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Was this how Bek was going to find her friends? Forming alliances with the very first girls to speak to her? It seemed too random, but perhaps that was just how life was. Maybe the three of them would be sisters. The only three to survive the nightmare years ahead. Bek found herself smirking at the idea. More likely they’d wake up dead, standing by the black river, waiting to cross. Certainly, Mollandra looked to be one of the best bets for girl-least-likely-to-survive-the-night.
“Here.” Bek waved the frail, blond child over and she came meekly, her feet bound in the cloth strips that the very poor pretend are shoes.
“Really?” Einsa looked the trembling girl up and down dismissively.
Mollandra, standing between the two girls’ beds, said nothing, only looked from one to the other with those almost faery eyes of hers.
Bek shrugged. Her illness would get her if the other students didn’t, so why play to win? She could be the sort of Kindly One where “kindness” wasn’t a stage curtain drawn to hide the horror. “Small can be useful. Maybe she’s fast too. Are you fast, little girl?”
“I…I don’t know.”
Bek considered slapping her to find out, but remembered she’d aimed herself at kindness only moments before. “You don’t look fast.”
Einsa shook her heavy head. “We should get someone else. The girl with the scar.” She nodded towards her choice.
The girl wasn’t the only scarred face in the hall, but this girl with the shaved head truly did have a magnificent scar that had torn open one cheek and healed pink against the smooth brown as if it were war paint.
“We should stick to three. If there’s four of us then we’ll always be wondering which one isn’t going to make it,” Bek said.
“None of you are going to make it!” said a wild-eyed girl with an untamed mass of red curls who perched on her bed like a bird of prey in some high place waiting to strike.
Einsa ignored her. “So we throw the minnow back and choose a better third.”
“Sometimes fate delivers a better choice than anything we can come up with ourselves.”
“Huh?” Einsa furrowed her brow. “You sound like you’ve had tutors. Someone’s been tipping gold down your throat.” Disapproval edged her voice.
“My father’s a scribe,” Bek said. She kept the “not a good one” to herself. “And if he had gold, he wouldn’t have sold me to this place.”
Einsa grunted. “The little fish can stay, then. I mean, if the gods have sent her…” She snorted and lay back on her bed.
“We’ll watch each other tonight. Take turns. Sometimes the first night can get very murdery.” Bek looked around the room. The curly-haired girl flashed her a white grin that split her face like a wound. The scarred girl watched with dark eyes, statue-still. “I’ll take first watch.”
“How will you know when to—”
“I’ll guess, I guess.” Bek cut Mollandra off and waved her back to her bed.
Heavy shutters covered the hall’s tall windows, and the light came from a score of candles in niches around the room, ushering shadows to the centre. Already a few of them had guttered out, and none of those remaining alight had more than an inch of wax to burn. Slowly, but faster than Bek liked, the gloom thickened, and soon, despite her plan, she’d have nothing to watch save the blackness of the first night.
“How do you know?” Mollandra called. “About the murdering?”
“Reading,” Bek called back. “It often pays to read ahead. They’ve been doing this for years, you know. Nearly two centuries.”
“I don’t know how—”
“They’ll teach you here. They won’t let you leave without knowing how to read.”
Einsa snorted and pulled her blankets around her. “They will if you forget how to breathe first.”
Somewhere across the room a girl with her face pressed to the shutter cracks called out to inform them that the sun had fallen behind the ramparts.
A short while later, the low bubbling of nervous voices died away entirely as the door grated open. All across the hall, girls sat up. Bek could see nothing past the crowding heads. She stood in time to see a shadowy figure slipping out through the gap.
“Two!”
“No, three.”
Three girls taking their last chance to escape.
