He was looming over the dust-wife.
The dust-wife was deeply unimpressed. Under normal circumstances, Marra would have applauded her calm, but she’d encountered a few drunks in her time with the Sister Apothecary and very few of them liked to be ignored. It made them angrier. The Sister Apothecary had been good at talking them down, usually by saying that there was a birth going on and suggesting they go have a toast to celebrate. Unfortunately that didn’t seem like it would apply here.
“You a witch?” asked the drunk, stabbing a finger at the dust-wife. “That your familiar?” He snickered.
Marra looked around wildly. Where was Fenris? Behind the inn, probably, chopping wood. Dammit. Two or three bystanders had stopped and were watching, but no one was intervening.
“Go back to the bottle, man,” said the dust-wife. “Leave an old woman alone.”
He made a grab for the brown hen. He was in no danger of succeeding, but the dust-wife stepped back anyway. Marra was very sure that the dust-wife could protect herself, and also that if she did, they might have to leave the village in a hurry.
Do something! Stop this! Think! How are you going to fight a prince if you can’t even handle one drunk?
“There’s many a man who’ll not think twice to mistreat a woman but who lives in fear of a habit and a holy symbol.” Remembering these words, Marra stepped in front of the dust-wife, running her fingers down the cord that held the carved grackle feather. “We mean no harm, my son,” she said, trying to sound like the abbess.
The drunk blinked at her. “The hell are you?”
“I serve Our Lady of Grackles.” She sent a silent prayer to the Lady to add it to her tab for these frequent impersonations.
Glory be, he took a step back. Marra had a moment to think that she’d pulled it off, that it was all going to work, and then Bonedog began to bark at him.
Perhaps if he had a voice like a normal dog, it might not have mattered. But the working throat and snapping jaws of a silent bark caught the man’s attention and he aimed a kick at Bonedog, with predictable results.
“Ow! Goddamn beast bit me!”
Oh hell. She snatched for Bonedog’s collar and took a step back.
“It bit me!” he shouted to the growing crowd. “You all saw it!”
From what Marra could see, Bonedog had barely scraped the man’s boot leather. She took another step back, dragging the dog with her. The dust-wife muttered something under her breath and dipped a hand into a pocket. Marra hoped she was grabbing something that would calm the man down, not something that would strike him dead and leave them with a corpse to explain.
A shadow fell between them.
“Excuse me,” said Fenris.
Relief flooded Marra. At least if they had to make a break for it, they wouldn’t get separated. And possibly the drunk would listen to another man, if not a nun.
The drunk turned. He had to look up to meet Fenris’s eyes. “This isn’t your problem, old man,” he said.
“Friend,” said Fenris in a just-between-us voice, “you’re frightening the nuns. Let them go on their way in peace. The gods look out for them and so should we, eh?”
“Their dog bit me,” muttered the drunk man.
“Ah well, even nuns have protectors, eh? Come now. I’m new in town, and you look like the sort of man who can tell me where I might find something…”
Fenris had a sort of matter-of-fact air that made it seem like the easiest thing in the world to go along. The drunk allowed himself to be escorted to the inn door, telling Fenris very seriously about blacksmiths and horse collars, and it should have worked, except that a bystander snickered and said, “Running from a nun, eh?”
“Oh hell,” said the dust-wife.
The drunk wheeled around. Everything happened very fast and all at once and Marra had to grab for Bonedog’s collar and then the drunk man was right there and something glittered in his hands and somebody shouted and Marra yelled, “Fenris, he has a knife!” and then, almost apologetically, Fenris stepped in close and punched the drunk in the head twice.
The man shook his head as if to clear it and Fenris punched him again. This time he fell down.
“And now I believe we should be going,” said Fenris. “Quickly.”
The three of them did not quite run out of the town, but they weren’t slow. Bonedog wanted to go back and bite the man and Marra’s shoulders ached from holding him.
When, after about twenty minutes, no one appeared to be chasing them, she relaxed enough to feel some other emotion, and it felt too much like anger for her liking. “Fenris!”
“Yes?”
“You could have died!” hissed Marra. “He had a knife!”
“But you would have gotten away,” said Fenris.
“But—” Marra gaped at him, not sure if she wanted to throw herself into his arms or shake him until his teeth rattled. “But you would have been dead!”
He shrugged.
Marra took a deep breath. Why was she angry? It didn’t make any sense to be angry, except that she’d been afraid and the fear didn’t know what to do with itself. It was just a drunk. You’re fighting a prince. You’ll face worse dangers than this.
“Enough,” said the dust-wife. “No one is dead, and let us get out of here while that’s still true.”
Chapter 11
It was easy to find the godmother, once they got to Trexel. Marra had visions of the dust-wife using magic or asking the dead, but what she actually did was lean over a fence and say, to a woman with three children and a harried expression, “Is there a godmother who blesses children about?”
The woman’s face briefly turned cheerful. “Oh yes— Don’t put that in your mouth! The godmother. She’s very kind— I swear to the saints, Owen, I will take you to market and sell you for a three-legged goat!—Five miles down the road, turn where it crosses the stream and go along the bank until— Owen, I’ve had about enough!—You’ll find a little house with a garden and a signpost out front. The sign’s fallen down, but the post is still there. There’s usually trumpet flower up the post and I don’t think we’ve had a hard enough frost yet— Owen! You leave that cat alone!”
These directions proved quite good, unlike Owen. They found the garden, the house, and a post with a wooden crosspiece and two rusted iron links that had probably held a sign at some point. The trumpet flower had gone up the pole and flowered extravagantly scarlet.
“Hello?” said Marra’s fairy godmother, looking up from her work in the garden. Marra knew her at once, though she had not seen her since she was in the cradle. Something inside her snapped toward the woman, like an iron filing snapping to a magnet. Her. There. That’s the one.
The garden was just slightly out of control. It was nothing that a week or two of work couldn’t fix, but the weeds were flourishing around the base of the plants and Marra could see the dried stems of last season’s beans still twined around the poles, despite the new growth covering them. None of the preparations for winter had been made, although the first frost would hit any day now. A little too much for one person.
Her godmother had the kind but faintly anxious look of someone who was permanently in just a little over her head. She smiled at Marra, a smile with a little worry at the edges, and started to say, “How can I hel—” and then a line formed between her eyes and in midsentence, she switched to “Oh! You’re one of mine, aren’t you?”