Page 62 of The Crow Games
Nola dropped the tomato in her hand and readied her Crone blade. Blue shuffled in behind us, clutching her pack of tomatoes protectively.
“I don’t know,” Ruchel said, brow furrowed.
“Hello.” The voice came from a woman dressed in tattered white linen. She appeared between the trees as though she’d been there all along, hiding behind them. Her skin was ghostly pale, and her dark hair lay over her shoulders, lank and oily. Her feet were bare and filthy. Thick mud caked the bottom of her skirt. “Will you help me?”
I recognized her as a revenant—a Whitten woman, they were called in the Upper Realm—and my heart hurt for her. She was not the soulless sort who haunted the train, not a corpse animated by magic, but the sort with their soul, twisted and broken and trapped inside them still where only the god who’d made them could free them.
The dangerous sort.
“We’ll help you,” I told her softly.
Ruchel grabbed my arm and squeezed. “Maven, no,” she hissed in my ear. “I sense great danger from this woman.”
“Trust me,” I whispered. She was right about the danger but not about what would trigger it. “Show her your warmth, Ruchel.” Then I glanced behind me at Nola and Blue. “It’s probably best the two of you just don’t say anything at all.”
“You don’t want to help me?” the woman asked, her expression flat and her head at a tilt.
“Yes, we do,” I said with fervor, and I took a cautious step forward. “Would you like a tomato?”
The woman in white, once a dedicated follower of Fria until the god of frost stole her away, considered the fruit balanced in my palm. She ran her fingers through her lank hair and eyed my braid. “Will you help me?”
“With your hair? Yes,” I said, and I tucked away the fruit and extended my hand to her slowly, carefully, the way one might hold out a piece of food with great caution toward a prowling predator.
She took my hand, her touch as cold as the grave. Her lips were tinged in blue and purple like a bruise, and when she breathed, her breath fogged gently despite the humidity, evidence of the White One’s wickedness. I had to bite down on my lip to stop it from trembling.
Guilt crashed to the bottom of my gut like a stone. There was nothing I could do for this woman. Not really. I’d spent lifetimes trying to help revenants just like her when I was Fria. I was their goddess, and I couldn’t save them.
“We don’t have time for this,” Blue muttered.
Nola hushed her, throwing an elbow into her side.
We washed the woman’s hair in the river. Nola helped me lower her into the water. Blue fetched soap from the green sisters, and we used it until her dark hair shone, glossy and clean.
Ruchel spoke to the revenant kindly as she braided her hair, seated on the bank in the mud just behind her. I cleaned her feet and between her toes too, and she seemed to like that, though she didn’t speak. Her expression remained blank, but occasionally light lit her eyes with awareness as Ruchel shared about the history of the calendar, filling the quiet with a droning gentleness.
The woman stood then and plucked a white piece of thread from her linens. She twirled it in her pale hands a moment, then handed it to Nola with the hint of a smile. “For you.”
“Oh. Thank you?” Nola said, glancing at the revenant, a line deepening between her tawny brows.
The woman stepped behind the moss-covered trunk of the nearest oak tree and was gone.
“Leave now,” I said urgently, rushing back down the bank toward the rafts.
“I don’t sense danger any longer,” Ruchel said.
“Where there’s one revenant, there’s always more,” I cautioned. I jostled my satchel and sent tomatoes tumbling. Blue tried to pick them up.
“Don’t fuss with that! Leave now!” I crowed at her.
Blue grumbled but did as I bid her. We hurried onto the rafts and pushed off.
“Should I even bother asking how you knew that woman was a revenant?” Blue demanded.
I didn’t know how to answer her, so I said nothing.
“Figures,” Blue growled.
Nola lounged beside me, twirling the piece of white thread between her fingers. “She gave me thread?”
