Fingers slid out of the gap and caught the edge. Marra nearly wept with relief. Fenris shoved the lid aside and sat up, gasping for air.
“You’re really here,” he said, bending over so that his forehead touched his drawn-up knees. “I kept imagining voices, but you’re really here this time.”
“We’re here,” said Marra, the words this time jabbing her like pins.
He took a half dozen sobbing breaths. “It is very close in there,” he said, “even with the holes.” His face was slick, with sweat or tears, Marra did not know. “Close and cold.”
“I’m sorry,” said Marra. “I’m sorry. It was the only way I could think of.” She pulled him out of the coffin, or he climbed out and she helped, and he wrapped his arms around her and they stood together, shaking.
“It worked,” he said. “I would not want to do it again. How many days has it been?”
“A little over half a day,” said the dust-wife.
“Only that? It seemed so much longer.”
They slid the lid back in place and crept out of the tomb, through the tomb that had been cut for Kania, through the small, sad room where Marra’s niece lay in her bed of stone. She had to help hold Fenris up. His muscles had cramped and knotted and he staggered as he walked. “Why are there no guards?” he whispered.
“Because of the queen,” said the dust-wife.
“She could not pull the guards from the entrance without it looking peculiar,” said Marra, “but she called on the others to escort her. She had gone to Vorling’s mother’s tomb. She said that no one thought of the mothers in this time and she wanted to commune with the shade who had lost a child and— Oh, it was amazing. It really was. She’s so good at this. At being queen. Everyone was very impressed.”
“I was certainly impressed,” he said a bit dryly. “When she looked down on me in that stone box, I thought that she was going to let me die a slow death in the dark.” One corner of his mouth crooked up. “And I found that I did not want to die. Not like that.”
“I’m sorry,” said Marra again.
“Don’t be. I had faith. I thought if I could just hold out long enough … well, you and Lady Fox here would come for me.”
The dust-wife snorted. “I would have,” she said. “You might not have been alive at the time, though. Dead men are much less trouble.”
He staggered again. Marra winced. “Did they torture you?”
“Very little, considering. General Takise is a good man, but more importantly, a good soldier, and he knows how little torture is worth for extracting usable information. I made up a tale that had truth scattered through it, and he decided that I was likely mad, but with the magic we had seen, he could not be sure. Torture only tells you what the victim thinks will save him, and they knew that. So they beat me a little, and when my story did not change to anything they could use, they stopped.
“Where are we going now?” asked Fenris.
“Away.” The dust-wife glanced over her shoulder. “Agnes arranged for a cart.”
“Agnes is walking around freely?”
Marra laughed. “Everyone remembers her as very tall,” she said, “with bright green eyes. It’s the damnedest thing.”
“She was, though,” said Fenris. He had to stop and lean against the wall for a moment, stretching his legs and bending his knee to work the kinks out. “When I saw her. Wasn’t she? Was it an illusion, like the one on Bonedog?”
“It’s not an illusion,” said the dust-wife. “Not exactly. Your mind knows what certain things ought to look like, and when your eyes are wrong, your mind wins. Agnes’s magic thinks she ought to be six feet tall with eyes like a starving wolf. That Agnes’s body didn’t comply is just an oversight, so far as the magic is concerned.”
“She’s a very wicked godmother, isn’t she?” asked Marra.
“Evil magic could flow through her like a river in full flood. Fortunately for the rest of us, there’s a lot of Agnes in the way. Whether that makes her wicked, I’ll leave to philosophers. This turning here, I think.”
They emerged into the gritty light that precedes dawn. Marra barely took note of their surroundings. Another quarry, it looked like. She was too busy helping to shore up Fenris. One step after another, one step, one step more, and then there was a wagon in front of them and Agnes was falling off the driver’s seat and threw her arms around them. “You’re alive!” she said. “But of course you are; I didn’t think you were dead— I mean, Fenris, I thought there was a chance you were dead, I didn’t know, but of course Marra wasn’t dead—not to disparage the dead, obviously they serve their purposes and we’ll all be dead eventually anyway, so you probably shouldn’t speak ill of them, although I can’t say that I’m sorry to see Vorling go—”