by Rachel Dunne
His hands shook where they were bound behind his back, but the skillful knots kept anyone from seeing it. He remembered a mountain, the bowels of the tallest point in all the world, and a boy who had told him, Free is something you have to fight for. Etarro’s remembered words felt like a whisper from his half-remembered dream, the boy—the dead boy, surely he could not survive sharing space with a god—coming back to haunt him. Are you ready to fight, Anddyr?
He had gotten so good at fighting . . .
“Yes,” he said, as loudly as he could manage without the word turning to a sob or a scream. “I’ll do it. But I’ll need more time.”
And that was that. The fists untied his fingers—a show of good faith—and he stood there working feeling back into his fingers as the Dogshead spoke more words at him. He didn’t hear any of them. When the fists led him out of the room, he was acutely aware of another who followed them out.
Surprise felt a distant thing, but he did not expect, when Rora said, “I’ll take ’im,” for the fists to leave. But they did, and Anddyr and Rora walked side by side through the dark and dusty halls.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” she asked softly, not even loud enough to disturb the swirling dust.
“Yes.” There didn’t seem to be any point in lying. Not to her. Not with no one else around to hear.
She stopped, and Anddyr stopped with her. When she turned, he turned. And, for the first time in what felt like an age, she met his eyes, and held his gaze. “We’re not square, you and me,” she said. “You helped me out down in the cellar, and maybe I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you, but that doesn’t make up for all the rest of the shit you’ve pulled. I still think my life’d be better if I didn’t know you.” She took a deep breath, closed her eyes as though she were counting, and still held his gaze when she opened them again. “But thanks. Thank you, for . . . for maybe saving my life down there.”
Anddyr gripped the sides of his robe in each hand, clenching and unclenching his fingers. It helped relieve some of the itchiness, the need to cast a spell, the need to assure himself he wasn’t broken, wasn’t more broken than he already was. “Is that why you told them to trust me?”
She shrugged one of her shoulders. “Part of it, yeah. You don’t have to leave, y’know. You can—you’d be useful.”
“Useful,” Anddyr repeated. It felt like a foreign word in his mouth, the shape of the vowels all wrong, nothing familiar in it from which he could parse meaning.
“Yeah. I think they’ve all got a taste for how useful a witch can be. Without—” She stopped, her brother’s name hanging unspoken in the air. Her eyes went away for a while.
Anddyr gently cleared his throat, and her gaze sharpened back on him. She’d spent so much time avoiding even acknowledging him in the cellar that all the intentional attention was making him flustered, making his tongue feel heavy in his mouth. Carefully shaping the words, carefully holding her eyes, Anddyr asked, “Do you want me to stay?” Not if he would be welcome. Not if he would be useful. Not even if he would be free. This was the only question whose answer would matter.
Rora looked away and her mouth twisted, as though she were chewing something unsavory. “Like I said. You’d be useful.”
Could one grieve for something that never had been, and never would be? Was that allowed? Anddyr straightened his fingers, smoothed them along the sides of his robe, gently calming the wrinkles. “You’ve never needed me,” he said softly, and turned away. She didn’t refute it, or try to stop him, or say anything at all.
None of the pack stopped him as he walked across the courtyard. It was dark, and few of them would recognize him as a danger. There was a muffled sound that filled the night air, an almost singsong, repetitive noise, and he followed it. It led him to where he’d been intending to go anyway.
Anddyr went to one knee beside the cellar door, spreading the fingers of one hand wide against the cobblestoned ground as he flexed the fingers of his other hand experimentally. Now that it was time, he was almost too nervous to check. Too nervous of failure, too nervous of knowing.
The repetitive sound came up through the cellar door: a voice calling, “Rora. Rora . . .”
His fingers wove sigils in the air, and his magic welled up from the core of his being, and flowed through his limbs and blood in a tide of relief. He wasn’t broken.
With senses beyond his own, Anddyr explored the cellar. It was a great cavernous empty space, but for one small and pulsing light, pacing. Neira. Anddyr changed the movements of his fingers and he built a solid wall around her, a wall made of air and light.
The repetitive call stopped for a moment, and turned into a soft laugh. “Good-bye,” Neira called up through the cellar door. “Good luck.”
He didn’t look back at the house as he left. Let them all think he was a coward. Let them all rot.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Rora waited for them to come for her, wondering if they’d send some nameless fists she didn’t even recognize, or if Tare’d come for her herself. All she knew for sure was they’d send someone. They had to. She’d told them to trust Anddyr, and then he’d run away and left them with no kind of protection, and left Rora holding the blame for it.
In the Canals, all you had to live on were your words and your hands and your smarts. Rora’s hands’d only ever been good at cutting, and all her daggers were gone, and she’d never been smart enough to do any better’n just getting by. Even when all the pack thought she was a twice-over traitor, at least she knew she wasn’t, at least she still had the truth and the hope that someday they’d trust her again.
They had, and it’d lasted maybe five whole hours.
“Better’n nothing,” she lied to herself as she sat in the little nook an old shed made against the crumbly wall. It felt weird, being under the stars and all the air, and having walls at her back and shoulder made it all feel a little less big. She wasn’t hiding. She never hid from her problems. Hiding wasn’t the same as just waiting for them to come find you first.
In the end, it was Tare. It had to be, didn’t it?
The older woman’s shadow hit Rora first, the rising moon behind her turning Tare all to black. She just stood there, and Rora couldn’t look up from her knees. “You knew he was leaving,” Tare said, no question in the words.
“Yeah.” No point in lying, and nothing she could say to defend herself.
“And you didn’t stop him.”
“No.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
Rora pressed her back a little harder against the wall, feeling a loose stone dig into her shoulder. “No.” That’d be the end of it—with all the bad things Tare thought she’d done, admitting to another bad thing was like putting a knife to her own throat. Ever since Rora’d gone back to the pack, back in the Canals, Tare’d been waiting to kill her. One more betrayal was all the Dogshead’d need to let her do it.
Tare’s shadow moved, and the shed wall creaked as she sat down against it. She was at an angle to Rora, so that when Rora looked up in surprise, she could see Tare’s face clear in the moonlight just by looking straight ahead. With Tare staring up at the moon, Rora could stare at her and lie to herself that she wouldn’t notice.
“That crazy bitch down in the cellar,” Tare said, “she keeps calling your name.”
“I’ve heard it,” Rora said. It was part of why she’d chose her corner. It was far enough away from the cellar door she could pretend the sound was just the wind. Rora swallowed, and because another minute passed without Tare looking to kill her, she said the thing she hadn’t been able to say in all the time so far: “Thanks. For . . . for pulling me out of there.”
The moonlight made a mask out of Tare’s face. “I can’t keep saving you.”
Rora reached up to rub at her missing ear, the one Tare’d cut off. If they’d been in the cellar she probably would’ve said something about it, but they weren’t in the cellar anymore. “I learned how to save myself.” It came out s
harper than she’d meant it to.
Tare looked down from the moon, turned her head to meet Rora’s eyes. Neither of them blinked, but it wasn’t the dog-staring, ready-to-kill kind of unblinking. It was like seeing something familiar that you’d half forgot. Tare said, “You’ve got a lap full of problems, Sparrow,” and she said it like when Rora’d been younger, when Tare’d been training her how to use her words and her hands and her smarts, before Tare’d thought of her as a traitor or a coward or a twin or anything except a scrappy pup called Sparrow. She said it like a challenge. She said it like a test. “What’re you gonna do to fix them?”
Rora rubbed her palms against her thighs and looked away. She had to—if she kept staring at Tare any longer, she might say something stupid, like “Why aren’t you killing me? Why do you care?”
For a long time, Rora didn’t think much of anything at all. She just stared up at the moon, and she could lie to herself that she didn’t notice Tare staring at her.
Rora finally cleared her throat, and said, “The biggest problem is that crazy bitch down in the cellar.”
“And what’re you gonna do about her?” The challenge, again.
Rora smoothed her hands down her legs again, just wasting time, just waiting. The thing she was gonna say was something she couldn’t take back, once she’d said it. It was something she hadn’t expected to have a choice in, and choosing to do something stupid and dangerous was a whole lot worse than someone forcing you into it. But you could only waste so much time, once you’d already made a choice, once you knew there was nothing else to do. Rora put her hands to the wall at her back, and pushed herself up to her feet. “I’m gonna go see what she wants with me.”
Tare nodded again, and she stood up, too. She was close to a head taller than Rora, but Rora’d never felt short next to her. She still didn’t, somehow. “Then I’ll go with you.”
That took Rora so much by surprise that she blurted out the first stupid thing to pop into her head. “You don’t trust me?”
“That’s not it.” She knew Tare well enough to recognize she was telling the truth—and anyway, why would she bother lying? You didn’t put in the effort to lie to someone who didn’t matter to you. “You always learned fast, but I might still need to save you again.”
Rora felt her mouth hanging open and closed it quick. “I . . . I appreciate it.”
Tare shrugged, and down at her sides, her hands were moving. “It’ll be nice to remember when things were better. Back before you were up here causing trouble.” Her hands were moving, the same movements over and over, so casual you wouldn’t notice it if you didn’t know the movements were trying to tell you something. The language of hand signs was a simple one: an open palm with the thumb tucked in. Me. A sharp jab down with two fingers. Bad.
Rora ran a hand through her too-long hair and held on to the back of her head, because the spinning made her feel like it was about to float away. That was the closest she was ever likely to get to an apology from Tare, but for someone who’d been expecting to get drawn and quartered, anything like an apology was . . . unexpected. Rora laughed, surprising them both. “Yeah,” she said breathlessly, dropping her hand back down to her side, “it’ll be nice to see the place again. Been having trouble sleeping in a soft bed.” With a circling finger, Rora’s hand said, No. Two middle fingers tucked up said, Good.
The hand signs were simple things, meant to point out a mark or warn of danger or signal when the time was right. They weren’t good for complicated things, like telling someone how you were going to hit a mark, or why they should stay away from a certain alley, or making a plan on the fly. Just simple signs for simple words. But simple words were easier, sometimes. Simple words could say just as much as the complicated ones.
Rora and Tare walked side by side to the cellar door.
As they got closer, Rora began to hear the calling again. It was irregular now, not the constant droning noise it’d been before; like someone drifting off and waking up with a start and calling out the first thing in their head, only this didn’t sound tired at all. And it wasn’t some random dream-word—it was her name. Over and over.
Rora took a bracing breath. She wasn’t scared. She’d expected to be dead or dying by now, and instead she was standing with the expected killer steady at her side, and maybe that wasn’t as reassuring as it’d seemed at first. But she’d cheated death. She shouldn’t be alive, but she was. So she didn’t have anything to be scared of.
“Wait,” Tare said, even though Rora hadn’t even leaned down to grab the door handle yet. She was still working up to that. But she turned to face Tare, who was fishing around under the hem of her shirt. Tare finally pulled her hands out and held them palm up toward Rora, and across each palm was the hilt of a dagger.
Rora recognized both daggers right away, of course—they were close as family. Her own daggers, the one with the big blue stone she’d broken, and the plain but sturdy one Tare herself had given her.
“She might still be dangerous,” Tare said, holding both hands out, perfectly even. Tare looked at her steadily, silent, unblinking.
Knowing it was a test, knowing there was only one way to pass it, Rora reached for the plain dagger first. The one Tare had given her years ago. Rora’d borrowed a belt to hold up the too-big but clean pants she’d got from one of the fists, and she redid the belt now to give the first dagger a secure home on her left hip. Her left hand was the stronger one, since her right arm’d been broken as a kid, so Tare’s dagger was the one she’d reach for first and fastest if it came to it. Rora held Tare’s eyes as she took the jewel-hilted dagger next. It was a shitty sort of test if you both knew there was only one right answer, the sort of test that only told you if the other person was dumb enough to choose the wrong answer apurpose. But if a stupid test would help Tare trust her again, Rora’d do it. And she did feel better with her knives back at her hips, where they were supposed to be.
She faced the cellar door again, and she wasn’t scared, and that actually felt closer to true this time.
Another breath, and Rora reached down to grab the door and fling it open. The door clattered against the cobblestones, a sound that’d woke her up countless times when she was down in the cellar, a sound she didn’t miss at all. The ladder stretched down into the darkness. They hadn’t left Neira a light, and Rora hadn’t thought to bring a lamp.
Didn’t matter, though—a witchlight flickered to life down in the shadows, outside the square of cellar floor she could see, over by Rora’s old corner where they’d left Neira. “Hello, Rora,” Neira’s voice said. She always sounded like she was a second away from a laugh, but the sort of laugh that made people back away from you. “Have you finally come to talk?”
Rora didn’t answer her, but took the ladder down. As soon as her head ducked below the doorframe, a crazy panic rose in her that this’d been Tare’s plan all along, that she’d slam the cellar door closed and leave the two of ’em trapped down there forever, both her problems taken care of in one swoop—
The ladder grumbled as Tare’s weight was added to it, and Rora kept climbing down.
Rora turned as soon as her feet touched the ground—she didn’t like having Neira at her back. Anddyr had tied the shadow-woman up in the same place Rora’d sat for the last few months—only that space was empty now, untied ropes hanging from the ring in the wall. And Neira wasn’t there.
Rora froze, even though her blood was screaming at her to run, run, run—
“Hello,” Neira said, and Rora’s neck popped she turned so fast. The shadow-woman was crouched there among the dead witches, her empty eye sockets fixed on Rora, and a smile stretching her face.
Run, run, run—
Rora would’ve bolted back up the ladder if she hadn’t noticed the way the air shimmered between her and Neira—the same kind of not-wall that’d sealed off the witches, only now it sealed off most of the cellar. She’d seen the witches try to get through the not-wall, seen how they couldn’t no m
atter what they did. It didn’t get rid of her heart’s pounding, but it did let Rora keep her feet on the ground.
“A parting gift from your friend, I believe,” Neira said, still smiling.
She can’t hear my thoughts, Rora told herself, because that had to be true, didn’t it? She’d just seen Rora’s face and made a good guess that she was thinking about the not-wall.
“Who untied you?” Tare asked. She was right at Rora’s shoulder, and even though it was stupid, it made Rora feel braver. Maybe that was mostly the threat in Tare’s voice—she’d punish anyone who went against her orders, no matter who it was. Rora knew that firsthand. There weren’t any empty threats with Tare.
Neira waggled her fingers. “I did. Your pet mage knows his knots, I’ll grant him that, but, well . . .” She shrugged like they should know why the same knots that could make any other witch powerless hadn’t worked on her.
Rora could feel Tare’s anger rising at her back, but angry wouldn’t get anything done. She took a step forward, closer to Neira, closer to the not-wall between them, even though her legs felt like stones, and she said, “You’ve been calling for me. You . . . you said there’s stuff I need to know. Well?”
“Will you sit?” Neira asked. “I’d prefer to talk like civilized people.” Maybe she didn’t realize she was surrounded by the witches she’d killed.
“We’ll stand,” Tare said, back stiff as the words.
Neira sighed, and she moved in a way Rora couldn’t quite follow, and there was a sound like a struck bell as something hit the not-wall. A dagger clattered to the floor on Neira’s side of the barrier as the bell-echoes faded fast. The shadow-woman grinned wide and raised up her hand, showing the bloody slash she’d left across her palm, a new cut among old scars. That black smoke began to boil up from the floor beneath her.