[Sin Eater's Daughter 3] The Scarecrow Queen

by Melinda Salisbury

  He tugs the knots at my legs until the rope unspools.

  “What are you—?”

  “You’re going to need to run. So we’ll have to risk leaving your feet free, for a while.”

  He moves behind me and unties my wrists too, but keeps a tight grip on them. With an apologetic twist of his mouth, he binds them again, in front of me, though he leaves a foot of loose rope between them, so I have some movement.

  “What if he commands her to return to him?” Margot asks.

  Merek hesitates.

  “Tie more rope around this,” I hold up my hands and nod at the bindings. “Like a leash. Then you can pull me back if you have to.”

  Margot opens the tiny back door and peers out, and Merek quickly knots a new length of rope to the one at my wrists, then hauls the sacks on to his back. He holds my lead in his hands and we wait for Margot to give us the all-clear.

  “Now,” she barks, and we go, bolting from her house like racing dogs from their posts.

  We don’t even say thank you or goodbye as we leave; there’s no time. We run full pelt to the back wall. With Merek’s help, I get up and over the wall, landing in someone else’s small yard, and we keep moving that way, him linking his fingers together so I can stand in the cradle of his hands and haul myself over fence after fence, avoiding the main thoroughfare. At the end of the row, we climb over a last wall, and then we’re back on the streets. The sound of the bell drowns everything else out, I can’t hear voices, or footsteps, or even my own boots against the muddy lanes.

  Merek keeps the rope leash between us short, so I know which passage to turn down not long after he decides it. We see no one, not even the twitching of a window slat or a shadow on a wall.

  We stop behind a tavern that has cobwebbed windows, an air of neglect surrounding it. We both lean against the damp wall to catch our breath, my lungs burning as I suck down the icy air.

  “There’s a trade gate the other side of the pub,” Merek gasps between breaths. “I don’t know if it’s manned.”

  “Won’t it be locked?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  “Wait here,” Merek says, and before I can protest, he’s dropped the rope and vanished around the corner. Fear spikes as soon as he’s out of sight – what if I’m possessed in this very moment? – but then Merek is back, picking the rope up again and giving me a grim sort-of smile.

  “Unmanned, and the lock looks intact. I’ll need your help.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” I hiss.

  Merek says nothing, jerking his head to indicate we need to leave.

  The bell sounds further away now, deadened by the buildings between us and the castle.

  “Lift on three,” Merek says, bracing his hands under the thick wooden plank lodged inside iron braces.

  I place my own, bound hands under it.

  “One. Two—”

  The bell pauses for a split second, and in it I hear the whisper of metal sliding against leather. I whirl, and come face-to-face with a pair of soldiers, the triple gold stars on their tabards glowing faintly.

  “Merek.” I barely have time to warn him before they’re on us, knives in hand like assassins.

  I raise my bound arms in the nick of time, the knife of the man nearest me biting into them, fraying the outer edge of the rope. I kick out immediately, making contact with his knee.

  He grunts at the impact, and staggers, grabbing outwards instinctively to stay upright. But I’m not ready for it, and he pulls me off balance, so we both tumble down.

  I roll as I land, which saves me from being winded, but my body still judders as the ground meets my side, and he recovers first, crawling over to me. His hands scrabble for my shoulders, trying to pin me, spittle flying from his mouth as he roars a battle cry. I raise my knee between his legs, and miss. He reaches for the rope attached to the binding on my wrists and begins to pull it, but as he shifts to pull it from between us I force my shoulder up, catching his chin and making his teeth smash together with a terrible crack. Then I knee him again, and this time I get him, his eyes glazing as the pain consumes him. Another knee to the stomach to get him off me, and then I push myself up, panting heavily. As he bends double, cradling himself, I slip my bound arms over my head and pull back, pressing the rope into his throat, trying to knock him out, as Merek did me.

  I chance a look over at Merek as the guard fights against me, his struggles becoming weaker. Merek is removing a dagger from the other man’s side, wiping it clean on his tunic before putting it in his belt.

  He looks over at me and nods grimly, and at the same time I realize the man I’ve been fighting has stopped moving. When I unhook my hands from his throat, he falls, rolling slightly and staring up at the sky with bloodshot eyes.

  It takes me a second to understand that I killed him.

  “Come on,” Merek urges me, but I can’t move.

  I killed someone.

  “Errin,” Merek barks.

  I don’t take my eyes from the dead man. He has a little scuff on his chin, and I can see some of it is silvery white. He’s perhaps my father’s age.

  Behind me, Merek grunts loudly, and there is a splintering, breaking sound, followed almost immediately by an almighty crash.

  I turn slowly, moving as if I’m suspended in honey, to see the gate is now open. Then Merek’s arms are under my shoulders and he’s hauling me up.

  Once I’m upright, he moves to look at my face.

  “Are you hurt?”

  I shake my head.

  “Then let’s go.”

  He grabs my wrists and pulls, and I totter after him, twisting to look once more at the body. I killed someone. It should have been harder.

  Merek pulls me out into the wild darkness of Lormere, dragging me off the road and into the fields that surround the capital city. In the grey light of winter dawn, the trees look like skeletons.

  We cross one field, then another, then another, jogging for a while, then walking, turning back to watch the red light around Lormere castle grow fainter and fainter, until, after almost two hours, even the faintest glow can’t be seen. I wonder what Aurek will do if the whole castle burns to the ground. Where will he go? Who will pay for last night?

  Did he allow Mama the Elixir?

  A mist thickens the air, coming from nowhere, and I stay close to Merek, but I’m so focused on keeping my eyes on him instead of where I’m going that his warning to “mind the brook!” comes too late. My foot cracks the thin layer of ice atop it, sending a wave of freezing water into my boot and shocking me out of my thoughts with a small “Oh!” of surprise.

  Merek sighs heavily and pulls me from the small stream as I mutter curses under my breath. He leads me over to a stately, thick tree, and urges me to sit. I sink down on to the ground, nestling myself between two forked roots and leaning back.

  Silently, he drops the bags to the ground and lowers himself before me. He pulls the boot off, holding it up to tip out the droplets of water that have remained.

  He reaches for one of the bags, rummaging inside it, pulling various fabric objects from it. When he’s satisfied he reaches for my leg again, peeling off the now-sodden sock.

  The intimacy of it shocks me, and I try to draw my foot away. “What are you doing?”

  He gives me a dark look. “On my progress, we got stuck in Tallith. There was a terrible storm, and our shelter got soaked. Everything got soaked. Clothes, sleeping rolls, food. We had to manage. But it wasn’t good. And it got a lot worse as the days passed. You know, there’s a certain type of fungus that grows in the damp recesses of feet.”

  “Oyster foot,” I say automatically. It’s named for men who stand all day in seawater, gathering oysters from their underwater beds, and don’t let their feet dry off before they put their boots on.

  “Then you know of it? And how uncomfortable, and smelly, it can be.”

  “Did you get it?” I ask.

  A smile ghosts the left corner of his m
outh. “No. I was a proper prince about it, and insisted that my boots and socks be dried out before I put them back on. Some of the others scoffed, and wore their damp boots with pride. I took the ribbing with surprising good grace.” He starts to pat my foot dry with one of the cloaks while I pretend it’s not awkward to have a prince dry your feet for you.

  “Because you knew what would happen to them?”

  He nods. “I spent four years reading everything I could about life in the field. Every army document, every herbalist’s manual. If there were commendations for boys who learned how to survive in the wild, I would have earned them all.”

  “What did they do, when it happened?”

  He gifts me with one of his rare, hard-won smiles. “They asked me how to fix it. And I took some lavender, vinegar and some wild garlic, and I made a paste that cleared it up within a fortnight.”

  I feel my own lips curve, because it’s exactly the right thing to do, and I would never have expected it of him, even after I’ve seen first-hand how resourceful and clever he is. But then I remember the dead guard and I lower my head.

  Apparently satisfied I’m no longer at immediate risk from oyster foot, Merek eases a new, dry sock on to my foot, then stuffs the boot with another piece of cloth and puts it aside.

  He reaches into the second bag and pulls out a water skin, and some of the bread and ham. He offers them to me, and I take what I want before passing them back, watching as he rips the bread apart and places the ham inside.

  “I’ve never killed anyone before, either,” he says quietly, when he’s finished chewing. “Well, not directly. Not with my own hands.”

  I look up. “Not with your own hands?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m responsible for my mother’s death, indirectly. Had I not imprisoned her, he wouldn’t have found her.”

  I’ve never asked Merek about his mother. I assumed she’d died when Aurek came, but I’ve never probed into the details. I stay silent, waiting.

  “From what I heard, she tried to pretend she was a commoner to get free, once he’d announced he killed me. But some of the prisoners he took told him the truth. So she tried to offer him alliance, which was what she wanted all along. Apparently he laughed in her face. He didn’t even kill her himself. I wasn’t there.” He pauses, pulling the cloth free from the boot and seeking out another one, stuffing it inside. “But the guards in the guard room talk a lot. And someone has to fetch and carry for them. They said. . .” Again he stops talking, and I lean forward, reaching for his still hands with my bound ones. He nods gratefully. “They said he had a golem snap her neck. That when she said she deserved to be killed by him, monarch to monarch, he laughed at her. And kept laughing.”

  “Merek,” I say quietly.

  “So she’s one. Then I suppose you could lay the deaths of every Lormerian who died when he invaded at my feet. Soldiers, staff, citizens. The boy who died in my place, too. Everyone in Tregellan, when he wasn’t stopped. And your mother.” He looks up. “If Aurek won’t give her the Elixir, then I’ll have killed her too.”

  “Don’t,” I say sharply. I can’t think about it. I can’t afford to be angry with him. In the distance I hear the faintest sound of dogs barking, the haze distorting the sound. “Just don’t, please.”

  After a moment, he speaks. “Let me ask you something, then. Did you mean to kill the man who attacked you?”

  I shake my head. “I was trying to knock him out.”

  “Whereas I was definitely trying to kill the guard I fought with.” He looks down at the knife tucked into his belt. “And I’d do it again. I suspect I’ll have to, before this is over. I feel a little stupid, though.”

  “Why?”

  He waits for a long moment. Then: “Death always seemed so easy,” he says finally, speaking out into the night. “I would read stories full of brave warriors and assassins and how they would deliver speedy deaths, and then walk away. They’d go to the taverns and drink with their friends, or go home to their lovers. They never said anything about how they felt afterwards. They took a life, and that was that. So easy. So . . . normal. And yet I don’t think I’m ever going to forget how it felt to kill that man. It’s one thing to cause a death, but another to deliver it. With hardly any pressure, or thought, I managed it. And I felt every inch of the knife sliding into him. I think I always will.” He looks down at his hands. “They don’t tell you that part.”

  The dog barks again, louder now, and all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  “Merek,” I say. “He wouldn’t send the dogs after us, would he?”

  Merek looks at me, his face blank. Then he rips the cloth from my boot and throws it at me. As I scramble to put it back on, he gathers up the discarded fabric and shoves it in the bag. He lifts it, flinging it as far away as he can, trying to distract them, buying us a few extra seconds. Hopefully. He shoulders the second bag as a chorus of barks and howls rends the night apart as they catch the freshness of our scent.

  “We have to get to water,” Merek says, reaching for the rope at my wrists and slicing it through with the knife. He sees my horrified expression. “You’ll need all the momentum you can get. Besides, I’d rather you killed me than the dogs.”

  Then once again, we’re running.

  Every single second I’m waiting for my body to betray me, for the command to come that will stop me in my tracks. Even as we fly through the fog, pain burning in my sides as I gasp for breath, I imagine the slow stop, the turn, the hounds leaping towards me, jaws open, stinking breath in my face.

  A little ahead of me Merek is running for all he’s worth, cutting through the meadow like a blade, arms swinging back and forth with precision as he moves. I wish it was dark, wish we still had the cover of night. I feel too exposed out here in the open. Every now and then Merek glances back, eyes on me, then over my shoulder, before he turns back in the direction we’re heading.

  Though he said we need to get to water, he didn’t say if there was any near, and I keep the refrain please-please-please in my mind. We leave the meadow and find ourselves in a small copse, where we have to take care, as roots hide in the shadows to trip us up.

  At one point I gasp that maybe we should climb the trees, but Merek snaps “No” at me without even turning around. So we keep running, out of the woodland, into more farmland, the muscles in my legs screaming from weeks of disuse, my lungs and chest burning, sharp pain in my side. The dogs still bark behind us, getting ever louder as they get ever closer.

  “There!” Merek screams, and it seems that whatever he’s spotted is enough, because he pelts towards it, widening the gap between us. I do the same, a cry wrenching itself from my lips as I force my poor body to pick up speed.

  Then my ankle gives, and I stumble. I feel the layers of skins rubbing away on my palms as my hands fly out to protect me. My knees take the brunt of the fall as I slide forward on the momentum of my running, scraped raw beneath the breeches, and I close my mouth and eyes against the mud and stone that fly into my face.

  The dogs are even louder.

  I look behind me and for the first time I can see the dogs, cutting through the dark, shadows low to the ground as they race towards me.

  Then Merek is there, hauling me up, an arm around my waist, and I try to move but my ankle hurts, my knees hurt, my hands sting.

  “Just go,” I tell him.

  Instead he swings me up and into his arms, grunting under my weight.

  Over his shoulder I can make out the patterns in the dogs’ fur now, striped and brindled, their teeth gleaming as they yip and call to each other, running us down. I turn to the front and I see something shining, silver – water – glittering ahead of us. We’re going to make it.

  Something slams into us from behind, and I fly out of Merek’s arms, landing a few feet from the water’s edge. Merek is on his front, one of the dogs on his back, savaging the pack there, food flying out, but the dog ignores it, intent on the man beneath it.

 
He looks up and his eyes are terrified.

  He’s not of their pack.

  I stagger to my feet and my hands reach for a rock behind me.

  I throw the first one at the beast with all my might, and miss. But the next one hits its flank with a wet popping sound, and the dog snarls and looks up at me. It bares its teeth and a low, primal rumble echoes from it.

  Even as my legs turn to jelly, I fire a third stone, then a fourth, at it, missing at first as it dodges, but its motion moves it into the path of the second, the rock hitting it square in the face. It whimpers in apparent surprise, then leaps off Merek, heading straight for me.

  I take a deep breath and throw myself backwards into the water, the dog’s face inches from mine as I crash through the frigid surface and all the air is pushed from my lungs. The world becomes black around me, and for a moment I don’t know which way is up or down. The water is cold, thick, and pressing; my palms and knees sting where the skin is raw and bleeding still. I spin, trying to stay calm and get my bearings, but bubbles cloud my vision and I start to sink. I’m too heavy. The cloak, the boots. They have to go.

  I feel the urge to breathe start to pull at me and panic sets in, my heart racing.

  Think! I tell myself.

  I tug off my boots, dropping them down into the murky water. Then I hold myself still, ignoring my lungs’ frantic demand for air, and open my eyes, looking for the cloak. When I make out the edge of it floating above me, I push in that direction, and finally break the surface. The moment I do I unhook it from around my throat and watch as it floats away.

  As I gasp for air, I peer around until I see Merek, fifteen foot away from where I’ve surfaced downstream and I strike out to get back to him, fighting the current, the water feeling dangerously warmer as I get used to it. As I get closer I see Merek crawling towards the river, the dog dead with his knife sticking out of its temple. There is a moment of relief, and I call out to him.

  Then two more dogs move silently out of the mist.

  “Merek!” I scream, but with a snarl they both leap forward, one landing on his back and the other clamping its jaws on to his leg.