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The grounds surrounding the mansion were thick with overgrown bushes, pierced by a handful of trees. Decisions had to be made swiftly. Escape or die. Capture was not an option.

Eldest peered once more down the chimney pot. Milk-Eye’s face looked up at her from the flue, almost within reach now. The girl looked desperate, though whether from fear of falling, fear of failing, or desire to escape, Eldest couldn’t say. Despite sharing extremes with her sister—her false sister—for years, Eldest didn’t know which way she’d break under such stress and faced with such choices. Eldest did know that she was too weak to fight off her younger sibling, though.

“Help me…” Milk-Eye’s filthy arm reached up, hand grasping.

Eldest stared with frozen horror. If she took that hand the girl could drag her back down, hold her there at the very least.

She found herself reaching for Milk-Eye, the gap between those stretching fingers and her own already reduced to less than a foot. In that moment the memory of Strong, broken and crawling for the street door, speared through her again, a physical pain that contracted her muscles, pulling back her hand.

“…sorry…” A gasp. A soft cry of agony. “Sorry,” she muttered again as she withdrew, telling herself again that the girl was not her sister. Not her blood. A wipe of her hand sent a cloud of soot down to blind the one good eye staring up at her. A shove sent the loose chimney pot falling, aimed in the opposite direction to the one she planned to take, and in the faint hope it would roll and crash on Father as he emerged. When the pot broke away it revealed Milk-Eye’s blackened, spluttering face in the flue, now just inches from the open air.

If she’d had the strength, Eldest could have pulled the girl free, out into the world and new possibilities, but fear and weakness stayed her hand.

Eldest ran. Along the ridge towards the East Wing, then veering down across the slates in an unstoppable curving run towards the guttering. She aimed herself at the tree that grew nearest to the mansion on the far side from the street door. Fear of the fall didn’t factor at all. Terror of Father’s revenge drove her on.

The roof’s slope gave her speed that her tired legs could not have manufactured. At the last moment she leapt for the branches and shot through the air, arms pinwheeling as the thick foliage devoured her.

The drop didn’t end until the ground hammered the air from her lungs. Eldest remembered only the sense of falling, the sound of splintering, and the branches’ repeated blows to her body. She rolled onto her front, drawing air into her wheezing chest, and began to crawl, moving slowly through a thick green jungle that was cold, wet, and sharp. She hoped that Father would be climbing the mansion’s outer wall to gain the roof, too distracted by the falling chimney to hear her distant encounter with the tree.

As Eldest crawled she tried to erase herself. She didn’t stop moving, though. Trusting only in what Father had taught her felt…too trusting. What had been the point of all those nights of pain and fear? To teach the children to hide themselves. To terrify them into feats of concentration that might be beyond any less motivated mind. But would Father truly teach them to hide from him, or could he see through such tricks?

Eldest trusted the cover of the bushes, thorned or not. On hands and knees, she advanced through brambles, tearing her clothes and her skin. And when she came to the garden wall, she peered through the leaves to see the black figure of Father prowling the roof ridge, hunting around the chimney stacks. A thick tree provided the cover she needed to climb the wall unseen. An oak, she thought, though how she knew that she had no idea. She dropped down into the street beyond, barefoot, filthy, bloody, and more tired than she had ever been. But she stood in daylight, and though the sky was leaden, promising only rain, she had never felt more free.

27

Rue

“Why are you running away?”

Rue ignored the crow and continued what could at best be called limping briskly away.

“Stay and fight!” Senna cawed. “I thought you were all set on justice!”

“Anything that won’t bend can break us. It’s convictions that make monsters.” Rue shook her head. “I set my convictions aside early on. It’s part of what made me so hard to kill.”

“That sounds like a very long way to say you’re scared.”

“I’m scared,” Rue growled.

“I thought you Kindnesses were the big bad.”

“The important word in that sentence is ‘were.’ The news is five years out of date this far from civilization, not thirty. Didn’t your memory fit inside that bird skull?”

Rue stamped onwards. Her body felt one part dead and three parts alive, and all of the parts were too old for any of this shit. Her injuries hurt less than they should and impeded her less than they should, but they still hurt and still got in the way.

The road out of Pye led west towards the border. Pye, the Vale, and the rest of the region that had once belonged to a copper-crowned king named Handelf had been swallowed by the empire ten years before Rue’s arrival. Villages had burned, and fields had been watered with the blood of Handelf’s axemen. He’d been a warrior who had carved his way to his throne and wasn’t ready to surrender it, whatever the opposition. There had been battles, but in Pye they’d seen only distant smoke and the gathering of ravens.

Those fields now belonged to Emperor Sunder, though he might ride three swift horses to death in as many days and still not reach them from his golden capital. He’d given their administration over to one of his barons, Baron Mancer, and whether the man had considered it a gift or a reprimand, Rue didn’t know.

The emperor’s newest neighbour to the west was now King Armand, third of his name and ruler of Tavoland, whose mountains rose in sharp defence before falling away in a long descent to the sea. Or it would have been had Armand not himself fallen…from his horse mere yards from the gates of his palace and succumbed by degrees to an infection that sank its teeth into a fractured hip. The two years that had passed since had seen the title settle on his widow, the “Battle Queen” having crushed opportunistic invasions from the north and south, giving the lord of the rock-strewn kingdom of Hard Hill a very bloody nose and wreaking worse ruin upon the Marsh King.

To judge from Senna’s report the mercenaries were burning settlements on both sides of the empire’s border with Tavoland. Rue knew for certain that the emperor didn’t give a bent copper for the lives of the peasants out in these supposedly unfarmable hills. She doubted that this Battle Queen out of Tavoland would give one either, but pile enough corpses on the margins of a country and eventually the ruler’s pride would be hurt sufficiently to do something about it. It had to be said, though, that the Battle Queen forged her name fighting alongside peasants. Shortly after the invasion of Regon, twenty years earlier, she’d supported Regonian rebels up in the Red Hills on their side of that same border. They still sang songs about the battle of Caden’s Pass. So Armand’s widow might respond this time. If Tavoland stayed silent, though, Sunder would have to pretend to care about his farmers and use his own antagonism as a pretext for expanding to the western sea. Similar tactics had initiated wars with Svellard to the north and Kintcha to the south. Both countries now mere provinces of Sunder’s empire.

Rue’s friends, home, and village had all been destroyed as part of the pretence staged so that Emperor Sunder could claim the moral high ground in a war of his own making.

Senna swooped low, cawing. “Your lot got a taste of your own medicine.” The bird’s thoughts were still on Rue and the Kindnesses that had raised her. “A bitter enough taste! I remember that.”

“They stopped being ‘my lot’ long before Sunder’s purge.” Rue struck out over a ploughed field, the ruts swerving here and there to avoid stones too large to move. In her mind’s eye Rue could still see Martha Craven cursing her ox, Low Bo, as she coaxed him round the turns. “Sunder saved me the effort.” A lie but it soothed her. “Sunder and the Cruelties that served him.”