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“Eldest.” Milk-Eye nodded her acknowledgement of Rue. “When Mother dealt the baron his hand in the game—forced it on him really”—she circled her left wrist with the fingers of the right as if to pinch it off—“it was in order that he use it to seize power. I am impressed that you turned his own hand against him so effectively.”

Mention of Mother put a chill into Rue. She wanted to ask how long ago this plan had been laid, how long ago the baron had been maimed. Mother had been dead for many years, surely?

She felt snared now in a way that even Milk-Eye’s appearance hadn’t made her feel. There were plans here decades and more in the making…“You! You put Sharp in that place!”

“A lure for you, Eldest. You were a long time coming. I’d lost faith that you would. I thought you’d abandoned your new family as completely as your old one.”

“You’re so young.” This talk of new and old had brought Milk-Eye’s age into focus. “So many years thrown away…” Without time’s tether the girl was a floating point, trapped in an endless now. Rue had cursed her age more in the last few days than in the previous ten years, her weakness highlighted at every turn. But without the foundation of memory she wouldn’t have cared about Jayne or Ambeth or even known Sharp or felt the bonds they’d earned after the Academy.

“You threw us all away, Eldest. All our years.” The woman, who Rue recognized only from the peculiarity that had named her, sneered. “What do you care whether we keep our years or cast them aside?”

The truth of it lay beyond words. She could say that she had also been a child. That both of them were victims. That if Milk-Eye had held tight to her experience, then age would have taught her perspective too. But there was no home for these words behind those mismatched eyes, so Rue answered with a question.

“If Sharp was bait, who was watching her?”

Sharp, hearing her name, looked up in confusion, no recognition in her face. “Me?”

“Who was watching her?” Rue continued. “And why didn’t they close the trap?”

Milk-Eye nodded to the masked figures left and right, only now starting to stand, having rid their minds of the echoes of the baron’s death. Concentrating on the pair, Rue could now sense beneath the damping shield traces of the bones they carried, the baron’s fingers, linking them to his corpse. She sensed the Ingredient in them too—a new generation of Cruelties.

“When they saw you were heading in the right direction, they followed you here. No need to step in. You were in the baron’s grasp for a long time before you…broke it.”

Milk-Eye watched her, half-amused. Savouring the moment. Watching different levels of understanding surface on Rue’s face.

Rue needed help and she knew it. Without Sharp she had no chance at all. Even if she were to regain her friend, a three-legged donkey in a thoroughbred race would have better odds. But at least she wouldn’t feel she was dying alone, unwitnessed.

Megaera’s poison, whatever it was they’d fed Rue—scavenged from the Fury’s earthly remains—had allowed her presence to stir Sharp’s depths, bringing her partway out of the catatonia that age had mired her in. But she needed more and she had never been trained in the subtleties of that power. Rue had fled too young to learn the Cruelties’ craft.

She needed something more than the ability to dredge memory from the darkness or press it back into black oblivion. In the face of this disease, that was too blunt a weapon. She needed something…sharp. Something personal and so deep that it would bring up with it the delicate webs of recollection that constituted her friend’s being.

“I’m sorry, Sharp…” Rue moved to her friend’s side. “But I need you.”

Sharp’s confusion deepened. “It must be time for dinner by now. Where’s Maria?”

Rue pushed forward with the darkness even now unwrapping from her bones. She needed an arrowhead, though. Something to pierce deep and open the way.

“Matrin Smith.” She whispered the name, just as Sharp herself had whispered the man’s name at seventeen when she shared her deepest and most secret hurts a lifetime ago and a world away.

A soft cry of hurt escaped the old woman, and she staggered. Rue caught her arm, pouring in Megaera’s power.

“Matrin Smith.” Rue spat the name now. “Remember how we killed him? The three of us?”

“I…” Sharp straightened. “I do.” Her face hardened. Her gaze became focused. She shook her arm free.

“I remember this one.” Sharp stepped past Rue, pointing with her sword at Milk-Eye. “I told you that I knew her! The eye-girl. Came to our dormitory with a bunch of stabby children.” Sharp nodded. “I burned them all up. We threw them off the wall. Down where the shit goes. She ran away. Now she’s back to finish it.”

How much she’d been able to restore to Sharp, Rue had no idea, but she clearly had more of her friend with her than she had moments before. Rue narrowed her gaze at Milk-Eye. “Sharp’s right? That’s what this is about?”

Milk-Eye looked surprised, as if she hadn’t imagined that there would ever be any doubt about that, of all things. Somewhere far away a bell began to toll, though whether to raise the alarm or to note the baron’s passing, Rue didn’t know.

“Of course that’s what this is about. You might have grown old and forgotten what you did to us. You might have hidden yourself away in some pigsty village and played nice with the peasants. But I didn’t, we didn’t, the ones you left behind. Father and Mother taught us all about memory, sister. We forget our years but never the wounds we’re dealt.”

Beside Milk-Eye, the masked Cruelties had recovered and brought their crossbows to bear once more. Rue knew she should have attacked when they were weak, but somehow she didn’t think Milk-Eye had nursed this grudge for half a century only to end it with a bolt to the stomach. She’d want a more personal revenge.

To Rue’s despair, her own backup, Sharp, seemed to have forgotten about Milk-Eye and the others entirely. Instead of watching them, she stared at her reflection in the various mirrors around the walls, swaying this way and that for a better angle.

One of the crossbow men, with exaggerated motions, drew a bead on Rue’s head.