“Can you distract them somehow? At least long enough for me to stab him?”
“Probably not long enough for you to get away again, no.”
Fenris raised his eyebrows. “That’s not really a requirement, is it?”
“Yes,” said Marra, annoyed. “It is.”
“Fine, fine.” He lifted his hands. “No death-and-glory final stands unless we have no other options. Hmm. Can you raise up an army of the dead to fight the guards?”
The dust-wife rolled her eyes. “Armies of the dead seem like a good idea,” she said. “Until you’re standing in front of a thousand blind, withered husks who only know how to kill and kill and keep on killing. We might as well just drop plague corpses in the town well at that point.”
“I would have to object to that,” admitted Fenris. “All right. No armies of the dead, then.”
“Could you do that?” asked Marra tentatively.
The dust-wife shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s never really come up.”
“Yes, but if it did, would you know how?”
Feathers and movement announced the brown hen’s emergence from the pack. The chicken walked up the dust-wife’s arm and settled back on the staff, her comb at a decidedly jaunty angle.
“I know how I’d start,” said the dust-wife finally. “Some things I expect you don’t know until you’re doing them. But it’s been done before.” She leveled a glare at Marra. “But don’t get any ideas. We’re here for a straightforward regicide, not to level the city.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Marra meekly, and dropped her head.
* * *
They stayed that night in a barn, courtesy of Fenris’s firewood-splitting skills. The farmer even threw in a meal of salted potatoes and gave them apples for the road.
“I promise I did not bring you along to make you split firewood,” said Marra.
Fenris laughed. The two older women had gone inside to sleep, and it was only the two of them and a very small fire, well away from the barn.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve done many things that were terribly important, lives hanging in the balance and so on and so forth. There is something pleasant about chopping wood. If I miss a stroke, nothing awful happens. If a piece of wood is not quite right, it will still burn. If I stack it and it isn’t perfect, clans will not fall.”
“It sounds very difficult.”
“Mm. Sometimes.” He fixed her with a thoughtful look, and it occurred to her that his eyes were the color of sun-warmed earth, and she did not quite know what to do about it. “But you know, don’t you? You are the daughter and the sister of queens, so there must have been many times in your life when things hung on your actions.”
Marra inhaled sharply. Fenris poked at the fire with a stick. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I did not mean to distress you.”
“No. No, it’s not your fault. I … yes. I have too much power for who I am. My mother sent me away, finally, and I know it was partly because I was not … not good at these things. But none of it is my power. It is only other people, moving me on a game board. It was a relief when I went to the convent. When I have to come out, for the christenings or the funerals…” She wrapped the nettle cloak more tightly around herself. “It’s why I like needlework,” she added.
Fenris lifted an eyebrow.
“Like splitting wood. Like you said. Embroidery doesn’t do anything. It isn’t anything but what it is, and I don’t have to worry that I’m doing something terribly wrong and my tutors will get sent away or that I slighted someone important and they’ll want to close down trade with my kingdom. I can just make pictures and patterns, and if I make a mistake, I can tear it out again and no one dies.” She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter that I’m a princess. The thread doesn’t care.”
She was looking at the fire and did not expect the hand that came out of the dark and took hers and squeezed.
“And yet here we are,” he said. His thumb lay like a warm bar across her palm. His hands were very large compared to hers, and the calluses from the sword and the axe were much thicker than the ones she had developed from shoveling stables. “Freed of all our duties, we charge headlong to take on another responsibility.”
“I have to save my sister,” said Marra. “I lost one already.” She laughed and heard the bitterness in it. “Kania doesn’t even like me very much, I don’t think. But I still have to do it.”