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Senna gave her that sideways look crows are so good at. “In a hurry?”

“You were right all along. Is that what you wanted to hear? I’m not a good person. Never have been.”

The crow flew off towards the house. Perhaps each of them saw the other as a mirror, and not liking what confronted them they were edging each other towards a foolish act of heroism.

“Dammit.” Rue kept unwinding the rope.

By the time Senna returned, Rue had the skiff on the water, the long pole in her hands. She felt unsteady, shifting on the current, her natural balance eroded by passing decades. Water had never been her element in any case.

“Well?” she demanded of the bird.

“Empty.”

“Then for a little while longer you can hang on to the false belief that I would have helped if you’d told me different.” Rue set the skiff in motion, releasing an oath as a wobble nearly pitched her into the flow. After a while she sat down on the damp boards, trailing the pole to steer them and letting the current set the pace. Already her brother’s closeness was diminishing, like a toothache averted. The thought of her daughter diminished too, as it had so often before after innumerable resolutions to seek her out. Perhaps they’d made the cleanest cut they could, and it was better left alone. Hunting Cela down felt a selfish instinct now. And she could hardly lead Lip-Scar to her child. Then they really would see how deep his resentment ran.

This close to the Innat Hills the Wentwash ran swiftly, its current hauling them along, chewing away the miles. Senna settled on the prow, peering downriver, a figurehead for their vessel. A light drizzle fell, beading the reeds and bullrushes along the banks. The land offered from the river was rugged, more rocks than soil, dotted here and there with lone houses, occasionally a small cluster huddled together for company. None of it on fire.

“Where are you taking us, Senna?”

“I don’t know—”

“You better fucking know! This ain’t the direction I need to go for the baron.” When Rue spoke to Senna, the peasant she’d been pretending to be for so long infected her voice. She wondered when the pretending stopped being pretence and she actually became a peasant. “Where’re we going?”

“I don’t know. I’ve just got a pull. Like when I led you out of the dead place. I didn’t get it till you gave me that mark neither, no matter what that girl’s ghost said. I got a pull. Like when birds know where to head in winter, or to find their way back to the nest. That. It feels weird and I don’t like it. But that’s what I’ve got.”

“Huh.” Rue settled back into the curve of the skiff, letting the current have its way. She wadded some old sacking in behind her to cushion the contact. “Better lead us somewhere more useful than an old bird’s nest.”

Senna hunched against the strengthening rain. “You got a direction you like more—then take it.”

By day two the river was slower but still brisk, as if eager to be rid of the place. The land about them lay flat and dreary. Occasional hamlets seemed to have been deposited by some ancient deluge and had then decided to make a go of it anyway.

In time the Wentwash slowed again and began to wind its way into the heartland of the former kingdom of Regon, throwing wide loops across the floor of a valley carved by something greater than a river. Millennia of flooding had piled fertile soil around the river’s meanderings, and by the third day the farmhouses looked much further away from collapse. The spring crops showed sufficient quantity that avarice rather than desperation would prompt the harvest. They passed villages, and then a town.

Senna returned to the prow, having taken wing to scan for threats and opportunities. “You should see how these people live! All of them got cows and pigs. Better houses than mine too. Every one of them. Maybe the empire ain’t such a bad thing.” She shrugged a crow-shrug. “The emperor does all right for his people round here…”

“You’re a loyal subject now?” Rue raised an eyebrow and resisted pointing out that ultimately it was the emperor who burned Senna’s house, his purse that paid the mercenaries. If the baron hadn’t been there to pay the wergild, then Rue would have had to carry her demand to the capital, all the way to Sunder’s doors.

“Just saying.” A crow-sniff followed. “He looks after them. At least round here.”

“I expect you’d like him.” Rue made her own shrug. “He always had a certain charm.”

Senna chattered out a harsh and raucous laugh. “You don’t know the emperor!”

Rue applied herself to the pole. “No, you’re right there. I don’t suppose I ever did.”

As the river slowed, Rue felt the presence of the Cruelty again, pressing on her mind, not close but growing closer, his feet plotting a straighter course than the one the current chose for them. She steered clear of other craft, and even where the navigable width narrowed, the river folk gave her a wide berth.

This land had been the first prize Sunder reached for after taking his uncle’s throne. It was worth noting that, in murdering his way through his own family, Sunder had broken laws that the Kindnesses were bound to punish him for breaking. Save for the predations of the Cruelties, a Kindness would very likely have nipped the warlord’s empire-building in the bud.

The scars of those early battles had faded and the peoples of Regon for the most part now counted themselves proud citizens of the Abronan Empire. Especially the young.

Out in the borderlands, in the hamlets and villages like Pye and Stones Corner, the peasants were more concerned with survival than with whoever nominally governed them in the name of the warlord. This Baron Mancer was the latest in a line of proxies to warm the lesser throne with their overprivileged arses. Rue hadn’t even known his name until the mercenary leader had offered it up.

As far as the well-fed locals were concerned, Rue or anyone else from the Tavoland border might have come from some distant country, maybe even crossed the Narrow Sea from Gog. Traders nudged their barges clear, though they outweighed her skiff a thousandfold.

Mud might have obscured the gory record of her recent adventures to a degree where the casual observer could ignore the stains, but even so, something about this ragged traveller instructed others to look away. Perhaps her own recent encounter with a far more infamous boatman still echoed around her, persuading others to avoid her even if they couldn’t name a specific reason for doing so.

Maybe it was that they sensed she was being chased. As the Cruelty’s presence pressed closer, Rue began to pole the skiff whenever the riverbed lay shallow enough. During the long night when hunger chewed at her, she wondered if Lip-Scar might have secured himself a vessel too. How else did he continue to narrow the gap despite the river’s unsleeping progress?