Seconds later, she was dead.
Cat and Raven stood. “What the I-don’t-know-what was that all about?” Cat asked.
“I had to be sure she was who I thought she was.” With one toe, Raven nudged a leather satchel. “That’s the bag we came for.”
Cat picked it up. Dimly, she heard sirens. The military had arrived at last, it seemed, with ambulances and real doctors and trained paramedics. For which, she thought, thank the Goddess. Because she was exhausted.
And Cat passed out.
All shall be well and all shall be well and every manner of thing shall be well.
—Julian of Norwich
Soldiers set up tents and carted away bodies and put out fires and shouted angrily at anyone who was clearly a civilian and not dying. In the ensuing chaos, it was the easiest thing in the world to slip away. Raven commandeered a military pickup truck—“In wartime, it’s commandeering, not theft,” she explained—and, taking turns behind the wheel, they traveled north and east on winding roads toward the Debatable Hills. The countryside was eerily peaceful. Crops were being gathered in and scarecrows burned to placate the fields for the theft of their produce. But in the country stores where they stopped for supplies, citizens clustered about newspapers and radios and spoke in low, worried voices.
The baby was fed breast milk when they could buy it, cow’s milk when they could not, and formula when nothing else was available. He seemed to like all of them equally and he ran through diapers like nobody’s business. All things considered, it didn’t take him long to get over the loss of his mother. “Who’s a little rascal?” Raven said to the imp as Cat drove. “Who’s my itty-bitty scamp? You are! Yes, you are.”
“So what’s the story with the kid and his mother?” Cat asked.
“It’s personal,” Raven replied.
“Given the situation, I kinda want to know.”
“Yeah, well, just because you want to know something doesn’t mean you ever will,” Raven said, and lapsed into a sullen silence.
They drove through lush and verdant lands with hills so green they hurt to look at them and valleys so beautiful as to make Cat forget to keep her eyes on the road until Raven screamed at her to get back on her side of the line. In the evening, they booked weeklong stays in the finest inns they could find and in the morning they went for a drive after breakfast and never came back. It was all tremendous fun and would have been as good as any vacation Cat had ever experienced if it weren’t for the horrors of the Brocielande Station raid and the nightmares that woke her in the middle of the night.
This near-idyllic existence lasted until they came to the Great River and discovered that the bridge across it had been secured by the regional guard, who were stopping all vehicles and examining the credentials of everyone in them. Or so said a hulder who had come from the far side and paused to share the information. There was a backup miles long as a result.
Cat pulled the pickup off the road and Raven lit a cigarette. “We’re screwed if they ask for our IDs,” she said. “You don’t have any and mine were issued years in the future.”
“So what do we do?”
“Improvise.”
At Raven’s direction, Cat wheeled the truck about and drove back to the last town they had passed through. It was clearly a staging point for the Armies of the West, for there were young soldiers in uniform everywhere. “Park here,” Raven said when they’d reached the center of town and, leaning out the window, caught the eye of one. “Hey, warrior! You got a spare uniform in that duffel bag?”
The soldier was a woods fey, of a height with Raven, and had an easy grin. He ambled to the truck and put down the bag. “What’s it to you?”
“We’ve got to return this brat to his folks in Garena, other side of the river, and my sister’s driver’s license is expired. I’m thinking, though, if someone were to lend me a uniform, I could bluff my way across.”
“Oh, yeah? If I lent you my uniform would you let me watch you take it off when you return it?”
“I’ll do a lot more than that, handsome. You look like you haven’t mustered in yet. Are you free tonight? Meet us in the Black Hart in Garena at nineteen hundred hours and my sister and I will give you a night you’ll never forget.”
Even knowing that Raven was making empty promises, Cat couldn’t help but blush. The soldier’s grin grew wider at that, which compounded her embarrassment.
“Ma’am, you had me at letting me see you in your undies.” The soldier opened his duffel bag, dug out the spare uniform, and handed it to Raven. Who, almost simultaneously, kicked Cat in the ankle.
Cat started up the truck and pulled into the road. Raven blew the soldier a kiss. “Bring some silk scarves,” she said, “and I’ll let you tie me up.”
On the far side of town, they found a barbershop. Raven went in and emerged with a haircut so short and ugly there could be no doubt she was presenting as a male and a military one to boot. “Oh, Raven—your hair!” Cat cried.
“It’ll grow back. It always does.”
After that they stopped at the hardware store, where Raven bought a dog collar and chain. “Put ’em on,” she said and, when Cat had, “Okay. Gimme the wheel. It’s showtime.”
* * *
Two hours of stop-and-go traffic later, they came to the roadblock at the foot of the bridge. “Amateurs,” Cat said out of the corner of her mouth. “You want to set up the checkpoint a distance from the bridge so if an IED goes off, it doesn’t do any damage to the asset.”
“If they had any idea what they were doing, they wouldn’t be defending a bridge in the middle of their own territory,” Raven replied. “They’re inexperienced and antsy and they’re making it up as they go along. I can work with that. Now. I’m going to spin these guys an ugly little fantasy. Are you down with that?”
“Uh … sure.”
“I’m holding you to your word. Keep your eyes down and don’t say anything. No matter what garbage you hear, show no emotion whatsoever.”
A kobold and a pair of tiddy men, all in regional guard uniforms, approached the truck. “Get out of the vehicle, sir,” the kobold said.
Raven tied the end of Cat’s dog chain to the steering wheel. “Stay!” she told Cat, and climbed out.
Cat stared down at her lap, said nothing.
“What’s this?” one of the tiddy men asked.
“War wife,” Raven said. “Picked up her and two others in the aftermath of the Brocielande Station raid, but I gave one to my CO and the other to a buddy. Plenty more where they came from.”
“War wife, eh?” said one tiddy man.
“That’s a new one on me,” said the other.
“Yeah,” said the kobold. “What’s the deal?”
“War wives are like real wives,” said Raven, “except more obedient. Plus, they don’t have any claim on you. Also, you can have as many as you want. They’re property, essentially.”
The guardsmen looked at one another. “You say you just picked up three of ’em. How’s that work?” the kobold asked.
“You grab ’em, you train ’em, you keep ’em. Simple as that. It wouldn’t be legal for civilians. But in times of war certain legal and social protections are loosened for…” Talking, Raven strolled out of earshot, pulling the guardsmen after her. Just as well, too, in Cat’s opinion. She wasn’t exactly enjoying anything she was hearing.
Not much later, the guardsmen returned, opened the door for Raven, and waved her on her way. At no time had they asked to see her papers.
When the bridge was invisible behind them, Raven said, “You can take off the dog collar now.”
Cat threw the thing out the window. “Just what kind of ideas have you put into the heads of those assholes?”
“I told them that to acquire a war wife legally, it had to be done in broad daylight with ranking officers nearby for witnesses. Then that their victims had to be driven around real slow to teach them that nobody was going to come to their aid if they called for help. T
hen that … Trust me, if they try to act on my advice—and I’m kinda hoping they do—they’ll wind up in the brig so fast they won’t know what hit them.”
* * *
Early the next afternoon, Cat and Raven saw two sand giants digging holes in the middle of a bright-green field of oats, casually destroying the crops around them in the process. Since she was planning to swap out drivers soon anyway, Cat stopped the pickup truck and leaned out the window. “Hey!” she shouted. “What are you doing?”
The sand giantess mopped her forehead and, putting down her shovel, wandered over to the road. Sitting, to bring her face level with Cat’s, she said, “War’s begun. Our kind’s always the first to be drafted and the first to die. Because of our size, you see. On the one hand, we’re strong. On the other hand, we’re easy targets. Face it, you don’t have to be much of a shot to hit one of us with a bazooka, do you? So my hubby and me are going to hibernate for forty, fifty years. We’ll sleep through this fuss and dig our way out after it’s over.”
The sand giant had stumped over to see what was going on. Now he loomed over his spouse, listening.
“Fifty years is a long time,” Cat said.
“Yup,” the sand giant agreed.
“Tell me about it!” The sand giantess threw her hands up in the air. “Worst thing is, all those years in the earth erode your recollection. After I dug my way out last time, I came to with no memory of my past at all.”
“No memory nor hardly no clothes neither,” the sand giant rumbled. “They’d all rotted off of her. I could see everything. You name it, I saw it.”
“Behave yourself!” The giantess punched him in the shoulder so hard that it would have shattered the bones of a lesser being. “You did a lot more than look.”
The giant sat down alongside his wife and clasped her hand. “We bonded.”
“Oh, is that what you’re calling it now?”
“After we’d been together a few years, we went to the local hag and told her we intended to get hitched. But she laughed and said we was already married. Every time a war came along, we went underground, forgot our pasts, and when we dug out, fell for each other all over again. We was kind of a local legend.”
“Course, the hag also said that four or five hundred years ago, loverboy here was married to a slut with hair the color of straw. Only she dug her way out early once and wandered off, never to be seen again.”
“No big loss,” said the sand giant. “Can’t even recollect her name.”
Raven walked to the driver’s side of the pickup and opened the door. “Slide over. This has been one swell conversation, but we’ve got to get moving.”
“We were having a nice little chat,” Cat objected.
“Were. Aren’t anymore. Get your ass in gear.”
The sand giant stood and slapped his hands against his knees and butt to knock off the dirt. Then he helped his wife up. “Time we went back to work anyway. We got holes to dig and the draft to dodge.”
“That’s right,” said the sand giantess. “Then, before we bury ourselves to sleep, we’re gonna want to bond the living daylights out of each other.”
* * *
As they drove off, Cat said, “Are you setting an egg?”
“No!”
“Just asking. Because you were pretty testy with those folks back there.” There was something different about Raven today. Abruptly, Cat realized what it was. “Hey. You’re not smoking. You haven’t had a cigarette all day.”
“Gave ’em up after the bridge yesterday. Withdrawal gives me a way to redirect my anger.”
“Anger at what?”
“Anger at those idiots at the bridge. At everyone who makes war possible. At anyone who flies dragons. At you.”
“My mission is to defend Babylon from her enemies, to keep her borders secure, and to uphold the honor of Her Absent Majesty before all the world.”
“You think Her Absent Majesty gives a fuck about her honor? She probably ran off just to get away from crap like honor, borders, conquest, slaughter, genocide…”
“The Dragon Corps serves as a deterrent to foreign aggression. It is the single greatest force for peace in the world. If you think things are a mess now, just try living without it.”
“Yeah, it sounds real good when you put it that way. Not so much when the golden fire falls on a train station crammed with civilians and the screaming begins. Sounds bad while it’s happening and smells even worse afterward.”
Cat’s face went cold and numb. She clamped her mouth shut.
In tense silence, they let the road glide beneath their pickup’s tires until a convenience store swam into view. By unspoken agreement, they stopped and Raven went inside to buy the makings of lunch. Cat spread out a blanket on the grass and, after checking to make sure he didn’t need to be changed again, set the brat down on one corner of it. She watched as, with great effort, he managed to catch one foot and then lose it again. Contentedly, he set out to repeat the deed.
Raven came back with sandwiches, deviled eggs, two bottles of beer, and a pannikin of warm rusalka’s milk. She thumped one of the bottles down in front of Cat, who (for she was learning to read Raven’s ways) accepted it as a tacit peace offering. Then she filled the baby’s bottle with milk and guided the nipple into his mouth.
After the imp had been fed and the sandwiches eaten, Cat said, “We’ve got the bag of magical doodads we came for. Why are we going so far out of our way to find a place for the kid? Why not take him back to the present and find someone there to take care of him?”
“I’ve got my reasons.” Raven bit the last deviled egg in half, chewed, swallowed. “But even if I didn’t, there’s no way I’d bring a baby anywhere near Sasha.”
“There seems to be some history between you two.”
“Well, as far as Sasha’s concerned, I’m the one that got away. And there’s no denying that she tried to kill me and eat me. But you don’t hate gravity for breaking your leg when you fall out of a tree. Same thing with Sasha. She can’t help being the way she is.”
“Tell me everything,” Cat said.
Raven swallowed down the last of her egg and settled herself into a storyteller’s stance. Touching hands together to make the sign of the yoni, she said:
“I was lost. I admit it. I’d been hired by this schmuck—let’s call him Hank—whose heart had been stolen and placed in a glass egg by a bitter ex-girlfriend and then dumped in a thieves’ market where it was sold to an itinerant haruspex, blah, blah, blah. You’ve probably heard this story a hundred times. My plan was for us to hike deep into Caledon Wood, where I’d built a stone altar, and leave him standing watch over it all night. ‘Prove yourself true—your heart will return to you.’ Which wasn’t gonna happen, given some of the frights I’d lined up for him. He was going to soil himself and run off screaming. Come dawn, he’d be so ashamed of his cowardice it would never occur to him to come looking for me. Simple. Clean.
“But either I took a wrong turn or the witch-house moved itself into my path because come midnight there it was, glowing bright as the sun. I couldn’t convince Hank this wasn’t what we’d come looking for. It was all I could do to keep him from hammering on the door. So I pried open a side window and we climbed in and … well, you’ve seen that place. It’s like a candy store for grown-ups, ’miright?
“Hank went apeshit. I tried to stop him, but he saw a line of hearts in glass eggs and made a beeline for them. Guys like Hank have consistently lousy luck. So, inevitably, he grabbed one that was not only ensorcelled but lethal. Whammo! Down he goes, ass over teak-fiddle, dead as a doormat. Tough titties to the poor bastard who bought his heart.
“Out comes Sasha, breathing fire and talking trash.
“Skipping over a lot of tedious exposition, it’s established that Sasha plans to cook me in that honking big stove of hers and then do her cannibalistic thing. She’s got wards and weapons up the yin-yang. All I’ve got is a superior brain.
“‘I invoke the anc
ient courtesies,’ I said. ‘I’m entitled to one last wish, right?’
“‘You might be and you might not,’ Sasha replied. ‘It depends on the wish. Ask for a gun and I’ll laugh in your face.’
“‘Can’t help but notice you’ve got a world-class selection of liquor here. I know how to make the best Manhattan ever. If I have to die, that’s the taste I want in my mouth.’
“Long and short, Sasha let me fix a pitcher. I started with Pappy Van Winkle two-hundred-year reserve and then mellowed it with just a splash of Sir John Falstaff grande champagne cognac, distilled under the supervision of the master himself. To this I added Carpano Antica sweet vermouth—why get fancy?—and minuscule amounts of eight different bitters (if I’d used the full twelve, Sasha would have thought I was stalling) and just the slightest shaving of white truffle, to make the flavors pop. ‘Frost the glasses while I shake,’ I said, and Sasha glared them white with rime. The drink itself, however, I chilled with ice from the living glaciers of Niflheim, which crackled most marvelously as I shook the cocktail cold. Into the glasses I dropped two spiced cherries from the Isles of the Blest. I kid you not, it was a drink that literally was to die for. I poured one for myself and another for Sasha. Then I raised my glass in toast. ‘Evoe!’
“We drank. Strange to tell, Sasha finished hers before I did mine. So I poured her another. And kept it topped up. And fixed another pitcher.
“I was hoping to get her so plowed she’d pass out. But Sasha was made of stronger stuff than that. Cast-iron stomach and a bladder to match. At last she cried ‘Enough!’ and marched me off to the kitchen. She slammed open an oven door, and gestured with her handgun—a Mauser, of course; I’ve never known a woods witch to pack anything else—and said, ‘Climb in.’
“I played stupid. I bent over, stuck out my butt to one side and my elbows to the other and said, ‘I can’t fit in.’
“Sasha thought I was as drunk as she was, so she tried to talk me through it. ‘Just get down on your knees and crawl in,’ she said. ‘Any idiot could do it.’
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