It’s because you’re too much alike. What did the abbess used to say? That our own flaws infuriate us in other people? How long did it take you to leave the convent?
Blissfully unaware of Marra’s thoughts, Agnes was walking alongside the dust-wife. Occasionally the godmother reached up to chuck the brown hen under the chin. The hen seemed deeply appalled but was apparently too surprised to resist.
“How does one become a godmother, then?” asked the dust-wife. “Is there training?”
“Oh dear. I wish there was! Maybe there is, if you know the right people. But I didn’t. Don’t.” Agnes waved her hands. “I knew that a godmother was a thing that people like me could be, you understand. So I practiced.”
“How does one practice something like that?” asked the dust-wife.
“On kittens, mostly,” Agnes said. “I think I blessed every barn cat from the time I was nine or ten on. Ducklings, too. And once I ran out of those, mice.” She bit her lower lip. “I tried everything I could think of. That they would live for many years, that they would find love, that they would never know hunger. Nothing took. You can feel it when it takes, you understand—it’s like stamping your foot down and then you see the footprint. I can see the print after the blessing. Marra’s still got it. And Fenris…” She screwed up her face thoughtfully. “There was a godmother at your christening, wasn’t there?”
“We don’t call them that in Hardack,” said Fenris, “but I believe our erl-wives perform the same function. Can you see it?”
“Oh yes. You will live with honor and never waver. Your shield will not break.”
Something about the solemnity of the words, delivered in Agnes’s thin but cheerful voice, made Marra want to laugh. Fenris smiled broadly. “That is correct,” he said. “And my shields never broke in battle, either. Mind you, I dropped a fair number of them over the years…”
“What about curses?” the dust-wife asked. “There are many stories about the wicked fairy at the christening.”
Agnes shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I always wondered if maybe those godmothers could only give bad gifts. And then you have to wonder if maybe there are lots of godmothers out there who don’t do anything because the only gifts they could give would be curses.”
“Have you ever tried to curse?” asked the dust-wife.
Agnes ducked her head, failing to hide a guilty expression. The dust-wife pounced like a chicken on a worm. “You did. And you found you could, couldn’t you?”
“I shouldn’t have,” whispered Agnes. “It was on a mouse. I … I said it would die before its seventeenth birthday. I’d read a story with a princess who was cursed and … well, I shouldn’t have, but I did. And it took. I felt it. It was like a black stain on that poor little thing’s future.” She dabbed at her eyes. “I tried to tell myself that mice hardly ever live past two anyway. Most of them don’t live anywhere near that long. But what if it would have been a particularly long-lived mouse and I cursed it?”
Sweet Lady of Grackles, thought Marra. She’s genuinely upset that she might have stopped a mouse from becoming ancient. Because of course she is.
“You said before that health was the only gift you could give that anyone would want,” said the dust-wife. “Were there other gifts? Ones that you think no one would want?”
Agnes, wilting beneath the inquisition, hung her head. “Yes. Keen whiskers. I’m good at keen whiskers. It isn’t much good for anything but kittens and mice, though. You can’t give a human baby keen whiskers. It wouldn’t work—or what if it did?”
Marra pictured a child in the cradle suddenly growing a full set of cat whiskers and put her hand over her mouth.
“Now, that would be an interesting experiment,” said the dust-wife.
“No,” said Agnes, with surprising firmness. “No, I wouldn’t do it. It’s not fair to the child. It’s not decent.”
“I suppose.” The dust-wife didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Any others you managed?”
“Well, I blessed a whole litter of mice that cats wouldn’t eat them. But I don’t think that’s very useful for a child, either. And then once I said a kitten would have many fine sons.”
All three of them looked at her sharply. Bonedog, sensing something, whined.
“I’d just been reading a book, you see, and it had a king and a queen and she bore him … I was twelve! I didn’t think!”
“What happened?” asked Marra. In her head, her mother’s words echoed around and around, like a coin in a begging bowl. We shall hope the next child is a son. Kania is riding a dragon, and all of us in the kingdom are riding along with her … hope the next child is a son, hope the next child is a son …
“It was awful,” said Agnes. “She had six litters and every kitten was a tom. The barn was overrun. Nothing but fighting and pissing everywhere, and yowling when they weren’t pissing.”
“Just like the barracks,” said Fenris nostalgically.
“Interesting,” said the dust-wife slowly. “So you are rather more versatile than you claim, but health is the only gift that you’re willing to give.”
“Health can’t go wrong,” said Agnes. “Most of the rest can. If you bless a mouse that they’ll always be happy, they run right out in front of a cat and get happily eaten. But health always works. No one regrets being healthy.”
“What did the prince’s godmother say?” asked the dust-wife, turning to Marra. “Her exact words?”
Marra wracked her brain, drawing up the image of the ancient godmother, the stained-glass skin stretched over bone. “‘I shall serve her as I have served all her line, my life bound to theirs. No foreign magic shall harm them. No enemy shall topple their throne. As it has been for all the children of the royal house, so shall it be for her, as long as I draw breath.’”
Agnes sighed. “That’s a good one,” she said. “A big one. I couldn’t do that.”
“That’s what we’re up against,” said Marra. “Vorling can’t be harmed by foreign magic. Supposedly the Northern Kingdom’s enemies are always throwing spells at them, but they don’t take.” She remembered the king, aged and infirm before he had turned fifty. “But it burns them out. I wish it would burn Vorling out faster.”
“Can his guards be harmed by magic?” asked Fenris.
“Eh?”
“Well, if Lady Fox here can arrange to put his guards to sleep, I can just stab him.”
The dust-wife snorted. Agnes’s eyes were very round.
“What?” said Fenris. “Simple plans are best.”
“You’re not wrong, but I doubt I can put an entire palace to sleep,” said the dust-wife. “Particularly since I’ve never put even one person to sleep. I have a great many talents, including raising the dead, but if you want lullabies, that’s someone else.”
“Can you distract them somehow? At least long enough for me to stab him?”
“Probably not long enough for you to get away again, no.”
Fenris raised his eyebrows. “That’s not really a requirement, is it?”
“Yes,” said Marra, annoyed. “It is.”
“Fine, fine.” He lifted his hands. “No death-and-glory final stands unless we have no other options. Hmm. Can you raise up an army of the dead to fight the guards?”
The dust-wife rolled her eyes. “Armies of the dead seem like a good idea,” she said. “Until you’re standing in front of a thousand blind, withered husks who only know how to kill and kill and keep on killing. We might as well just drop plague corpses in the town well at that point.”
“I would have to object to that,” admitted Fenris. “All right. No armies of the dead, then.”
“Could you do that?” asked Marra tentatively.
The dust-wife shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s never really come up.”
“Yes, but if it did, would you know how?”
Feathers and movement announced the brown hen’s emergence from the pack. The chicken walked up the dust-wife’s arm and settled back on the staff, her comb at a decidedly jaunty angle.