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“Twist her fucking head off, Brak!” Tabtha sounded relieved—the spell of the supernatural broken as the real world started to reassert itself. One old woman, no matter how angry, was never going to best a giant mercenary in a test of strength.

Even so, Rue gave ground only slowly. She changed her footing, tried to throw him, but again his knee slammed into her. By rights her thigh should have broken the first time and her hip the second.

“Crush her!” Tabtha warmed to her role as cheerleader.

Outside, a crow was cawing in alarm. Senna, no doubt, complaining about Rue’s performance.

Brak dropped his club and pressed down with still greater force. Rue sank to her knees, grunting with the effort of keeping the man’s hands from her throat. The bastard was going to beat her, again, by himself this time. She snarled and rose an inch or two before being thrust down farther, blunt fingers clawing for purchase on her face.

Panic narrows your vision. That had been an early lesson. Panic shows you only one thing and you keep doing it until you die. And so, even as the mercenary forced her to the floor, seeking to wring her neck and tear off her head, Rue reached out for other ideas.

At the last, as the hands fastened around her throat, she saw the fire in Brak’s eyes, the twist of a grin in the forest of his beard. The end had come.

A moment later he was gone, torn away to an accompaniment of Tabtha’s screams, the arm of his freshly dead sibling braced against his throat.

Rue got to her hands and knees, spitting crimson drool. She scooped up the discarded hatchet as she rose above the brothers, one dead and one living, locked together in filial combat, one suddenly desperate, the other all rage and strength and the snapping of his jaw as he sought family flesh.

Rue ended Brak with a swing of the hatchet to the back of his neck. The other one she released, feeling his spirit tumble away down the long climb that had returned her to her body. Keeping him dancing to her tune was straining a muscle she’d not known she still owned, and she no longer needed him.

“Going somewhere?” Rue cricked her neck and looked over her shoulder to where Tabtha Heart-Taker was hobbling towards the back door.

“Wh-what are you?” The woman fumbled for her sword.

Rue turned and advanced on her slowly.

“Consider me a kindness.”

10

Bek

Year One

The class hurried along the length of West Corridor, to the great iron door at the end, none of them wanting to be late for their first lesson with Kindness Marta. They stood before the door, still in the clothes in which they had arrived at the Academy. Still spattered with the days-old blood of Lucia, the general’s daughter, who had been killed by one of their number on the first night, and then again, collectively, on the first morning after breakfast.

The lesson turned out to be far less traumatic than Kindness Undu’s. Packed into Creed Hall, the first years had been treated to a simple discourse on the world in which the Academy found itself—a world partly shaped by the deeds of the Academy’s alumni over the many decades since its founding. To those possessed of even a basic education it was old news, and the main challenge was staying focused so as not to provoke the Kindness’s ire.

Bek supposed that many of the class came from even deeper poverty than she had, and hadn’t had the advantage of having a scribe—however poor—as a father. Even so, the depth of some of the girls’ ignorance surprised her, and worse, she was shocked to find that Mollandra knew less than any of them, quickly attracting the Kindness’s disapproval. Mollandra had seemed sharp enough back in the dormitory’s gloom, but under the glare of Kindness Marta’s questions it seemed that she knew almost nothing.

The Kindness eventually released them to the central courtyard. She watched them leave like a fox eyes hens when deciding on its next meal. The girls emerged blinking into the freshness of the day, the sky above them a hungry blue. The high walls were studded with patient crows drawn by the Academy’s carrion stench and seemingly waiting for calamity to strike among the acolytes below.

The Year One girls had been told they would be permitted a short recreation period before Instructor Suni summoned them to her class again and continued to teach them how to break each other with fists and feet.

“We need to help her.” Bek kept at Einsa’s side while Mollandra hurried out of the walls’ shade.

“Or let nature take its course while we start thinking about a replacement.” Einsa said it without malice and with a certain resignation.

“Helping her can’t hurt. Tutoring her will help us too, you know. My father says that teaching someone else something is the best way to understand it yourself…” Bek paused. Mentioning her father put a sour taste into her mouth. Maybe he hadn’t had any good choices. But out of the bad options, he’d chosen the one that exchanged her for coins.

Einsa shrugged her broad shoulders. “Shrimp!” She shouted after Mollandra, nodding to the side where a flight of steps up to the formal entrance hall made for good sitting. Mollandra arrived as Bek planted her backside on the cold stone.

“You don’t know much, do you?” Einsa repeated Kindness Marta’s point.

“I know lots of things,” Mollandra answered neutrally. “They’re just different things from the rest of you.”

“You know who rules the city, then,” Einsa said.

“Baron Ha…” Mollandra furrowed her brow. There had been a lot of names in the lesson. “No, Prince Co…Conner?”