They meandered south, day by day. The wagon was drawn by an exceedingly patient mule who tolerated the brown hen standing on his back. Marra sat in the back of the wagon and worked as well as she could with everything moving and rattling under her. At night, by the fire, she made much better progress, but then the light was bad and she jabbed her fingers bloody again. Agnes tutted and salved her fingertips. The dust-wife watched her, her long face expressionless.
“Will it work?” asked Marra, wrapping wires.
The dust-wife stood looking down at her and her skirt full of bones. “It would never work on a human,” she said. “Humans know when they’re dead. It might work on a dog. Dogs are simpler.”
She slept back-to-back with Fenris at night. No one commented. Sometimes he moved and she knew that he was also awake in the darkness, but neither of them quite had the nerve to act on it, not with Agnes and the dust-wife there. I could roll over. I could put my arm around his waist. I could …
“I’m going home,” said the dust-wife one morning. “Agnes, you should probably come with me. They’ll sort out the godmother thing one of these days, and you’ll be left trying to fend off the enemy with a chicken.”
“I know,” said Agnes. “I always expected I’d go with you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, of course.” Agnes tapped Finder’s beak. The young cockerel was growing in his adult feathers, though he was still half the size of the brown hen and had no wattles to speak of. “Finder, find me the safest place for me to be.”
Finder cocked his head to one side, then turned and walked to the dust-wife’s feet, where he began scratching in the dirt after an interesting worm.
“Ah,” said the dust-wife.
“But we have to stop by my cottage. I want my good medicine chest and I’m not leaving all my chickens. And I want seeds of all my good plants. And…”
“Yes, yes.” The dust-wife turned back to Fenris and Marra. “You two will be better off making your own way. By which I mean that all this poorly suppressed longing is giving me hives.”
Fenris coughed. Marra put her hands over her face.
“Come see us,” said Agnes. “Please. I’ll want someone to talk to who isn’t grumpy.”
“I’m not grumpy.”
“You are an absolute grump and so is your chicken.” The two old women climbed into the wagon and drove away, still bickering. Marra felt a pang in her heart and a surge of relief, all at once.
They spent the day where they had made camp the night before, in a little shepherd’s hut on a hillside, out of the wind. Fenris kept the fire up, and Marra threaded wire through bits of bone, rubbing her fingers across the broad, faithful skull and the long cage of ribs, the narrow whip of tail.
He sat beside her and handed her bones and wire as she asked, but he did not press her.
At sunset, just as the light from the fire became brighter than the light from the doorway, she finished. The skeleton lay across her lap, complete, claws wired to paws, vertebrae strung like beads.
“Wake,” she whispered, while the light faded outside the door. “Wake. Please.”
The bones lay motionless in her lap. She bowed her head. Please. Please, Bonedog. I’m never going to see my sister again, or my mother. I’m not going to see the Sister Apothecary or the abbess. I need one more friend. Please.
It was too much like the first time. The second impossible task was also the third. She had always known that she had gotten off too lightly, being handed the moon in a jar.
Fenris took her free hand, careful of her sore fingertips, and held it between his palms, waiting with her.
“Please,” she said again, and a single tear ran hotly down her cheek and splashed on the white expanse of skull.
Bonedog yawned and stretched and woke.
Marra let out a sob of relief and buried her head in Fenris’s neck. He held her in the crook of his arm while Bonedog stood up and bounced and cavorted around the hut.
“We’ll have to get him enchanted again,” said Fenris, watching the dog trying to lick parts that had vanished along with the glamour.
“We’ll figure something out.”
“Mm. And what happens now? Are you going back to your convent?”
Marra thought about sitting up, but it was very warm against his side. “You said once that you couldn’t go back,” she said. “You said that homesickness wasn’t worth a clan war.”
Fenris nodded. “It’s still true.”
“If I go home now, I don’t know what will happen. Maybe nothing. But they’ll probably marry me off and I’ll be back in that world and I … I’m not good at it. I’m so very bad at it. And there’s always a chance that someone figures out what we did.” Marra took a deep breath. “I think it’s more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Very likely.” He was looking at her with that grave, thoughtful look again, but there was a hint of humor in his eyes, which was encouraging or maddening or both together.
“And I already agreed to help you ransom the other humans in the goblin market.”
“You did.”
“So. Maybe you and I could … not go home together?”
The words hung in the air between them, as fine as spun glass and just as fragile. Marra waited for him to say something, to catch the words or shatter them, whichever he chose.
“I think I’d like that,” said Fenris.
Marra sagged with relief.
She had been so focused on what he might say that she hadn’t quite expected what he might do. So it came as a surprise when he wrapped both arms around her and put his lips against her hair. “I think I would like that very much,” he murmured.
“Oh good,” said Marra against his neck. And then she would have kissed him or he would have kissed her, but Bonedog decided that they were wrestling and jumped up and barked soundlessly at them both.
Black dog, white dog,
Live dog, dead dog,
Yellow dog, run!
Author’s Note
This book started in a grocery store parking lot, with the line “with the dog made of bone at your side.” I don’t know why, but that line showed up in my head and started hammering away like a tuneless earworm.
It’s always neat when something drops in your lap like that, but you generally spend the first hour trying to figure out if you thought of it or if it’s a fragment of something you read once. Authors have minds like packrats and a lot of stuff gets squirreled away, some of which belongs to other people. Nevertheless, the line was insistent and didn’t seem familiar.
By the time I reached the grocery store, it had grown to “You came to me in your cloak of nettles with the dog made of bone at your side.” At the checkout line, I had most of a very short story called “Godmother.” It had a lot of imagery in common with the book you just read, though the plot, such as it was, was very different. I put it on the internet and then in an anthology and then went on about my life.
Still, the images nagged at me. Why did she build her own dog out of bones? Why were her hands stained with a prince’s blood? What does building your own dog feel like? Who was the godmother narrating the story? Judging by some of my reader mail, it nagged at them too. People wanted to know about the woman with the bone dog.