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“I’m tired.” Rue sat down too, cursing at the pain flaring from hips and knees. Now that she had someone in her corner, her resolve faltered.

“You’re old is what you are.” Senna stalked about, ridiculous on her crow’s legs. “You’re an old woman. A toothless hag.”

“I have my teeth.” Insecurity had Rue’s fingers at her lips. “Most of them anyway.” She spat angrily. She’d thought she’d outgrown her old insecurities.

“You should have the grace to die so that the rest of us can move on rather than hang around you like some ragtag carnival rejects. Go back to the river. Take the boat.”

Rue put her hands to her cheeks, rubbing as if she could rub away the years. She lowered them, looking closely. Bony fingers, wrinkle-clad. They weren’t the hands she knew.

“Leave Sunder to someone else,” Bek said. “He won’t last forever. A hero will come along. A bigger bad. Or time will pull him down all by itself. You don’t have to—”

“Sunder?” Rue remembered him. The warlord on the edge of her open grave, ready to unthrone the gods themselves. The Morrigan stalking across the dead, defying him. The boy who had so many years ago visited the Academy with his royal parents. Those years which bore down on her so hard seemed to have slipped from his shoulders, as if those who called him a demigod had the right of it. “You think this is about him?” She got to her feet with a snarl. “I don’t give a damn what the goddess wants. I was done with her the day I finished with all this Kindness nonsense.”

“What in seven hells are we doing here, then?” Senna croaked.

“They killed my friends. All I want is a word with the person who made that happen, some fucking baron, Mancer, wasn’t it? I’ll have my pound of flesh from that one and be done with it. After that I don’t give a damn!”

Einsa stood up too. She held a bronze mark, edge on, between finger and thumb. “And what if I gave you this back and told you to use it to pay the fare?” She nodded towards the river.

For a moment uncertainty chilled the blood in Rue’s veins. She met the ghost’s hollow gaze. “You wouldn’t do that. But if you did…I would take the ferry.”

Einsa shrugged. “I wouldn’t do it.” She held the coin out on the flat of her palm. “But you could take it anyway.”

Rue turned from her and looked out across the Badlands. Somewhere out there were the caves that joined the Academy’s catacombs. Hidden in the folds of death’s borders were a thousand nooks and crannies through which an unquiet soul could crawl to return to haunt the living. Her pain flared in anticipation of all those miles. The untold timeless years of searching. “Do you know the way?”

“I don’t,” Bek said. “But she does.” She stared at Senna.

The crow took to the air with a squawk of betrayal, evading Rue’s grasp.

“Give it up!” A harsh cry from above, where Senna flew against a black sky.

Rue balled her fists. “They killed my friends!”

“I’m not your friend!”

“Fine.” Rue reached into her shift and drew forth a bronze mark. One of the nine they gave her on that day of days. She held it aloft, pinched between finger and thumb, arm stretched out.

“Fine!” A dark shape plucked it from her grasp in an explosion of feathers. “I still don’t like you.” The crow’s cry reached her from on high.

“That’s okay.” Rue shrugged off her ghosts and set out in the direction of the caw. “Friends don’t have to like each other.”

33

Rue

“Oh…that hurt.” Rue rolled over on the wet ground and stared up at a sky as black as the one she’d left behind, only sprinkled with stars. She pushed herself up into a sitting position. “Dear gods, this hurts almost as much.” She sniffed. “Did he…damn him. I think he pissed on my corpse.”

A flutter of wings and a nearby branch creaked under new weight. “We’re back, then. I earned my mark.”

“Damn, I’m cold.” Rue’s flesh presumably had cooled to the temperature of the ground during her absence. She thought it must be the night of the same day since nothing had come to chew at her fingers yet or peck out her eyes. If the Cruelty had thought to cut off her head, this return might have gone very differently. A good cremation could have sealed the door entirely. Unpleasant as Lip-Scar’s final disrespect had been, it could have gone a lot worse.

As it was, with the Cruelty and his negation gone, the Morrigan’s blessing, or curse, was able to reestablish itself and allow Rue to function despite fatal injuries and a distinct shortage of blood.

“Won’t he just find you again?” Senna croaked from the tree.

“Depends how close he is and what I do.” Day-Father had found her the first time she’d used the power he’d raised her to inherit. The Ingredient had saved both her and Sharp from the Kindnesses’ elixir, but it had told the Cruelties where to find her.

“The smoke might have drawn him towards Pye, but it didn’t follow you here, and he found you anyway,” Senna cawed. “He found you the same way the Cruelties found every other Kindness.”