She looked up. The sun was on the far horizon and the shadows were turning blue. She drank water, holding the jug with her right hand. She tried to pour a little over her left. It didn’t do anything. She cried a little, and that didn’t do anything, either.
Marra had saved her right hand for the delicate work. She took a deep breath and then worked the thread loose from the spindle while her flesh blazed as if it had caught fire. The thread came off lumpy and ugly and uneven, but there was nothing to be done. She had no more nettle wool to spin anyway. She wished that she could ply it, but she did not have enough time and she did not know how much more pain she could endure.
There was no needle. She stared at the owlcloth scraps and the thread in her hand and could not believe that she had missed that. There’s always a needle, she thought wearily. I am an embroiderer; I always have a needle. She started laughing softly to herself, the broken laughter of a mortal wound. All her needles were in her room at the convent, carefully jabbed into a pincushion shaped like a little white rat. It had been a gift from the Sister Apothecary.
She looked over the rooftop, looking for a shape she had missed, the wink of bone or metal in the moonlight. When had the moon come up? Had it been that long already?
Marra did not find a needle. Instead she saw the dull gleam of light on the bitter thorn at the heart of the nettle wool.
She picked it up in her swollen fingers and looked at the point. It was sharp enough to serve as an awl. She would have to push the thread through with her fingers and then grab it on the other side and pull it through and it would burn and burn and her fingers would stop working and then, Lady of Grackles help her, perhaps she would have to use her teeth.
Did you think impossible tasks were so easily done?
She looked at her sad, misshapen pile of thread and the soft, shifting owlcloth, and she cried a little more, and then she bent her head over the fabric and set to work.
* * *
“God’s balls,” said the dust-wife a week later, looking at the bone dog. “You did it.” She did not sound happy about it. She hadn’t sounded happy about the cloak of nettles, either, when Marra had come down with her ruined hands and her swollen lips and dropped the owlcloth garment at her feet.
“I did,” said Marra. “Where do I begin the next task? Moonlight in a jar of clay?”
The dust-wife groaned. She got up without answering and went to rummage in her pantry. Eventually she found a pile of chicken bones and tossed them to the bone dog.
Marra had a vague notion that chicken bones were bad for dogs, but she also wasn’t sure that there was anything in the bone dog to be injured. He lay down happily and began to gnaw. Bits of splintered bone rained out of his neck as he swallowed.
The dust-wife pulled out a chair at the table and slumped into it. She was tall and bony and stoop shouldered where Marra was short and round. “Do you know why you set someone an impossible task?” she asked.
Marra scowled. This was the sort of question that she hated, the kind that made her think that the other person was trying to be clever at her expense. But the dust-wife had dealt fairly with her, so she tried to think of an answer. “To see if they can do it?” She racked her brain, thinking of all the old legends: Mordecai and the worm; the white deer who loved a human and her terrible quest to save her lover; Little Mouse who killed the dragon on her wedding day. “To see if they are heroes?”
“Heroes,” said the dust-wife with an explosive snort. “The gods save us all from heroes.” She gazed at Marra, her normally expressionless face lined with sorrow. “But perhaps that’s the fate in store for you after all. No, child, you give someone an impossible task so that they won’t be able to do it.”
Marra examined this statement carefully from all directions. “But I did it,” she said. “Twice.”
“I had noticed,” said the dust-wife grimly. “And quite likely you will do the third task and then I will be obligated to help you kill your prince.”
“He isn’t my prince,” said Marra acidly.
“If you plan to kill him, he is. Your victim. Your prince. All the same. You sink a knife in someone’s guts, you’re bound to them in that moment. Watch a murderer go through the world and you’ll see all his victims trailing behind him on black cords, shades of ghosts waiting for their chance.” She drummed her nails on the table. “You sure you want that?”
“He killed Damia,” said Marra. “He’s torturing Kania. He deserves to die.”