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“No you don’t,” Mara replied.  “But enemyship is as much my choice as it is yours.  I choose to be enemies.”

I drew the Hyena.

I saw the crone’s expression change.  Not a smile.  She wouldn’t give me that much.  But amusement.  Almost relaxed, more comfortable with this than she’d been with my blade in a sheath.

“Blake,” Tiff murmured.  “Rose told me about Mara.  She might be more dangerous than the dragon.”

“I know,” I said.

“Then… let’s not pick a fight?”

“We’re not,” I said.  “I’m speaking her language.”

“Indian?” Evan asked.

“Algonquin,” Tiff corrected, gently.  “And I don’t think that’s what Blake means.”

My eyes were fixed on the crone’s.  The snow was frozen around her, but her breath billowed out in front of her face, expanding, and here and there, it touched a snowflake, stirring it into motion.

“If I strike at you,” Mara told me, “I’m backed by laws.”

“If I fight back, I am too,” I said.

“I’ve been here for a very long time,” she said.  “This place is mine, and it’s been mine for more years than I can count.  It will serve me.”

“I’ve only technically existed for a few months,” I replied.  “I don’t think I’m long for this world.  It sounds like you have a lot more at stake than I do.  I can’t imagine you really want to pick a fight against someone with so little to lose.”

She didn’t respond.

I took that as a cue to elaborate, “It doesn’t fit what we know of you.  You don’t get to be as old as you are by picking fights or being reckless.  Assuming we each killed the other, I’d be ending something like, what, a few hundred years of history?  What do you gain by destroying me?”

“You understand so little,” she said.

It was a little weird, being condescended to by someone who looked just over half my age.

She went on, “Gain, loss, love, fairness, right, rights.”

Mara put an emphasis on the s at the end of the second statement.

I spread my arms a little.

“Meaningless,” she said.  “The town will fall, just as it rose, two hundred and fifteen years ago.  Before that, I was here.  I watched people come and go.  Settlements rose and fell.  Not many, not large, but a number.  Before that, I was here.”

“Been here a while,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed.  “The man and woman who brought me into this world came to this place on a raft of reeds, and I was so small I had to be carried. We traveled from the west to here over my lifetime, following the deer and the hunt.  When my parents passed, I stayed.  I was one of the first to lay claim here, and I have never given it up.”

“Over the water to the west?” Peter murmured.  “The lake?”

“Ocean,” Tiff said, her voice almost a whisper.

“I nurtured those who followed after me or passed through, offered them my hand and my amassed knowledge, so they could be communities, a people.  Many are mine.  Hundreds of years of work.  I saw things follow in our wake, things stirred into existence by our being.  Your Others, echoing our intelligence, echoing our pride and fear and pain, to join those Others that were here before the first people.  I am familiar with them all.  I know what man is, and I know that your love and law and fairness are invention.  Invention younger than I am.”

These words had a power that went beyond a simple explanation.  It was a declaration, and she was gaining a kind of power through it.  I could feel it.

I could see how tense the satyr and maenad were.  Green Eyes was hunkered down.

“What do you have, if you take all that away?” I asked.  “That’s not humanity.”

“It is everything humans are, distilled.  Your culture, your ideas, they pollute it.  Weaken you.”

“We might have to agree to disagree,” I said.

“No,” she said, and she said it with conviction.  “You know the power of your repetition.  Three times, you do something.  Three times you bind it to make it so.  Agreed?”

“That’s the gist of it.”

Invention.  But at the core, there is truth.  I have not counted, but I can still be utterly confident in saying that I have woken up in the same place for more than nine million of your days.  I have gathered, hunted, cooked and eaten the same foods on those same days.  I have been born, bled for the first time, and been reborn on more than one thousand occasions.  The wheel of life and death turns forward and I am an indelible part of it, especially here.  This is a pattern, this is my ritual.  Now tell me, what is the truth of this.  What does it make me?”

“A hag,” Tiff murmured.  “A blood hag.”

“The dullest person alive?” Peter muttered.

“Powerful,” I said, before she could respond to him.  “A hell of a lot scarier than a dragon.”

“Man, you must be really glad to have visitors,” Evan said.

Mara’s eyes narrowed, face hardening.  “You don’t understand.”

“Guess not,” he said.

“Boredom is a newer invention,” she said.  “Loneliness a luxury.  For most of humanity’s time on this earth, the only desire was to exist.  Food, shelter, water, health.  When our lives ran short, we carried our existence forward through our offspring.”

“Mara,” I said.  “We’re not here to debate the definition of humanity.”

“You’re here to ask if I had anything to do with your town’s descent into darkness, chaos, and ruin.”

“Yes.”

“Did you really expect me to give you an answer?” she asked.

“You’ve already pointed out that we came with something of a warband.  Is that not answer enough?” I asked.

Again, that almost relaxed, easy sort of acceptance of the open threat.

“Okay, Blake,” Tiff said.  “This is part of the reason why Rose wanted me along for the ride, here.  You’re a little prone to pick fights, the way you are now.  Stop.”

“Mara,” I called out.  “Tell me, is there any way we could have done this fairly?  Gotten a straight answer out of you?”

“No,” the crone said.

“There’s no way we’re going to get out of here without a confrontation of some kind?” I said.

“No,” Mara said.  “There isn’t.”

I nodded slowly.

Shit,” Tiff swore, under her breath.

“Had that vibe right from the start,” I said.  “Which brings us here.  Talking.”

Buying time, I thought, though I didn’t dare say it.

Mara was, if nothing else, endlessly patient.

If I said that I was taking advantage of that patience, she might revoke it.

I just had to pray my allies got the message without the message being too obvious.  If one of them lost nerve or pushed things the wrong way, this could all be for naught.

“Mara,” I said.  “You’ve been talking about what lies at the root of humanity.”

“Yes.”  She rubbed her hands together for warmth.

“Trade, barter, that’s at the root of humanity.  You’ve done it.”