‘You bitch,’ said Bell. ‘You’ve ruined everything.’
It wasn’t what Mary expected to hear. She had a right to be angry, but to be so resolutely, stupidly, stubborn? ‘I don’t get it, and I don’t get you. Why won’t you just give up?’
‘It would have worked.’ Bell kept coming. The splashing water was up to Bell’s knees, then her shins, now her ankles. ‘It would have worked if it hadn’t been for you.’
‘Your plan? To scare open a door back to London? Fucking hell, mate: we’ve had the shit scared out of us so many times tonight, it’s pretty obvious it’s never going to work.’
Bell was getting uncomfortably close, her feet slipping on the loose rock just under the surface.
‘Everything had to be just right. And it was, until you showed up.’ She was a miserable sight, her dress all but falling off her, rags held together by a few stitches. White and gold cloth, once rich, like her, just dropping away, piece by piece.
‘Was that… Was that a wedding dress?’
They were face to face.
Bell wiped the water out of her eyes. ‘Yes. It was mine.’
‘You just happened to be wearing it, when, what? You were attacked by bears or something?’
‘Don’t pretend to understand. Don’t pretend to know what it’s like, to be married off, like some prize cow.’
‘Okay. I don’t know what that’s like. But fucking hell, whatever happened to you, why can’t you just leave us alone? You’ve done all this◦– all this, everything◦– to yourself. By behaving like a, a…’
‘A dragon.’
Crows was a snake, sneaky and slippery. Stanislav had been whatever he’d become, that primal chaos she’d first witnessed down by the lake that lay at the heart of everyone. Bell was a dragon, cruel and hard. And she, she was an eagle. What did that say about her?
‘Sounds like some bloke had a lucky escape.’
‘If I could, I’d—’
‘What? Hit me? Is that it? Is that all you have?’ Mary leaned in. ‘It’s your answer to everything, and you’ve got nothing left.’
‘I have everything,’ said Bell. ‘I still have everything.’
‘You can’t keep us here. Your guards are gone, you’ve lost all your maps and all your weird cog-machines. You’ve got what you stand up in, and that’s even less than me.’
‘You thought you’d beaten me on the mountain, and then in the tower, and now, here. You’re wrong. You’re so very wrong.’
Mary shrugged and rather than using her fists again, she turned away. ‘It doesn’t matter what you think, I don’t have to do this any more. We’ve won the right to walk away from the crazy girl.’
‘Come back. Come back here. I order you.’
Mary raised her middle finger.
The air behind her puffed out, like something huge was suddenly present.
She knew what it was. She raised her hands and dragged the darkness out of the sky so that when she confronted the dragon, it had no idea of where she was. Its wounded wing dragged across the ground, the wing-tip claw scraping up the stones into a ridge. Mary should have been in plain sight; there was nothing sophisticated about her hiding, yet the dragon couldn’t see her. It turned its smooth scaled head this way and that, in darting movements, and it tasted the air with its forked tongue.
Mary stepped forward, reached up and took hold of the broken wing beyond the fracture. She gave it a tug, and found herself holding a pale, limp arm. Bell staggered and fell, barking her knees on the stones, putting her good hand down in amongst the shale. She retched and heaved. The pain had to be overwhelming.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary. She was, too. This brought her no pleasure, and though it was necessary, she felt ashamed for having to do it. ‘You have to stop.’
‘I will not.’ Bell hissed through clenched teeth. She tried to get up, shivering through the cold and pain. ‘I win. I win every time. I take what I want. I’m born to rule. This is my destiny. I decide what happens, not some grubby half-caste whore.’
Mary spun Bell around so she was facing the lake again and, letting go of the arm, she shoved her hands into the woman’s back. She stumbled forward and into the water, the splash closing over her head before she half-heartedly raised herself again.
Mary walked into the water after her, and kicked her backside hard enough to send her sprawling again.
‘Is that it? You can’t stand being beaten by some common street-kid? If I talked posh and was dripping with diamonds, it wouldn’t be so bad? You think I should be kissing your arse instead of kicking it? Or are you just fucking nuts because you know you should have stayed in London and told your parents to fuck off? When did it happen? Before or after the wedding?’
She forced Bell out, deeper and deeper, until only the woman’s head and shoulders were visible.
‘During. It was during. I was supposed to go through and sign the register, and the door opened and there was Down.’ For the first and only time, the tears were no longer an act. ‘I ran.’
Mary remembered her own escape. The terrible fire, the heat and the smoke, followed by the unexpected, delicious coldness of the sea. Down had decided, for reasons of its own, that the two situations were equally awful, and she relented.
‘What am I going to do with you? Do you want me to kill you? Do you want me to hold you under until it’s over? Is that what you want? Do you hate yourself that much?’
‘Why?’ said Bell, her voice reduced to a childish whine. ‘Why won’t you let me win?’
‘Because you did a bad thing to us, and you need to be punished for it. Your punishment is all around you. It’s your dead guards, your burnt castle, your broken arm, your bruises, your messed-up plans and your missing maps. You need to learn that you don’t fuck around with people’s lives. Okay, you get away with it sometimes. But not this time. Just… just stay out of our way. We’ll go in the morning. You don’t follow us, you don’t try and stop us. That’s it. That’s all we want.’
Mary waded ashore and set off after Dalip. There was no pursuit, not this time.
32
He was only a man, and he was spent like the empty bullet cases that had belonged to his grandfather, and now, in another world, belonged to him.
She was not only a woman, and perhaps that was how she was able to catch him up and pull him to his feet, look hard and deep into his face, then drag his arm over her shoulder so that she could take some of his weight.
He was grateful, and not a little confused. It wasn’t how it was supposed to be◦– not how he’d been taught it was supposed to be◦– but perhaps he’d left all that behind along with so much else.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘Stupid bitch,’ she said, not at him. ‘I don’t know: she’s got her reasons, but not her excuses.’ She growled deep in her throat.
‘You all right?’
‘Just… you learn stuff about someone, and it makes it more difficult to hate them despite what they’ve done.’ She told him about Bell’s interrupted wedding. He listened carefully, and when she was done, he twisted his head around to look at the lake.
‘She’s gone.’
‘Do you think I’m going to regret it?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Not, you know: not killing her.’
He shrugged, not that he had much strength left to do even that. ‘Ask me if I regret killing Stanislav.’
‘The storm killed him.’
‘Oh, come on. I knew what I was doing, luring him to the top of the mountain, using the knife to attract the lightning. He was human just enough to feel hate, but not enough to realise the danger. I killed him for certain.’
‘Do you regret it?’