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“A parent owns a child. The girl—”
Her husband coughed over her before hemming loudly, determined to stop his wife’s pronouncement without actually making one of his own.
Undaunted, the princess pressed on. “The girl should be given over to him.”
With his bare hand, Father pushed Kindness Terra’s sword aside and came forward unopposed. Mollandra released her coins into a pocket. Within the cover of her robe she drew her knife. The first row of acolytes parted before the man. All save Sharp, whom he shoved from his path as if she were nothing.
Careless of any threat Mollandra might offer, Father took hold of her, overlong fingers with swollen joints wrapping like cables around the muscles of her lower arm. Agony shot from that contact, spreading through her veins, running through the marrow of the bones beneath. The familiar pain almost felled Mollandra, but she kept her feet and managed to drive the fear from her voice as she spoke.
“What are Kindnesses if not oath keepers? I took your payment. We made a bond. Until death.”
Kindness Terra scowled and shifted her grip upon the hilt of her sword. Undu’s eyes glittered dangerously, black stones in the white deadness of her face.
Marta frowned. “Has anyone seen this child in your care? Does she have siblings? Were we to visit your house, would she be known to them and to your neighbours?”
“We…” Father’s eyes flashed angrily in Mollandra’s direction, almost blasting away her resolve in that brief contact. “We are a very private family.”
The younger prince, the handsome, unaccountably familiar Sunder, seemed on the point of saying something, but Kindness Marta cut across him. “You should have come to us with these claims years ago. The acolyte’s training has progressed too far for her to be released. She will leave here as a Kindness, or she will never leave. This is our way.”
Mollandra tried to shake herself free, but her father’s grip was an iron band. In her core the dark thing stirred—the blackness that they had put into her. He and Mother had fed it into her, and now it was her only defence against them.
“Let her go.” Terra raised close on two yards of cold steel and cruel edge.
Amazingly, despite the threat of three Kindnesses, Mollandra sensed the tension coiling ever tighter in Father’s body as if he were on the point of springing upon them. The thunder on his face seemed to promise that he would make a fight of it.
A cry of pain escaped Mollandra despite her determination. She felt bones grating in her arm. The knife she had planned to drive into the side of her father’s head suddenly seemed too feeble a weapon to harm such a man.
“I must insist,” blustered the elder prince.
His wife, shading to crimson beneath her rain-washed paints and powders, opened her mouth to utter some more forceful decree.
“How is it that you are here now, in this moment?” Undu’s childlike trill flowed into the dangerous stillness before the princess could speak. “Why today? How is it that you come here, passing our gates without invitation, on the coattails of the king’s own family, and so many years after this supposed loss?” She advanced on Father, her small flowing steps making it seem that the great bulk of her simply floated towards him. “What information led you to suspect that a daughter of yours might be in our care? I find it passing strange.” She halted so close to Father that her breath might be felt on his mouth, and smiled her curious smile, wide yet thin-lipped, the one Mollandra knew she must share with the dead down in the catacombs’ fetor.
Father, more than a king within his own walls, had no reply other than a baring of teeth.
Mollandra jerked her arm and this time won free of his faltering grip. She stepped back several paces. Trembling fingers traced the line of an old scar on the wrist of her knife hand, now exposed. Fingertips followed a white arc of indentations that traced the shape of Father’s bite: however bad his bark, the man’s bite was definitely crueller.
“You haven’t heard the last of this.” Father began to retreat towards the closed gates. And then, as if realizing how weak that sounded, how like the words of some costumed villain treading the creaking boards of a small-town stage, he strode forward once more towards Terra’s great sword and Undu’s smile.
“Enough!” Princess Scalla barked. “Enough.” More softly, acknowledging the limits of her authority. “Kindness Marta, I would count it a personal favour if we could avoid violence in front of my son.”
Prince Sunder gave a lopsided smile at this, meeting Father’s eyes with a boldness that seemed bordering on insanity to Mollandra.
He seemed again on the point of speaking but left it to his father, Prince Cormac, to pass judgement. “If you would show this gentleman out and continue with your fascinating account of the Academy’s progress, I’m sure I can give a good report of today’s visit to my brother.”
Kindness Marta eyed Father with a focused venom that Mollandra had never seen before and hoped never to see again—a look that made her truly believe that here was a woman who had killed and endured her way through ten Academy years as one hundred became three. She gave a disgusted wave of her hand and nodded to Instructor Akki.
Father followed the instructor to the gates without a backwards glance.
“You sold yourself?” Sharp turned around while the instructors were distracted and the Kindnesses conversing with their guests. For once she actually looked impressed.
By way of answer, Mollandra handed Sharp one of the bronze marks she’d been paid. “And now I’ve bought part of you, Sharp Mahalla.”
Sharp looked at the coin, a dull glint in her narrow palm. “And what can I buy with it?”
“One tenth of a good donkey. Or, from me, anything you want. But if you purchase something I don’t want to give, we will no longer be friends.”
Sharp had two looks, one diamond-hard that she used on almost everyone, and a rarely seen soft look that she used in her seductions and almost never at any other time. She used it now.
