Days stretched into weeks, while Marra fretted and dug her nails into her skin. The abbess was worried, but the Sister Apothecary mixed up a salve for her scratches and simply said, “You’re kicking against the world, that’s all.”
This was true, so far as it went, but Marra resented it. It was the sort of thing you were supposed to get out of the way when you were sixteen, not thirty. I have always been slow for my age, but this is too much.
Weeks became a month, then another month, then another, while Marra did nothing but pace and worry and feel increasingly useless. I should do something. I should be able to do something. I should be able to fix this somehow.
She could not think of a way. It was a job for heroes, perhaps, and Marra did not know how to be a hero. She lay awake at night, chasing phantoms behind her eyes, reliving the moments in the chapel over and over, the moments with her mother over and over. She made dramatic plans in the darkness and discarded them in daylight. She would go and ask for an audience with Vorling and stab him. （No, the guards would stop her.） She would attempt to seduce Vorling on condition of the guards being sent away and then stab him. （She was nearly a nun—what did she know of seduction?） She would take plants from the Sister Apothecary’s store and poison him. （How would she even get close to his food?） She would … she would …
Apparently she would do nothing. Every course of action ended with Marra dead and her sister or her kingdom destroyed. The plans played out in her head night after night, all of them useless.
Worthless plans. Worthless Marra. What good am I to anyone?
It occurred to her that Kania’s pregnancy was well advanced by now. If she’s showing, maybe she’s safe. She said he leaves her alone when she’s pregnant. Mostly. She thought of her sister’s clothes, the way that she had seemed to be showing so very early. It did happen that way, sometimes, but Kania was no fool, and perhaps her dressmakers had cut her clothing so that her pregnancy was obvious.
Assuming she hasn’t lost this one, too.
But it was not the baby that she lost next. Instead the word came down, not from letters but from gossip, that the king had died and Prince Vorling was now King Vorling of the North.
Is this better?
Is this worse?
Are more people watching him?
But he is the king and no one can stop him now.
She had no answers. She did not know whether this was good or bad or terrible, whether Kania had been thrown a lifeline or given a death sentence. She could not even get her mind around it. King Vorling made no sense. He was still Prince Vorling in her head. She remembered that flash of rage when Kania had asked to hold a vigil for her daughter. How could a man like that be a king and hold a whole kingdom at his fingertips?
She took to weeding the garden with savage intensity, ripping out dock and plantain and rabbit tobacco, her teeth grinding in her jaw.
If I were a man, I would fight him.
If she were a man, no one would force Kania to try to bear child after child. If I were a man, I would not be the next in line to be married if he kills her. If we were men … She stared at her fingers curled in the dirt. It did not matter. They were not and the history of the world was written in women’s wombs and women’s blood and she would never be allowed to change it.
Rage shivered through her, a rage that seemed like it could topple the halls of heaven, then vanished under the knowledge of her own helplessness. Rage was only useful if you were allowed to do anything with it.
She was still staring at her hands when she heard two of the lay sisters talking. “I don’t know what to do,” said one. “I’m out of ideas.”
“Go to the dust-wife,” advised the other. “She knows things.”
“What sort of things?”
“You know. Magic.”
Marra looked up sharply. Too sharply as it turned out. They saw her and moved away hurriedly, lowering their voices, but the seed was planted.
The dust-wife.
In this part of the kingdom, every graveyard of any size had its dust-wife. Marra was vaguely aware of their existence, but she came from the western side of the kingdom, and there was a definite difference. On the seacoast side, churchyards buried a dog to guide and guard the dead—church grims they were called. On the eastern mountain side, there were dust-wives. （In one or two places in the middle, there was both a dust-wife and a church grim. “They’re no trouble,” said one dust-wife of the grim, “and it’s good to have a dog about the place.”）
Dust-wives lived in little houses by the cemeteries. They operated as combination witches and gravediggers, digging the holes and laying out the dead. Even when a dust-wife got too old and frail to dig the graves herself, she would totter out with a spade and move the first spadeful of earth before hired hands did the rest. Otherwise, there was a chance that the dead might think the diggers were graverobbers, and their curses would be upon them, if not for the dust-wife’s blessing.