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“You never stopped thinking you were better than us.” Somehow seeing Rue’s fear of what was coming had removed Senna’s fear of Rue.

“I never stopped knowing I was different. That’s true.” In the Vale lives had been hard but lived much as they were in other places. Maybe the spectre of hunger had waited rather closer to the front door, but the violence that had ended the peasants’ lives was as alien to them as the luxuries in distant cities known only by their names. People there grew as people are meant to. Rue’s childhood had taken a very different path.

“You brought this on us!” Senna cried.

“I did not. They were surprised to find me here. If they’d known who I was, what I was, then the man following us would have been the first one I saw—and probably the last.”

The bird’s cry expressed her disbelief better than any words.

“They call you the small folk. Simple souls. But it’s untrue. I was taught to be simple. A hammer.”

Rue had observed that real lives were complicated and therefore delicate. Tendrils of obligation, interest, and concern expanded into a wider community. Wants and cares and love were distributed across the limbs of a slender tree. When one person came up against another they must negotiate, orient themselves, edge closer, so that the vulnerabilities of one could mesh with those of another without damage.

Life in a hamlet educated her in new truths. She saw how hearts could hang upon fragile things she had held as no more important than spiderwebs strung across her path. How the more connections a person made, the more precious small things became. Marriages, meals, even moments.

Young love, especially, seemed both a monumental indulgence and at the same time a vital pulse in life’s veins, the foundation of so many things, both as trivial and as fundamental as competing views would claim.

Rue took a step towards the darkness between the trees. He was coming. She felt it.

“You’re endlessly complicated, Senna. Even the reason you hate me has a million pieces. But us Kindnesses, we’ve been pared down to the bone. We are simple, direct. The stakes are life or death: little else matters. We are not part of society, or family; we are not subject to others’ opinions or governed by them. We lack the capacity for the many minor joys and hurts that real people dance around. We are blunt weapons. All or nothing.”

Rue thought of the friends she had shared the recent years with. Real people might be thickets of emotions, cares and wants coiling like brambles, ready to snag on every interaction. But age starts to prune those branches, to strip a person down, to shape them for the simplicity of death. The old had less time, and thus the clever ones had less time for nonsense. And so, as life in Pye had finally given her a chance to grow just when others of her age start to draw in, she had found her match in two old peasant women: Jayne’s gently pointed wit, Ambeth’s unashamed bawdy humour, both had given her something she had never hoped to own, though in her time her hands had brimmed with gold and jewels.

She saw the hunter’s eyes first, though they were deep among the shadow and black. Judgement had arrived after a long and misspent life. Surely few deserved it more than she did. She had dispensed a Kindness’s justice, all the while with the blood of patricide staining her hands. Hypocrisy might not be a crime on the Kindly Ones’ list, but Rue ranked it high on hers and had spent most of her life bent beneath its burden.

She glanced at the crow. “Fly away.”

Senna exploded into the air in a thrashing of wings as the Cruelty stepped into the open.

The man hunched within the black shroud of his cape. Dark eyes watched the crow’s retreat, black hair plastered his forehead as if heavy rain had fallen.

“I should have taken a sword,” Rue said.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference.” A crooked smile revealed crooked teeth.

Two scars divided the man’s pale face. One ran from cheekbone to jaw, almost a twin to the wound that Wenda had given Rue back in the Academy when she had sliced her cheek open. Wenda had been very skilled. Rue had killed her from behind, much like she had killed Cocran Plight. Without the distraction Bek had provided, Rue would have died fighting Wenda that day.

Rue understood now how the man had found her, and how she had felt his approach. They had a bond, forged long ago in a dark place.

The second, smaller, older scar scored its way across the man’s mouth, notching both lips. Rue had given him the larger wound and had named him for the smaller one.

“Lip-Scar,” she said. “You’re looking…young.”

It was true. As Eldest she had been at most two years his senior. Now it seemed two decades would be needed to span the gap. The Cruelties, it was said, could forget years as easily as anything else, but that if they shrugged off a year then every memory of those months went with it. Rue had wondered if it was worth living a year you had no recollection of. Now she wondered if her sibling from the dark mansion had, as part of his payment for youth, shed their childhood and the horrors they’d shared.

“And you look old. But not too old to pay for this.” His fingers traced the scar she’d cut into him long ago with a sliver of broken mirror.

“You didn’t forget me, then.” Oddly it pleased Rue that he hadn’t. She wasn’t sure how it would feel to be the only one to remember. As if she were holding half of something that should be whole.

“Those years taught me too much to let slide,” Lip-Scar said.

“I should have taken a sword,” she repeated, meeting his gaze.

“All that iron. A heavy load for an old woman.”

“It’s true.” She’d left them all behind for exactly that reason. “Always did prefer a knife in any case.” She readied herself. Lip-Scar looked to be in his mid-forties, and though grey hadn’t yet found its way into his hair, years of summer sun and winter winds had crinkled him like an apple on the turn.

“It would be undignified to fight you.” The Cruelty pressed his lips into a flat line.