Chapter 5: The Past Rarely Helps
“Riona O’Shea was my friend,” said the marquise, “and Riona O’Shea was an idiot.” There was a ghost of fondness in her voice: a thing that had been felt strongly, and still haunted. “I will remember both, even if your histories do not.”
“You knew the First Crown?” Rose interrupted from where she sat, because Aaron had made sure she’d sat. “How? Rat kings don’t live anywhere near so long as--”
“If I gave the impression that I care to hear your voice longer than necessary,” the gray rat said, as behind her, the rest of her mass tangled restlessly with herself, “please accept my condolences.”
She continued.
“We were tired. We’d run so far. We didn’t know that the island we were on was the second-to-last; didn’t know that across the narrow strait ahead, that lighthouse we could see was already guiding us home. We came across a young dragon on the beach. It was a scared thing--had run nearly as far as us, I imagine; we hadn’t seen a lesser dragon for ten isles.”
“A lesser...?” Rose started. And stopped herself, with the air of a terrier at the edge of its leash.
“A dragon wasn’t a chance to miss,” said the marquise. “A strong fighter, a versatile form, and if it wouldn’t stay useful for so long as some others, at least it would help us today.
“We’d have both doppeled it, and maybe more of us besides, but our friend had lost the taste for taking things that couldn’t consent and wouldn’t hold it for us to copy until its heart gave out. That happens, you know; we did it. Trapped up some useful beastie, and let our people doppel and doppel until we broke the thing’s mind with all the lives we shoved inside. The body doesn’t last long, after. But without Rivers holding it, we’d only get the one shot. So we played for it: stone-scroll-salt, and it turns out Riona had spent five isles pretending to favor stone just so she could salt me when it counted. And Rivers knew, the bastard. I hated them.
“I loved them.