The cellar was starting to reek bad as a place Rora’d found in the Canals once, a place where a few different streams met and swirled and didn’t have anywhere to go. Wouldn’t’ve mattered most of the time, there were plenty of places like it all through the Canals, only in this specific place, one of the streams happened to be the one that, farther back, Whitedog Pack used for dumping corpses of the other packs. The place’d been close to clogged up with bodies when Rora’d found it, bloated and rotting and reeking, and she’d just stood staring in horror till vomit had burst out of her, and then she’d gone running far away and not ever gone anywhere near the place again.
The cellar wasn’t quite so bad, but the smells of refuse were getting stronger every day. Rora knew a good portion of that was from her, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. The part that wasn’t her was from too many bodies stuffed into a place that was made to store things instead of people, and adding all the pups into the reeking mix didn’t do a thing to help.
The pups were doing their best to be quiet, and the biggers were doing their best to hush the pups when they got too loud, but the problem was none of ’em were scared anymore. They’d been sent down to the cellar for safety close to a dozen times by now, and every time that nothing bad happened during the fighting up above, they got less scared and more stupid. They’d started a new game the last time, and kept it going this time: seeing how big a thing they could throw at Rora before she got angry and snapped at them. They were up to splinters from a broken old barrel, and they had damned good aim—her face was peppered with little cuts and pokes, but she’d promised herself she wouldn’t let them get to her this time. She didn’t want to let them win, even for a thing that didn’t matter. With everything that’d been taken from her, losing anything more was like . . . well, was like getting a shower of stones and splinters chucked at you.
They were little terrors, all the pups, and Rora would’ve swore she hadn’t been anywhere near so foolish and awful when she’d been that young. But there wasn’t much for them to do, and even Rora—grown as she was, even if she didn’t have the height to show it—was getting plenty bored. Still, she wasn’t ever bored or stupid enough to annoy the witches, which put the pups pretty high on the ladder of stupidity.
The witches couldn’t do much, sealed up behind their not-wall, and they were mostly well behaved and careful when the pups were around . . . but Rora’d seen them when they weren’t so well behaved, when they couldn’t be careful. She’d seen fire race along the ground, cracks walk up the walls and make showers of stone-dust, seen one witch just scream and scream until he threw up blood, and seen others fight each other like they were cornered animals, tearing and biting and wide-eyed with desperate fear.
But the pups hadn’t seen any of that, didn’t know how much they were risking just by making funny faces at the witches through the solid air, and they sure as shit didn’t listen to Rora when she told ’em to stop it.
A piece of wood about the size of her palm thunked against Rora’s shoulder, and she ground her teeth together, ignoring the pups’ giggles.
The ceiling opened up on firelight and stars, and the pups fled for fresh air like they’d been kicked. Used to be, Rora’d tried to follow them, just a stupid instinct to stick with pack, but the shame of clanking chains and smirks had taught her quick enough to stay put.
Her belly was knotted up with nerves—the last time they’d brought down a new witch, her brother’d looked half dead with tired, and then after the not-wall had fallen down and Anddyr had attacked him, Aro’d gone to looking most of the rest of the way dead. Rora hadn’t had the time or the brain to do anything besides shout his name after him as the fists helped him up the ladder, and if he’d heard, he hadn’t said anything back.
They hadn’t said a word to each other since they’d got to this damned place.
Rora’d told herself she wouldn’t be the one to break. It was Aro’s fault things were like this—she’d made him choose, and he’d chose himself over her, when all she’d done her whole life was choose him. Anddyr and Joros’d broken him, and every piece of Rora’d been screaming to kill them both, and Aro’d asked her not to because he thought they could help him more than Rora could. Rora planned on letting him live with that dumb choice. Let him see how much help they were, a crazy witch and a man who cared only about himself.
And then she’d seen how sick Aro looked, how he’d cried under Anddyr’s wild fists, and her anger had cracked, just a little bit.
She’d decided that the next time he came down, she’d say something. She still didn’t know what, it’d only been a few days since she’d decided and she hadn’t been able to come up with anything good. She’d figure it out. The twisting in her belly would chuck out some useful words.
Rora sat up straighter against the wall, put her hands in her lap, where it was harder to see the chains around them. She stared up at the open cellar door, and she watched the small group come down the ladder. That was a good thing about it being near as dark aboveground as it was in a witch-lit cellar: it didn’t take her eyes anything to pick out faces, and her hands clenched a little in her lap.
There was a new person, another witch by the looks of his crazy-wide eyes, with two fists pushing him forward. One of ’em was Skit, who knew how the cellar worked, brought food and cleaned up when things got really bad, knew enough to keep things from getting too bad most of the time. He was a good one, talked to Rora sometimes, though never if there was anyone important around to see. She could recognize the other fist’s face, but didn’t know his name, and following after the fists, in Aro’s usual place, was Tare.
It wasn’t that strange—Tare came down to the cellar pretty often, acting like it was to keep an eye on everyone and everything. Rora knew the real reason was that the Dogshead wouldn’t let Tare kill Rora, so the best Tare could do was remind herself that Rora’s life was pretty shit right now. Rora could understand that well enough. It was the same reason she sometimes glared over at Anddyr behind the not-wall when she was sure he wasn’t looking. You had to keep your hate burning bright, and the best way to do that was to see the one you hated being miserable.
So Tare came around pretty often, that wasn’t unusual, but what was unusual was that Aro wasn’t there at all. He always came down to push new witches through his not-wall.
Tare glared over at Rora as she passed by, same as she always did, but didn’t say anything. And Rora, all ready to blurt out some words at her brother, was left just staring with the nervous twist in her belly gone sour.
Tare and the fists pushed the new witch through the cellar, past Rora’s little corner to the far end, the big space that probably could’ve held three wagons if you could figure out how to get ’em through the cellar door. Now it was holding seven witches, all spread apart and glary like territorial cats. The fists added the new witch into the mix, pushing him through the not-wall, making the air shimmer and ripple for just a few seconds. Seemed like they didn’t need Aro for it, and the not-wall didn’t fall apart like it’d done the last time. The witch stood on the other side, looking like he’d bolt if he could just figure out which direction to run in.
And Anddyr, who always sat pressed into the corner, he reached out to gently touch the new witch’s leg. It made him jump, but then his eyes fixed on Anddyr like he was drowning and Anddyr was something floating by. He sat down next to Anddyr, and the not-wall did enough to muffle the sounds of their voices that Rora couldn’t pick out words, but after a while Anddyr turned his eyes away from the new one, looked back out to the same place he was always looking: Rora.
She looked away before he could see she’d been looking in the first place. She had promises to keep, after all. Even if they were just dumb little promises to herself. In the cellar, there weren’t many things worth keeping, but a promise might as well be one of ’em.
Tare was smirking over at her, that mocking little smile, like she thought it was the funniest thing in the world that the witch Rora hated so much loved her like an idiot.
Skit and the other fist started going around the cellar collecting filth buckets, working with the witches to get the special buckets Aro’d magicked up, the ones that could pass through the barrier. She hated those buckets; when the witches threw their fits, they weren’t shy about throwing the filth buckets around, and a lot of them ended up on her side of the not-wall.
Tare, nothing better to do, moved toward Rora’s end of the cellar, leaning back against the ladder and hooking her arms through the rungs. “You’re almost starting to look like a girl,” she said lightly, almost cheerfully. Rora still hadn’t figured out which was worse: when Tare spent all her time spitting and swearing and taunting, or when Tare ignored her, acted like Rora wasn’t even someone worth pretending was there.
Rora shook her head, felt her hair brush against one ear, and against the smooth skin where she would’ve had a second ear if Tare hadn’t cut it off. It was the longest her hair’d ever been, since she was a kid and desperate to make her and Aro look different, and he’d cried when she’d tried to chop his hair off. “Get me a dagger, and I can look proper and boyish again.”
Tare snorted. “Get you a dagger, and you’d just put it in my back. That’s all you’re good at.”
That amount of distrust hurt too much for Rora to have any light comeback. “Or maybe Sharra will turn her back long enough for you to put one in mine.”
“Maybe she will.”
Skit and the other fist—hells, Rora should know his name by now—came back down the ladder, buckets clean and ready to be passed back through the not-wall. That meant they’d all be leaving soon, and it meant her brother really wasn’t gonna show up. Softly, not really expecting any answer but a gob of spit, Rora asked Tare, “Is Aro okay?”
Tare frowned down at her, face twisted but not in any way Rora recognized. “He’s . . .” Down at her side, Tare’s hand turned over, palm out with the little finger tucked up, and wobbled a bit. It was one of the hand signs knives used to talk to each other, but Rora wasn’t sure Tare even meant to do it. It seemed like it was instinctual. “He’s just tired,” she finally said, but that was a lot less of an answer than the hand sign’d been. Tare’s mouth said fine, but her hand said wrong.
Rora swallowed a lump that fell hard into the tangled mess of her belly. “Can you . . .” What, was she gonna send Aro a message through Tare? Fat chance of that happening, and fatter chance of it even meaning anything that way. Anything she asked Tare to do, Tare’d probably take two jumps in the other direction just for spite. Rora sighed, pulled up her knees, and wrapped her chain-clanking arms around them. “Thanks,” she muttered, meaning it but not sure why she bothered.
Tare looked down at her like she wasn’t sure why Rora bothered either. It wasn’t a glare, though, and Tare left without saying anything else, Skit and the other fist following after. Skit did look back at her like maybe he was sorry, but he didn’t say anything either. Once they’d closed the cellar door behind them, she was just left with witchlight and Anddyr’s eyes staring like he could see inside her, all the way down to the twisting and the rocks in her belly.