like as not, the man with the axe wins, and then it’s his boot on the clan’s neck until someone sends to the Fathers to sort matters out, which half the time we can’t.”
“I’m beginning to suspect you’ve dealt with this before,” said Marra.
“However did you guess?” He gave her a wry glance. “Yes. I’ve seen four clans ruined by it. One saved as well, but we could have found other ways. What did this prince do?”
The question was delivered in the exact same tone as the rest, and it caught her by surprise, like a blow. She missed a step and Fenris moved to catch her, then stepped back when she caught herself on her own.
“He killed my sister,” she said. “And my other sister … his now wife … he…” Her throat tried to close up again and she forced the words out. “He hurts her. He leaves marks and she … she stays pregnant so that he will not beat her, but she will die of it eventually. Then he’ll take another wife and do it to her again.”
Fenris nodded, as if what she had said was perfectly comprehensible, even though she could barely comprehend it herself. If the fact that a nun was kin to a prince’s wife surprised him, he gave no sign. “I understand. Men like that never stop. If they can be isolated or thrown at the enemy, it is for the best, and then the clan gets some good of them in the end. But often they cannot be, and then we must find other solutions.”
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” said Marra. “Other solutions. Whatever that may be.”
“It’s a fool’s errand and we’ll probably all die,” said the dust-wife.
“Oh, well then,” said Fenris. “I always enjoy those.”
“What now?” Marra asked the dust-wife. “You had the ideas before. Or do we simply walk north until we get there?”
The dust-wife scratched her hen’s keel bone thoughtfully. The bird looked annoyed, but then, it always did. “I can almost see my way forward,” she said. “If it were only mortals we faced, then you and I and your large friend there might be enough. But the godmother is where everything falls down.”
“The prince’s fairy godmother?”
The dust-wife nodded. “They’ve had the same one for a long time. Bound to the royal family and kept alive long past when a sensible person would die. Her protection will lie over the prince.” She gnawed on her lower lip. “The dead I may command, but that is a different power.”
“Stronger?” asked Marra.
“Different.” The dust-wife paused, then smiled ruefully. “Probably stronger. I speak with the dead and for the dead. Our two powers have nothing to say to one another. We might pass each other in the street without speaking or she might blast me into nothingness.”
“I suppose you can’t blast her into nothingness first?” asked Fenris.
“I’ve never tried,” admitted the dust-wife, “but it doesn’t seem very likely.”
Marra sighed. “So what do we need to fight a power like that? My fairy godmother was nearly useless.”
The dust-wife raised an eyebrow. “You had a fairy godmother?”
“Yes, of course. Princesses, you know…”
“Not all of them,” said the dust-wife, “not even most of them, come to that. And the ones who do tend to be in much larger kingdoms, not little nations poised between dangerous neighbors. Power calls to power.”
Marra snorted. “Well, she wasn’t worth much, so you’re not far wrong.”
“Oh?” said the dust-wife.
“She blessed us all with good health,” said Marra grimly. “And Damia she said would marry a prince. Which wasn’t much of a blessing, given he killed her.”
“Health’s not so little a thing,” said the dust-wife. “Compared to the alternative, anyway.”
Marra’s lip curled. “She might have wished us safe,” she growled. “Or at least that we wouldn’t marry someone who’d murder us.”
“She might have,” said the dust-wife. “But parents object to people making pronouncements like that at christenings, for some odd reason.”
“You’d think they’d be grateful.”
“No accounting for human nature.”
Marra did not know Fenris well enough to read his expressions, but she would have sworn that he wanted to say something. He kept glancing at the dust-wife. A line formed between his eyes with each glance, growing deeper, until finally he apparently gave up and said, “Lady Fox?”
The dust-wife snorted. “Yes?”
“You claim to speak with the dead?”
“I don’t claim it,” said the dust-wife calmly. “I do it. Although most days it’s less speaking and more listening. People who won’t shut up in life rarely shut up in death.”
Fenris shook his head. After a moment he said, picking his words carefully, “I do not know that I believe in ghosts.”
“Yet you believe in fairies,” said the dust-wife, sounding amused rather than offended. “Enough that you offered yourself to a fairy fort.”
“And now I suppose that I should say that is different,” said Fenris. “But the truth is that I did not believe in fairies, either. No one I know does.” He rubbed a hand through his hair, and Marra saw threads of white salted through the dark length.
“You did not believe in fairies, but you were afraid of a fairy fort?” said Marra, puzzled.
“Well … yes.” Fenris gave her another of his bemused how-am-I-here smiles. “We do not believe, but you still wouldn’t cut trees from a fairy mound or spend the night in one. Just in case there is something there, whether you believe in it or not.”
“There you are, then,” said the dust-wife. “The dead are there, whether you believe in them or not.”