“Only that? It seemed so much longer.”
They slid the lid back in place and crept out of the tomb, through the tomb that had been cut for Kania, through the small, sad room where Marra’s niece lay in her bed of stone. She had to help hold Fenris up. His muscles had cramped and knotted and he staggered as he walked. “Why are there no guards?” he whispered.
“Because of the queen,” said the dust-wife.
“She could not pull the guards from the entrance without it looking peculiar,” said Marra, “but she called on the others to escort her. She had gone to Vorling’s mother’s tomb. She said that no one thought of the mothers in this time and she wanted to commune with the shade who had lost a child and— Oh, it was amazing. It really was. She’s so good at this. At being queen. Everyone was very impressed.”
“I was certainly impressed,” he said a bit dryly. “When she looked down on me in that stone box, I thought that she was going to let me die a slow death in the dark.” One corner of his mouth crooked up. “And I found that I did not want to die. Not like that.”
“I’m sorry,” said Marra again.
“Don’t be. I had faith. I thought if I could just hold out long enough … well, you and Lady Fox here would come for me.”
The dust-wife snorted. “I would have,” she said. “You might not have been alive at the time, though. Dead men are much less trouble.”
He staggered again. Marra winced. “Did they torture you?”
“Very little, considering. General Takise is a good man, but more importantly, a good soldier, and he knows how little torture is worth for extracting usable information. I made up a tale that had truth scattered through it, and he decided that I was likely mad, but with the magic we had seen, he could not be sure. Torture only tells you what the victim thinks will save him, and they knew that. So they beat me a little, and when my story did not change to anything they could use, they stopped.
“Where are we going now?” asked Fenris.
“Away.” The dust-wife glanced over her shoulder. “Agnes arranged for a cart.”
“Agnes is walking around freely?”
Marra laughed. “Everyone remembers her as very tall,” she said, “with bright green eyes. It’s the damnedest thing.”
“She was, though,” said Fenris. He had to stop and lean against the wall for a moment, stretching his legs and bending his knee to work the kinks out. “When I saw her. Wasn’t she? Was it an illusion, like the one on Bonedog?”
“It’s not an illusion,” said the dust-wife. “Not exactly. Your mind knows what certain things ought to look like, and when your eyes are wrong, your mind wins. Agnes’s magic thinks she ought to be six feet tall with eyes like a starving wolf. That Agnes’s body didn’t comply is just an oversight, so far as the magic is concerned.”
“She’s a very wicked godmother, isn’t she?” asked Marra.
“Evil magic could flow through her like a river in full flood. Fortunately for the rest of us, there’s a lot of Agnes in the way. Whether that makes her wicked, I’ll leave to philosophers. This turning here, I think.”
They emerged into the gritty light that precedes dawn. Marra barely took note of their surroundings. Another quarry, it looked like. She was too busy helping to shore up Fenris. One step after another, one step, one step more, and then there was a wagon in front of them and Agnes was falling off the driver’s seat and threw her arms around them. “You’re alive!” she said. “But of course you are; I didn’t think you were dead— I mean, Fenris, I thought there was a chance you were dead, I didn’t know, but of course Marra wasn’t dead—not to disparage the dead, obviously they serve their purposes and we’ll all be dead eventually anyway, so you probably shouldn’t speak ill of them, although I can’t say that I’m sorry to see Vorling go—”
“How is Finder?” asked Fenris, stemming the flow of words.
Agnes rummaged around in her scarf and produced Finder, who was half asleep and clearly indignant at being awoken.
“You need to train him to sit somewhere else,” said the dust-wife disapprovingly. “Otherwise you’ll have a rooster who thinks he should dive headfirst into your cleavage when he wants to roost.”
“It’s been a while since any man wanted to dive into my cleavage,” said Agnes. “It might be a nice change.”
“Not when the spurs grow in.”
“Oh, well, probably not.”
They got Fenris into the wagon and Marra handed up the bag slung across her back. It rattled as he took it. “What’s in here?”
“A friend.”
His eyebrows went up. Marra climbed up beside him and she and the dust-wife arranged empty feed sacks to conceal him. He sneezed a few times but did not argue.
“I see you have much to tell me,” he said. “Ah … not over the face unless it looks like we’ll be stopped. I was in that box too long, and having things on my face…” He smiled up at her, but it was a thin layer over deeper horror. Marra found his hand under the layers of burlap and squeezed. Another wound for Vorling’s tally. But if we get away, then it is done. It is all done, at last.
“No talking now,” said the dust-wife. The wagon wheels creaked as they left the quarry, going away from the city. Marra pulled the nettle cloak tight around her shoulders, chilly in the predawn cold. Fenris’s fingers were warm in hers.
By the time the sun had risen, the white city was behind them. She could still see it, like a canine tooth in the earth’s jaw, but it was far away and had no more power to bite.
And I will never go back.
When she had taken leave of her sister for the last time, they had both known it. Kania had said as much. “I do not know how long I can keep you out of this. I can try, but…”
“I know,” said Marra. “I know. Someone will remember seeing me. Someone will make a connection. As long as I’m here, there’s the risk. It’s better if I go.”
“It’s not quite that,” said her sister. “Although that is certainly true. You are now the sister of the queen regent of the Northern Kingdom, and you are no longer staying unwed to appease Vorling’s paranoia. Mother will begin thinking where to put you.”
For a moment, Marra was too astonished to be appalled. “But I’m … I’m not a virgin and not a princess. I’m almost a nun!”
“Almost is the key,” said Kania a bit dryly. “You could rush home and try to take orders, and I will bet you the finest horse in the kingdom that the abbess won’t accept them.”
Marra inhaled sharply. To be wed for politics. To be shipped off to a strange man’s bed, while Fenris lay in a box in the palace of dust, waiting for rescue …
“She doesn’t mean to be cruel,” said Kania. “She isn’t. She stopped a war by marrying our family into Vorling’s. The Northern Kingdom would have rolled over us like a tide and our people would all be feeding the crabs by now. She had to choose the people over us, and use our bodies to seal the deal.” She rubbed absently at her forearm, where the bruises were yellow and faded. “She saved thousands of lives.”
“I know,” said Marra. “I know.”
Kania had given her two gifts before she left. One was a pouch full of money and one was a sack full of bones.
“They gathered them all up,” her sister said. “Every one, down to the smallest claw. They were terrified that if they left any, it would give evil magic a way into the room. I told them that they needed to be disposed of properly and that my sister would take them to Our Lady of Grackles for the nuns to sanctify before they were burned.”
Marra could not see through sudden tears, but Kania wrapped her arm around her sister’s shoulder. “Go,” she whispered in Marra’s ear. “Run and be free. They cannot use what they cannot find.”
And Marra hugged her back and went out through the godmother’s palace door with her hood over her head, then slipped away into the city to meet the dust-wife and save her friends.
* * *