When she had been very young, she had sometimes crept from her bed to Damia’s. I had a bad dream, she would say. Her older sister had been very patient, had pulled the blankets aside and helped her climb up onto the tall bed. Marra remembered it all with sudden vividness, the scent of dried lavender under the pillow and the crispness of the sheets. She hadn’t thought of that in years.
I can’t remember Damia’s face, she thought, gazing dry-eyed into the dark, but I remember the lavender.
Her back was beginning to warm up. Unfortunately one side of her sinuses was starting to clog. Normally she would have rolled over, but if she did that, she’d have her face squashed into Fenris’s spine. She wished she could sleep on her back, but it always made her feel short of breath. (Women in her family did not sleep on their stomachs after puberty. She hadn’t even tried since she was fourteen.)
She fidgeted again, located a rock under her hip, and tried to get it out of the way without squirming too much. Bonedog got up, circled three times, and collapsed again in exactly the same position.
Fenris is probably regretting agreeing to this. He is probably thinking he got better sleep with his face an inch from the coals.
It was foolish to even try … she thought, and then it was morning and the warmth against her back was gone and the brown hen was clucking irritably for her breakfast.
* * *
The day they crossed back into Marra’s own kingdom felt strange, because it didn’t feel like anything at all.
The borders were porous and no one particularly cared, and they were on a back road that lacked even a guard post. There was a faded wooden marker with an approximation of the royal crest burned into it, recognizable even if the dragon looked more like a snake and the hare looked like a blobby dog. Marra paused at the line, then stepped over as if stepping into cold water.
I should feel something, she thought. This is my land. I’m a daughter of the royal house.
She didn’t.
She’d been asleep on the coach when she had crossed the other way, and she’d been so anxious about finding the dust-wife that she hadn’t given it much thought. But this time she knew where she was and she was walking into her own kingdom and it seemed as if she should feel … something.
“Problem?” asked Fenris.
“I live here,” said Marra. She nudged the dirt with her boot. “I’m home, I guess. Except it doesn’t feel like much of anything.”
“Ah.”
“The poet Tarus said that when he came home, the land itself sang under his feet, and his heart sang with it.”
“That may be unique to poets.” Fenris started to rest his hand on a nonexistent sword hilt, caught himself, and shoved his hands in his pockets instead. “I came back from my first campaign and I’d been in my own clan’s lands for half an hour before I noticed.”
She glanced up at his face, surprised.
“I was cold and wet and very tired,” he said. “When I did feel something, it was because I realized we were only about twenty minutes from the keep and I might get warm again.” He shrugged. “And then again, other times I have come home and felt as if I had finally woken up after a long illness. I suspect these things say more about us than they do about the land itself.”
Marra was watching his face, and so she saw the sudden flash of pain across it, quickly stifled, the deepening of the lines between his eyebrows.
“Will you be able to go back to your clan’s lands again?” she asked.
“No.” He lifted his head, looking around them. This part of the countryside did not go red and orange with autumn, only dun and yellow. Wind rustled through the dry stems of broom straw at the edges of the road. “No. I can go anywhere in the wide world that I wish, but the borders of Hardack are closed to me.”
“There is no appeal?” asked Marra. “You can’t … um … wait for someone to die? Or forget?”
His smile was acknowledgment that she was trying, not happiness—a quick flicker, then gone. “No. My return would start a senseless war of vengeance. I will not sentence so many people to die merely because I am homesick.”
“I’m sorry.”
“As am I.” The flicker of a smile lasted longer this time. “But I am told that this is a fool’s errand and we will all probably die, so I do not let it trouble me overmuch.”
They trudged onward, into her kingdom, Bonedog weaving in and out between them. Marra thought of all the stories of exiles returning home, and wondered how many, like Fenris, simply never returned at all because the price was too high.
And what will I do, if we succeed? Will I go back to my little room at the convent and hope to be left alone again?
It was because of Prince Vorling that she had never married. He did not want any competing claims to the little kingdom’s throne. If he was dead, would that change?
Lady of Grackles, please, no. Let me stay insignificant. Let me be a weaver and a midwife, not a princess.
She took a deep breath, then set the thought aside. This is still a fool’s errand, and probably we will all die. A familiar thought. It was strange to take such comfort in it.
“Marra?” The dust-wife looked over at her. “Where does your godmother live?”
“My godmother?” Marra frowned. “I don’t know. No, wait…” She rubbed her forehead, trying to dredge up old memories. Had her mother said something once? Nothing important. The godmother had not been important, had just been one more actor in the drama of childbirth. But they had gone out in a carriage years ago, passing through the countryside on the way to somewhere else, and the queen had said something about the godmother living over that way …
“I think near Trexel,” she said finally. “We went out for hawking and Trexel is where they have goshawks.”
“You’re a falconer?” asked Fenris.
“Not even remotely,” said Marra. “But there’s an absurd tradition that only the royal family is allowed to hunt with goshawks, so we have to go out and there’s a whole ridiculous ceremony where the falconers gift you the birds and then you ask them to hold the bird in trust, so that they can hunt with them. There’s probably still a bird or two out there that are technically my property, but what am I going to do with one?” She remembered the ceremony more clearly now, the pale bird with its mad red eyes and the heavy glove weighing down her arm. “So the falconers get to fly goshawks and put food on the table for the house that trains them—I’ve forgotten the name, one of the distaff branches—but if anyone asks, the birds belong to the royal house.”
The dust-wife had paused while the hen climbed down her arm and made her way to the pack to lay her daily egg, but snorted at this. “Not the worst system I’ve ever heard of. The godmother lived near there?”
“I think so.” Marra had a vague memory of her mother trying to entertain her and her sister, pointing out the window and saying, “Your fairy godmother lives over that way. Isn’t that interesting?”
“Then let us make for Trexel,” said the dust-wife.
Marra grimaced. She didn’t want to see the woman who had sent her sisters out in the world so ill prepared. But if I must, I suppose I can demand to know why she wasted such a chance. She could have stopped all of this long before it happened. Why didn’t she?
“Yes,” said Marra, feeling anger stir in the pit of her stomach, anger that for once had little to do with Vorling. “Yes, let’s.”
* * *
It was one of life’s ironies, thought Marra, that they had left the Southern Kingdom unmolested, only to be attacked as soon as they returned to her own lands.
Marra and the dust-wife were sitting by a well in a little gray town on a little gray road, surrounded by little gray fields. There was nothing to make anyone think it was dangerous. Fenris had negotiated a meal with the innkeeper in return for splitting yet more firewood. Marra was sitting on the edge of the well, thinking nothing in particular, when a shadow fell over her feet.
“The hell are you supposed to be?” said a thick, wet voice.
Marra jerked upright, panic firing her nerves. She had to grab for the stone to keep from pitching backward into the well.
The owner of the voice was not looking at her. He was a big, lanky, rawboned man and he was swaying slightly. Day-drunk, thought Marra. Oh, Lady of Grackles.