Near as I could tell Scar didn't do a damned thing.
But down there a centaur's arm shot forward. A javelin flashed. The shaft smashed in through one of Raven's temples and out the other.
This time he would not be back from the dead. This time he wasn't faking.
I sat down and turned inside myself, wondering if I hadn't dragged my feet so much while we were headed south would we have caught up with Croaker and so maybe never have gotten into this spot. This monster was going to be riding my shoulders for the rest of my life.
Darling did her own version of going into a pout.
Only Torque kept his mind on the job. He got the wooden chest from Darling, shinnied down the crane rope, got the spike away from Raven. He climbed back up, set the box down by Darling, came over to me and said, "Tell her I'm out of it, Case. Tell her I just couldn't take it no more." He walked away, maybe going looking for the brother who had left with Raven and hadn't come back.
I didn't much blame him for going.
LXXX
Smeds laid the last stone on the old man's cairn. The tears were gone. The anger was quiet. It was not right that Fish should have fallen to cholera after taking the worst that could be thrown by the world's nastiest villains. But there was no justice in this existence.
It there was, Timmy Locan would be here, not Smeds Stahl.
Smeds went on, into the city Roses. A year later he was a respected member of the community, owner of a struggling brewery. He lived well but without ostentation that would excite unwanted curiosity. He never told his story to a soul.
EPILOGUE
No matter how many times I walked around it, the hole into the tree god's "abyss" still looked like a piece of black silk suspended a yard above the ground. It refused to have more than two dimensions.
Darling brought the little chest containing the silver spike, threw it through. It took both of us to do the coffin that contained all that had been left in the big pot when, after a week of cooking, it had been allowed to boil dry. The black circle vanished as though a stage magician had sucked the cloth up his sleeve.
We went and got clean for what seemed like the first time in years, then Darling showed me around the rabbit warren mat had been home for the Black Company and Rebel movement for so many years. Fascinating. And repellent. That people should put themselves through such hell… I wished them better times than mine, wherever they were.
Somehow we ended up doing what men and women seem unable to avoid. Afterward, she dressed in the clothing of a peasant woman, without a hint of mail or a single hidden blade.
"What goes?" I asked.
She signed, "The White Rose is dead. There is no place for her anymore. No need."
I didn't argue. I never was on that side.
For want of anything better to do we got Old Father Tree to give us a ride to where we could check out the progress of the potato industry.
It hadn't changed a whole lot, except the people I knew had got older.
The grandkids wouldn't believe a word of our stories but they d fight anybody who didn't agree that we told the most exciting lies in the world.