Chall watched her silently, a question in his eyes, one which he voiced a moment later. “What do we do, Maeve?” He paused, smiling mischievously. “Or should I call you Lorrie? It’s what the ogre called you, isn’t it? Lorrie?”
She frowned. “Do you really think this is the most pressing thing right now, Chall?”
He shrugged. “Just never thought of you as a ‘Lorrie’ that’s all. Though I also never would have thought to have found you on your knees in the dirt, picking weeds either. And I don’t even want to get started on the way that big bastard talked to you. The Maeve I knew—”
“The Maeve you knew,” she interrupted, “has a price on her head that could beggar some of the realm’s wealthiest noblemen, thanks in no small part to you and your constant inability to keep your mouth shut when you should. After all, not all of us are illusionists who can fake our deaths. I wonder, did you go to your own funeral? It seems like the sort of thing you would do.”
He winced. “I’m afraid I missed the whole affair. I was, as I recall, a bit drunk at the time.”
“Surprising,” she said dryly. “Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about it—I was there, and it seems to me that just about everyone missed it.”
“Fine, fine, so maybe I’m not exactly overburdened with friends. Still, to see you like this—”
“No, Chall,” she growled. “No. I won’t talk about my husband or about anything else with you. That’s my business and mine alone. We’ve all dealt with our past in our own ways, found paths to move forward in our own ways. Yours, it seems”—she paused, glancing at his protruding gut—“mostly in the form of ale and food.”
“And prostitutes,” he offered without a hint of shame—it seemed the bastard still didn’t have any—“let’s not forget that.”
She sighed. “Have I told you just how pleased I am to see you?”
“Believe me, I didn’t want to come here…” He trailed off as she frowned. “I mean, I wanted to see you—of course, who wouldn’t, you’re such a pleasant person. But…what I mean…”
“I know what you mean,” she said. And that was true. She knew exactly how the vision’s contents made him feel, for she thought it likely that she was feeling much the same herself.
They trailed into silence then, both of them thinking their own thoughts, and just for something to do, Maeve took a sip of her tea. Terrible stuff, normally, but she could taste none of it now.
“What are we going to do, Mae?” Chall asked quietly.
No one had called her that in a very long time, no one had ever called her that, in fact, except for Chall. She’d always hated it, that name, and had long since lost track of the arguments they’d had over it—more than a few of which had ended when she’d finally had enough and reached for one of the knives she’d always kept. Now, though, she found that after fifteen years, she’d missed it. She had not, however, missed the way he was staring at her now, the same way that a child might stare at a parent when they’d had a bad dream. The child confident that the parent would know what to do, that the parent could make the monsters go away.
What are we going to do, Mae? A single sentence, uttered in a moment, but one that threatened to turn her life, the one she had spent the last fifteen years building, on its head. “What life?” she muttered.
“I’m sorry?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.” And that was an answer not just to his question, she realized, but to her own as well. What life? Nothing. No life at all, that was the truth. She realized, then, that she had been so focused on staying hidden, so focused on keeping her life that she had traded it one piece at a time in the name of safety, a particularly large part on her wedding day to Hank. For years, she had tolerated the man’s drunken pawings and drunken rages, pretending to be a meek, frightened wife because she thought that, in this way, she would keep herself safe, so that she might live. After all, as Chall had pointed out, no one could have ever expected to find Maeve the Marvelous in a shithole of a village, meekly accepting the constant rebukes of her overbearing husband. She had sought to keep her life and, in seeking it, had lost it.
She realized another truth then, a particularly unwelcome one. In the last fifteen years, she had done very few things of which she was proud, very few things which she could look back on with anything but shame. Over fifteen years, she had transformed herself, had metamorphosed the way a caterpillar might turn into a butterfly. Only she had not turned from an ugly insect into a beautiful butterfly. Instead, she had turned herself from a confident, brave woman, one after whom men lusted even while they were terrified of her, into a mewling, scraping wife, one who was, in fact, little better than a servant.
Chall had asked her how the Maeve he had known could marry Hank, could put up with the things she did, and the fact was that such a woman could not. So she had allowed herself to become something else, something worse. Years ago, before her head had such a price on it, and she had exiled herself from civilized society, Maeve had done many things. She had been known throughout the land—Maeve the Marvelous, they had called her, and though she had always hated that name, it had stood for something. She had stood for something, something more than pulled weeds and being a punching bag for her husband when he had it in mind to vent his anger and she was closest at hand.
True,
