Three tasks, and then the dust-wife would give her the tools to kill a prince.
“Typical,” she said into her hands. “Typical. Of course I’d manage the impossible thing, then not think that sometimes dogs run off.” For all she knew, the bone dog had caught the wisp of a scent and now it would end up a hundred miles away, chasing bone rabbits or bone foxes or bone deer.
She laughed into her swollen hands, misery twisting around, as it so often did, into weary humor. Well. Isn’t that just the way?
This is what I get for expecting bones to be loyal, just because I brought them back and wired them up. What does a dog know about resurrection?
“I should have brought it a bone,” she said, dropping her hands, and the crows in the trees took up the sound of her laughter.
Well.
If the dust-wife had failed her—or if she had failed the dust-wife—then she would make her own way. She’d had a godmother at her christening who had given her a single gift and smoothed her path not at all. Perhaps there was a debt owing there.
She turned and began to make her way, step by dragging step, out of the blistered land.
Chapter 2
Marra had grown up sullen, the sort of child who is always standing in exactly the wrong place so that adults tell her to get out of the way. She was not slow, exactly, but she seemed younger than her age, and very little interested her for long.
She had two sisters, and she was the youngest. She loved her oldest sister, Damia, very much. Damia was six years older, which seemed a lifetime. She was tall and poised and very pale, a child of Marra’s father’s first wife.
The middle sister, Kania, was only two years older than Marra. They shared a mother but no goodwill.
“I hate you,” said twelve-year-old Kania, through gritted teeth, to ten-year-old Marra. “I hate you and I hope you die.”
Marra carried the knowledge that her sister hated her snugged up under her ribs. It did not touch her heart, but it seemed to fill her lungs, and sometimes when she tried to take a deep breath, it caught on her sister’s words and left her breathless.
She did not talk to anyone about it. There was no point. Her father was not unkind, but he was mostly absent, even if he was physically present. At best he would have patted her awkwardly on the back and sent her to the kitchen for a treat, as if she were very small. And her mother, the queen, would have said, “Don’t be absurd, your sister loves you,” in a distracted voice, opening the latest dispatch from her spymasters, making the political decisions to keep the kingdom from falling into ruin.
When Prince Vorling was betrothed to Damia, the household rejoiced. Marra’s family ruled a small city-state with the misfortune to house the only deep harbor along the coast of two rival kingdoms. Both those kingdoms wanted that harbor, and either one could have rolled over the city and taken it with hardly a moment’s effort. Marra’s mother had kept them balancing between two knives for a long time.
But now Prince Vorling, of the Northern Kingdom, would marry Damia and thus cement an alliance between them. If the Southern Kingdom tried to take the harbor, the Northern Kingdom would defend it. Damia’s first son would sit someday upon the Northern throne, and her second （if she had one） would rule the harbor city.
It was, perhaps, a trifle odd to expend a firstborn son on so small a thing as the Harbor Kingdom, but it was said that the royal family of the North had grown thin blooded and had married too many close cousins over the centuries. They were protected by powerful magic, but magic could not fix blood, so the kings looked to marry outside their borders. By sealing the Harbor Kingdom and its shipping port to them by marriage, the Northern Kingdom enriched their blood and their coffers at a single stroke.
“At last,” said Marra’s father. “At last, we will be safe.” Her mother nodded. Now the Southern Kingdom would not dare to attack them, and the Northern Kingdom would no longer need to.
It was only Marra who cried. “But I don’t want you to go!” she sobbed, clinging to Damia’s waist. “You’re going away!”
Damia laughed. “It will be all right,” she said. “I’ll come visit. Or you’ll come visit me.”
“But you won’t be here!”
“Stop it,” said her mother, thin lipped, pulling her daughter away from her stepdaughter. “Don’t be selfish, Marra.”
“Marra’s just bitter because she doesn’t have a prince,” said Kania, taunting.
The unfairness of this made Marra cry harder. She was twelve and she knew that she was too old to throw a tantrum, but she felt one coming on anyway.