Daughter of Lies and Ruin

by Jo Spurrier

  All I could do was gape at her. ‘. . . how do you know?’

  She gave me a look of utter disgust. ‘I’m a witch, you little fool. And Gyssha knew every dirty trick the craft has to offer. Now, pull yourself together. It’s time we got out of here.’

  She started to pull away. Without really thinking about it, without any conscious decision to move, my hand shot out and caught her sleeve. ‘Aleida, wait.’

  She turned back to me, eyes narrow and sharp. ‘What?’ she demanded, and her voice made me wince.

  ‘I saw something. Inside the ruins, I saw . . . she’s working some kind of ritual. It’s something big.’

  She pressed her lips together.

  I don’t care. I was ready for her to say the words, to brush it off. It wasn’t our problem. Hadn’t I heard her say that, over and over? We don’t need to get involved.

  But then, with a sigh, she settled back to the rocks. ‘All right. Tell me.’

  I described it as best I could with my heart still pounding beneath my ribs, my breath hitching in my chest and my bloody shift clinging to my skin. Her face was neutral as she listened without interrupting as I described the obelisks of crystal and bone, the sigils inscribed on the floor.

  ‘These sigils,’ she said when I ran out of words to say. ‘What can you tell me about them?’

  ‘Um . . .’ She’d taught me a little about sigils and runes, the elements that went into them, what they were called and how they were assembled. But all that knowledge had fled for the moment, and though I could picture it clearly I couldn’t find the words to describe it.

  Instead, I picked up a flat stone beside me. The blood on my skin was drying, turning thick and gummy, but it was still wet enough. I swiped my finger through it and started to draw lines and angles, curves and dots.

  As I laid out the lines, my heart began to pound all over again, and I felt a flush of heat through my chest, surging through my veins. The stone was growing hot in my hands, throbbing as though it had a heartbeat of its own.

  Then Aleida snatched it away from me. Quickly, she spat on the stone and scrubbed at the drying blood with her sleeve, clearing the symbol away. Then she licked her finger and drew a sigil of her own, one I recognised as a method of dispelling trapped power and releasing bound spirits. Then, she threw the rock away into the water with a splash that echoed around the cavern.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a talent for sigils. You’re sure you remembered that correctly?’

  ‘I, I think so.’

  ‘You think?’ she demanded. ‘Or you know?’

  I dropped my gaze. ‘I know.’ I have a very good memory. One good thing that came out of the fact that I’d never gone to school. If I couldn’t read, I couldn’t rely on Ma’s book of recipes or the list of chores chalked onto the wall, I had to just remember them. I was told once what I was supposed to do, and there was hell to pay if I forgot the smallest thing.

  Aleida made a small noise in the back of her throat. A noise of concern.

  ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What does it mean?’

  She didn’t answer, frowning as she traced shapes on her thigh with the tip of her finger, silently mouthing words I couldn’t understand.

  ‘It’s important, isn’t it?’ I said.

  Her eyes cut to me, still glaring with fury. ‘Well,’ she said, after a pause. ‘You’ve got good instincts when it comes to hunting out information, I’ll grant you that. It’s just that whole self-preservation thing that needs some work.’ She stood then, wiping her hands on her skirt, and reached for her staff. ‘Everyone up,’ she said. ‘Time to go.’

  CHAPTER 8

  I was still feeling shaky when I brought us all back into the sunlight. The bandits filed past me without so much as a glance in my direction. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. On the one hand, I didn’t want them looking at me like a two-headed calf, but on the other, I had just saved their lives by bringing them to the refuge underground. It was pretty impressive, if you asked me.

  When they’d all filed past, I let the doorway close and turned my back to the stone, only to find Kara waiting for me. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked in a low voice. She wasn’t looking at my face, but lower. I glanced down, and saw that my shift above my leather stays was stained with drying blood. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

  She looked doubtful. ‘If you say so. So, what now?’

  I bit my lip. ‘I don’t—’

  Aleida’s shout interrupted me before I could finish. ‘Dee! Get over here. The rest of you sods: go. Get lost. Don’t let me see your ugly faces again, or I’ll do something we’ll all regret.’

  I met Kara’s gaze, and we both shrugged.

  Aleida was already walking away, leaning on her staff, and I hurried after her. As we departed, I heard muttering voices behind us, and someone growling at them to hush.

  ‘Those marked men are around here somewhere,’ I said. ‘I saw them when I was scouting.’

  ‘Screw those arseholes,’ she snapped. ‘They’ll stay the hells away if they know what’s good for them. Beyond that I don’t care, we’ve got bigger things to worry about.’

  ‘We do? But you said we’d walk away now. Tit for tat and the matter’s settled, isn’t that what you said?’

  She ignored me and strode onwards, the hem of her skirts sweeping through the dust. For all she was limping with each step, her legs were so long I had to stretch mine to keep up.

  Back at the wagon, she waved me inside. ‘First things first, you need to get cleaned up. You smell like a butcher’s shop.’

  I was well aware of that fact. In the short walk from the rocks, I’d amassed quite the flock of flies. Flushing, I scrambled up the steps. It’d be a long time, I figured, until I heard the last of this misadventure.

  She followed me up the steps and closed the door behind us, and as I started stripping off I heard her open the cabinet by the door, and heard the clink of glassware as she started riffling through the bottles within.

  Any curiosity I had for what she was doing was quickly lost in a rising tide of dismay as I loosened my skirts and stepped out of the puddle of cloth. My overskirt had escaped the worst of the gore, but the waist of my petticoat was soaked, like it had been dipped in blood. And from there it only got worse. I loosened the laces of my leather stays, but at first they didn’t budge — the clotted blood had all but glued them and my shift to my skin. I had to peel them away like the shell from a boiled egg, and I feared the memory of that sensation would make my skin crawl for years to come. I couldn’t help but make a sound of disgust as I wriggled out of the stays, and then pulled the stiff and sticky chemise over my head.

  I held it up, meaning to shake it out and fold it neatly out of sheer habit. But the sight of it, utterly soaked with blood, made me swallow hard.

  ‘Could have been worse,’ Aleida said from behind me. ‘Between the shift and the stays, it’s like you were wrapped in bandages. Kept the bleeding to a minimum.’

  Hastily I bundled the shift up, hiding the worst of the gore inside. ‘I’ll never get those stains out,’ I mumbled.

  ‘We’ll just dye it black,’ Aleida said. ‘That’s what I always do.’

  ‘And that’ll look lovely with my brown leather stays.’

  ‘We’ll dye them, too.’

  Quickly, I scrubbed myself clean, or at least as clean as a handkerchief and a little bit of water from the water butt could get me, before pulling on a fresh shift. I tried to clean the inside of my stays, too, but by then Aleida was tapping her foot impatiently, so I pulled them back on, damp enough to be uncomfortable and with the sinking knowledge that at the end of the day I’d have two bloodstained shifts to deal with instead of just one. ‘Shall I call Maggie back? I can get her harnessed and get us back on the road.’

  ‘We’re not hitting the road.’

  My hands froze tying the tapes of my skirt, and I swivelled to look at her. She was sitting at the tiny table, a glass with the dregs of something
inky and black by her elbow. She’d found the two little pebbles Facet had brought to me in the cave and was rolling them back and forth across the table, tapping them against each other with a stony chink chink chink.

  ‘B-but you said—’

  She lifted her eyes to mine, and I fell silent.

  ‘Are you ready?’ She stood.

  ‘No!’ I said firmly. ‘I am most definitely not ready. What are we doing? You said we’d leave, you said—’

  ‘That was before that bitch tried to kill my apprentice,’ she snapped. ‘Dee, get your wand.’

  Once again I hurried after her. She was still walking with her staff, but her stride was faster now, and I cursed myself for not taking notice of what she’d mixed herself from the bottles and flasks in the cabinet. ‘Aleida, stop!’

  She cast a dark glance back at me and kept moving. ‘I’m giving the orders here, kid, not you.’

  She was heading back towards the rocks, not to the witch’s den, which lay miles away to the north. I suspected what she meant to do, and I wanted no part of it.

  I stopped and watched Aleida’s back.

  She kept striding ahead of me, pushing onwards. But when she was a dozen yards away, she, too, came to a halt. ‘Dee,’ she said in warning tones.

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why are you doing this? Why fight her?’

  She shook back her hair, and turned to me. ‘Are you seriously asking me that? Seriously?’ There was still blood streaked on her temples and in her hair. My blood.

  But I stood my ground. ‘I don’t want you to. Not for my sake. Why can’t we just walk away, like you said? If it’s a matter of pride—’

  ‘You think this is about pride?’ She came stalking back towards me. ‘Gods damn it, Dee, I don’t want this either! Lord and Lady, I didn’t come here looking for a fight! All I wanted was to try out a new path, offload some of Gyssha’s filthy trophies, and see if I could make something, somewhere a little better! And now . . .’ She looked away, clenching her teeth. ‘Look, it’s not your fault. If a student makes a mistake of this scale, it’s her teacher’s failing. But what you did . . . that witch has to be wondering if I sent you to scout the place out.’

  ‘But we both know you didn’t,’ I said, twisting my skirt between my hands. ‘Does it really matter what she thinks?’

  ‘It matters because only the worst kind of witch would throw away an apprentice on a cursed suicide mission,’ she snapped. ‘So either she thinks I really desperately want to know what she’s up to in there and I’m willing to sacrifice you to find out . . . or I’m a completely useless blundering idiot with all the sense of a lamb that’s been kicked in the head. Listen, Dee, if word gets out that this bloody witch tried to kill you, and I just walked away without calling her to account for it . . . well, every witch who knew of Gyssha will come after us. Before winter’s over we’ll be fighting for our lives! Do you understand? Do you have any idea how many witches and wizards and warlocks there are out there who’d love to be the one who killed the last Blackbone, the upstart who put Gyssha in the ground? Do you?’

  All I could do was stare at her, feeling hollow and sick. ‘This is all my fault, isn’t it?’

  She huffed a sigh and turned away. ‘No, it’s mine. I just told you that, were you even listening? Look, I’ve been too soft on you. I couldn’t bring myself to train you the way I was trained, I didn’t want to be what Gyssha was. But that was a mistake. I’m going to put it right, you can be sure of that, but for now . . . well, here we are.’

  ‘But you can’t fight her. You’re too weak.’

  ‘Ugh, Dee!’ Aleida rolled her eyes. ‘Are we going to have this conversation every single time I have to face off against someone? I know what I’m doing. This is what Gyssha trained me for; I have a few tricks up my sleeve, cursed or not. And, in any case, I don’t like the look of that sigil you showed me. She’s up to something, this witch, and I’m not leaving here until I find out what. Now, come on.’

  She set off again, and this time I followed, although our little talk had done nothing to make me feel better about the situation. I didn’t want to fight. The thought terrified me. It took me back to my first days at Black Oak Cottage, where we’d faced the black-robed warlock as well as the ghost of Gyssha Blackbone. As terrified as I’d been back then, this felt more grim. Back then the fight had come to us. This time, it was us looking for trouble, sticking our noses where they didn’t belong. The thought was enough to make me grimace — it hadn’t stopped me from venturing into the witch’s lair in the first place, had it?

  Aleida marched right up to a huge boulder of milky rock. ‘All right, Dee. Take us in.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said. ‘Don’t I have to take us to somewhere?’ Every other time I’d opened a pathway I’d had the destination firm in mind. Even if I didn’t know exactly where that was, the idea of it was clear as crystal.

  ‘Nope. You can just open the door and bring us inside, and decide on where you want to go later.’

  I frowned at her. ‘That’s not how I’ve ever done it before.’ All of the two times I’d managed it. ‘Can . . . can you—’ Can you show me? That was what I meant to say, but the words died in my throat.

  She’d never offered to show me how to open a pathway. We’d tried many times since that fight with Gyssha on the hillside. I’d even tried it by myself, when I was out wandering the forests back home at the cottage.

  I raised my eyes to hers. ‘You can’t do it. Can you?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. It’s not that common a talent. But you have an affinity for earth magic, what with your crystals and your little familiar spirit.’

  ‘Facet?’ I said. ‘A familiar?’

  Aleida sighed. ‘Come on, Dee, time’s wasting. I want us inside, away from prying eyes.’

  I glanced around, looking for anything spying upon us. Of course it was hopeless. It could be something as small as a lizard or a skink hiding under the rocks. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Right.’

  I set my palm against the stone, and felt myself frowning.

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ she said in my ear. ‘Just do it.’

  That’s what she always said about working magic. Honestly, it didn’t make much sense to me. How was I supposed to do something without thinking about it?

  I remembered what she’d said a few moments ago: I’ve been too soft on you. And before: If I’d pulled a trick like that when I was with Gyssha she’d have let me die. I squeezed my eyes shut. Even if whatever she was planning went well, the next few weeks weren’t going to be fun.

  While I was lost in this thought, I felt the rock melt away beneath my hand.

  ‘There we go,’ Aleida said, striding into the darkness with a swish of her skirts.

  I followed, letting the doorway close behind me, throwing us into darkness. Aleida pulled a candle from the little bag on her belt and lit it with a touch of her finger. Then, she set it down on the floor and crouched down on her heels. ‘C’mere, Dee.’

  I joined her, settling to my knees on the sandy floor. ‘Isn’t it dangerous, hanging about here in between? That’s what you said before.’

  ‘So you do listen sometimes. Let me worry about that. Now, tell me about that place. The witch, too. Start at the beginning, and tell me everything you saw, every little detail.’

  I didn’t like taking my mind back there, putting myself back in the little fluttering body of the sparrow I’d taken to its death. But I knew I’d get no sympathy. Hadn’t she warned me against using prey animals for borrowing? And I’d known right from the start that venturing into the witch’s lair was a bad idea.

  I started with what I’d seen on the road, the lion dragging itself through the dust, and the witch coming out to meet it.

  ‘What did she look like?’ Aleida said.

  ‘She had reddish hair, streaked with grey,’ I said. ‘A real rat’s nest, looked like it hadn’t been combed in weeks. She was dressed oddly, too — just a leather jerkin; not a corset, a jerk
in like men wear, but with no shirt or anything under it. And a bit of cloth wrapped around her waist for a skirt.’

  Aleida gave me a startled look. ‘Did she have tattoos on her arms? All dots and triangles and things laid out in odd patterns?’

  ‘Yes!’ I realised then what that must mean. ‘You know her?’

  Aleida nodded. ‘Yeah. Well, I know of her. Minerva. She’s a strange one. Strange even for a witch, I mean. She’s got a talent for beast magic, likes living in the wilds. Doesn’t like people much. I can’t imagine what she’s doing here, this is far too close to civilisation for her liking.’

  ‘Do you think it was her who brought the griffins?’

  ‘Oh, most likely. Don’t ask me why, though.’

  ‘Not just a prank, then.’

  She pulled a face. ‘Minerva’s not really the pranking kind. All right, go on. Tell me about the ruins.’

  As I described the place, she drew it out with her fingertips, but instead of lines in the soft sand of the floor, she drew it with illusions, softly glowing threads that hung in the air. She quizzed me about the ritual this witch had laid out, too, and marked out the obelisks of crystal and bone. When I judged it as accurate, we both sat back on our heels.

  ‘That sigil I drew,’ I said. ‘What does it do?’

  She bit her lip, frowning at the diagram. ‘It summons.’

  ‘Summons? Summons what?’

  She didn’t answer. ‘And the men she’s killed . . . what are you doing, Minerva? Bones, bones are tied to life-force, but they’re corporeal, too. You’re summoning something and giving it a body . . . and from the sounds of it, not just any body. Crocodile, lion, bear. She chained them up securely, but she didn’t care so much about Toro, or the other hoofed beasts. She’s after predators.’

  ‘What about the nether beastie I saw last night?’ I said. ‘Does that have something to do with it?’

  ‘Oh! I’d forgotten about that. Yeah, probably . . .’ she trailed off, frowning.