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“Burned that big castle, didn’t they?”

“Academy,” Rue muttered. Try as she might to distract herself, the crow’s cawing scraped along her spine. Rue might have taken flight and eventually lost herself in the backwaters of empire, but Senna was right, whether she knew it or not. The Kindnesses had been “Rue’s lot.” And when their end had come in fire and chaos, despite the wrathful vows of her youth, it hadn’t been her doing. “Not castle. Academy.”

Senna flew ahead and fluttered to a halt on the gatepost at the field’s exit. Beyond the dry-stone wall the ground became progressively rockier and sloped up to a wooded ridge where the trees leaned sharply with the prevailing wind.

“Running from one man…Wasn’t one man tore down your castle, was it?”

“I wasn’t there.” It had been a mob. Not one man. Senna was right about that. Thousands had flooded out of the city once the resident Kindnesses were gone. With that many there together, driven by the surging collective will, they hadn’t known if they were there to save the children, to kill the monsters, to wipe the slate clean to remove the stain on their conscience, or just to loot and burn, hunting for the fabled wealth that surely must lie behind the next locked door.

“Why are you running?” Senna cawed. “They told us the Kindly Ones brought the fire. Said they could crack the earth itself. Raise storms. Call the waves.”

“You’re remembering a lot all of a sudden.” Rue made a lazy swipe as she passed the gatepost. Senna took to the air, squawking, a stray feather whirling in her wake. “And I did bring the fire.” She glanced back at the black smoke rising. The sun had poked out between cloud wracks, and the flames below the smoke were hardly visible in the light of day.

Senna swooped by. “You didn’t bring that fire. Those bastards set it alight. They burned the place and killed everyone. And you let them do it.”

Rue didn’t answer. She had never managed to unleash the full might of the elixir. The talent was rare, and few among the Kindnesses had burned as brightly as legends like Heera and the handful of others once remembered in the lesser creed. And nowadays nobody did. That fire had gone out of the world. Rue considered this to be a good thing, since as small as the number who could touch divinity were, the number who could survive the experience were smaller still. Heera herself was said to have endured two grand rages before being carried off at the height of her third and final unleashing at the gates of Themda.

The propensity for holy rage increased with each draught of the elixir consumed, but having found candidates for a trio at the expense of a sizeable portion of the class, the Kindnesses were loath to kill off their promising acolytes with a second drink of the poison. It wasn’t an act of compassion. All but three of any year were doomed. But the process over the five years of the second half of their training was designed to select those best suited to the role. Simply dosing the class with the fabulously valuable elixir until all but three of them had exploded, burned to a crisp, or just keeled over dead would not allow the rest of the training to achieve the brutality required when honing a Kindness.

The fact that Kindness Undu had poured Rue a second draught following her insubordination had, however, still not gifted her the power to unleash the full rage of the Kindly Ones. Nor had it served the punitive function the Kindness intended. Rue had gulped the liquid down, felt that same distressingly familiar blackness flutter in her chest, and then…nothing. She had found the Kindness’s eyes again, but this time had refrained from voicing her thoughts, instead releasing a belch that Sharp later gleefully recounted as being far too loud and long to have come out of such a slight child.

On a very small number of occasions, Rue had been a door for some fraction of the Furies’ fire. But to open that door required the incandescent fury that only true calamity can provoke. She prayed never to visit such extremes again.

Rue stumbled over a rock and cursed. She shook off the memories that had stolen her attention. “I wish—” But Rue wasn’t quite self-absorbed enough to complain to Senna about the things she wished she’d had time to recover from her hut. She might have had useful possessions burned up, but Senna had lost family. Senna’s husband had left with a visiting tinker woman years before Rue arrived, tired, no doubt, of her sharpening her tongue on him. But her son, his wife, their children…Rue clamped her lips together.

She would miss the village and many of the people in it, but she hadn’t been born there. It wasn’t the totality of her experience: she had suffered loss before. Even so, she really did wish she’d brought her heavy coat, a skin to hang over bushes for when it rained, a flint and kindling, some salt, the coins she’d kept under her hearthstone…so many things. A cartload really. She was too old for tramping across the wilds. She’d been too old for it ten years earlier when she’d tramped her way to the Vale. Now the great outdoors resembled a do-it-yourself torture kit. A decade of straw mattresses and woollen blankets, albeit thin grey ones that harboured a variety of wildlife, had made her soft. The years themselves had made her soft, comforts aside—the soft decay of age had found its way past her hardness and the barriers forged at such cost.

Among the trees the gloom already anticipated evening. Senna fluttered overhead, cawing irritably when she lost track of Rue. Though Rue reasoned that if the crow was compelled to follow her, then surely that must come with some sense of direction…or how was it a compulsion?

“He’s closer. Gaining on you.” Senna landed in the clearing Rue had just entered, by a spring that bubbled up near the middle of the glade, carpeting the ground in moss before running off among the thirsty roots. “He’s reached the trees.”

“He’s better at following me than you are,” Rue commented, patting her skirts for the twentieth time in search of a heel of bread or any other vaguely edible thing. She hitched the folds of cloth up and sank to her knees with a groan, cushioning them on the green carpet as she bent to drink, scooping water to her lips. In peril’s grip she had fought, demanding obedience from her body, ignoring its complaints. In the relative safety of the forest every action even slightly out of the ordinary seemed to require that she herald it with a grunt, groan, or the puffing of breath, as if her limbs needed each service to be individually acknowledged.

Rue stayed on her knees. It wasn’t exactly comfortable. The moss was soaking and cold. But she really didn’t feel ready to stand again. She wondered what it would be like to lie down and refuse to move until he found her.

“Get up!” Senna cawed.

“I thought you wanted me to face him down, burn him to a crisp!”

“Can you burn him to a crisp?”

“No.”

“Get up, then!”

“I’m tired. I can’t outrun him. And Kindnesses don’t hide. It’s not in our nature.”

“You’ve been hiding for years! Pretending to be a normal person!”

“Normal?” Rue forced the bitterness from her voice, spitting it out as a laugh that made the crow startle. She had learned early on to consider herself something different—as if as a baby the true Molly, sweet and pink in her innocence, had been offered up on an altar and replaced by a changeling, stained in her sin. It was easier to imagine all that had been taken from her removed in one bright stroke of a blade than torn away a scrap at a time. Easier to stop herself believing it could return to her. And yet despite the iron of her resolve, age and ten quiet years had let those feelings seep past her barriers. She had been steeped in peace and normality. “I have been hiding. That’s true. I wasn’t a Kindness anymore. I had set that aside.”

“I saw a Kindness walk out of that inferno.” The crow’s unnerving stare skewered her.

“They should never have come.” Rue saw the single mercenary again, back in the alehouse in Stones Corner. A harbinger of doom, like the first hunger-bug dropping from a clear blue sky, of little consequence by itself, but herald to a million more.

The icy wetness of the moss received her, softer than any bed. The sky showed the cold grey heart that beats behind the blue, the bare fingers of a dead tree reaching in from the corner of her vision.

“You hated me because you were never happy there, Senna. Pye gave you everything you had, and you resented it for choking you, keeping you, hemming in your horizons. You hated me because I’d seen what the world had to offer—the sharpest edge of that in any case—and I’d chosen to come to the Vale. Worse, I chose to stay!