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“I don’t give a damn about any emperor. I’m here for Ambeth—”

“Put them in chains!” Mancer waved his guards forward.

“I bring the oldest lore.” Rue raised her voice but didn’t shout. Even so, it was enough to stop those advancing on her in their tracks. “I am she the gods fear.”

Rue opened her mouth to speak the rest, but Sharp’s voice surprised her. “My sisters walk ever by my side.” She said the words without heat and yet the hairs on Rue’s forearms rose as chills ran the length of her. “Stand aside or be forever accursed.”

Rue glanced towards her friend and in that moment it seemed that the Morrigan stood where Sharp had been, or rather, that the goddess who had evicted her from the grave had been Sharp all along and had walked beside her for most of her life.

In the next instant it was just her friend: old, frail, and mean as a knife in the ear. Rue considered drawing the sword from beneath her skirts and handing it to Sharp but reasoned it would get her killed.

The first two guards were close and closing. Rue ignored them, focusing instead on her awakening in the open grave outside Stones Corner. The pressure between her shoulder blades returned—the goddess pushing her back into life. The triple-goddess had touched her, filled her with power and purpose, neither of them Rue’s own. Rue needed one now, if not the other. She needed that promised strength.

And now she felt it, something of the Morrigan burning cold through her veins.

“No!”

The first man tried to lay hands upon her, and she punched him. The blow should have broken the brittle bones of her fist. Instead, his head snapped to the side, spraying a crimson cloud. Something rattled against the nearest pillar, a hard rain falling. Teeth, they bounced off the stone to skitter across the polished floor.

Before the guard’s body hit the flagstones, Rue had her leather wrap in hand. She took out the shorter bone, the black relic she’d removed from Lip-Scar’s over-lively corpse. “Distal phalanx, I believe.” Instructor Jane had taught them that in torture class. She’d taught them the name of every bone in the hand and how to break it.

Beside her, Sharp stamped disdainfully on the back of the neck of the second man-at-arms, who had somehow ended up face down on the floor. A dozen more armoured figures closed in from all sides.

Rue broke the black bone using only her thumb and the goddess’s strength. The shock of unleashed necromantic power left her shaking like a leaf on a branch. On the dais, the baron screamed in agony, a shrill cry that seemed too high to have come from such a chest. For a moment every guard turned to look at their master in confusion, ready to gain his side and defend him.

In his distress, Baron Mancer ripped the silver hand from the stump of his left arm, clutching the wrist below the missing flesh as if to choke off the pain. He had sacrificed his hand, and a work of necromancy, far beyond any Rue might achieve, had bound those bones to him, regardless of distance, so that with them in the keeping of his servants he might keep in touch with the progress of his plans.

The baron had struck Rue as a soft, spiteful blowhard, not the sort to endure pain when others might suffer in his place. But the evidence spoke for itself. The hand was gone, the bones scattered. His power had cut both ways, though, leaving him vulnerable.

Rue threw the bone fragments to the floor, and Mancer, gasping his agony, put the raw flesh of his stump to his mouth as if to suck the injured fingertip. He found nothing, overshooting his mark.

The guards drew their steel, a common agreement that the time for polite treatment of captives had passed. Whatever strength the goddess had given her, Rue noted that the man she had punched still had his head on his shoulders, and that it was in no way sufficient to cut down a dozen court guards, let alone the others who would surely follow in their footsteps.

For her part, Sharp had commandeered a sword from the man she’d felled and stood ready to teach the latest generation a pointed lesson in how to die.

“Metacarpal.” Rue took the second, longer bone in both hands, ignoring the guards and the cold, sick searing of the blackness against her skin. She snapped it. This second blast of released necromancy ran through her in a cold thrill, its power almost more than she could bear. The surge lent new strength to her half-dead body and sharpened her senses. Both the guards at her feet died in that instant. She felt their souls dragged away through the thinning barriers to the underworld, and their deaths sang to her.

The first bone had given the baron the same pain on being broken as if it were still within his living hand. The second, though, thanks to the baron’s own actions in pressing his stump to his mouth, would rightly now occupy a position deep within his skull, and the effect of breaking it was magnified far beyond expectation. Rue’s hope had been to hurt him, to make him suffer as her friends had suffered. A price extracted for his crime—perhaps not the full price, but payment even so. Instead, with an inhuman cry, the baron fell stricken from his throne, hitting the steps like a dead thing, with no attempt whatsoever to cushion his fall. She sensed his death, tasted it bitter on her tongue.

Rue felt nothing, just the emptiness where something should be. She looked around. “Nobody else has to die.” It was, Rue reflected, unfortunate for the two men dead at their feet that they had not been people she cared about. They had died because she was angry that Jayne and Ambeth had been killed. And in truth, she’d been angry about young Soosa too, and Senna’s boy and grandchildren…everyone in Pye…The dead guards were probably of no less worth, had lives, families, childhood memories, but the fact was that people cared about those the world put in front of them, and the rest became a background. Would the world be a better place if everyone cared for everyone else? Yes. Was it like that? No. Rue knew that she was not now and never had been a good person. And yet she found herself acutely aware of the two men dead at her feet. Her necromancy told her the truth of the three deaths beneath the baron’s roof, but she felt them more deeply than that, at least the absence of the two guards. And she found herself surprised, her appetite for more entirely gone. “Nobody else has to die,” she repeated, more quietly but with greater passion.

Perhaps echoes of the Kindnesses’ reputation, combined with the sudden agonizing death of their liege lord, returned the guards’ swords to their sheaths. Or maybe it had been the distant look in Sharp’s eyes as she pondered the deaths of their companions, clearly not giving a damn whether the rest of them came at her or not. Either way, a dozen armoured warriors whose skills had earned them a place in the baron’s personal guard now slunk away without recrimination, unable to look at their fellows or the body of their employer, whose blood was even now trickling slowly down the steps of the dais.

“Where are they going?” Sharp asked. “I thought we were having a reckoning…”

As the baron’s defenders retreated beyond the pillars, Rue saw that by the door the two masked and black-clad men had fallen to their knees, clasping their heads in pain, crossbows discarded on the floor. The other two guards were looking uncertainly at Minor Remon for instruction.

A single clap rang out as the Minor’s hands met. “I didn’t think you could do it. I really didn’t. She said you would, but I didn’t believe her for a moment.”

“Run away.” Rue made a shooing motion with a confidence she didn’t feel. Something in the way the Minor stood told her there wouldn’t be any running. At least, not away…

“That sorcerer hasn’t shown up yet,” Sharp remarked absently. “Nasty, tricksy things, sorcerers. Not as bad as Cruelties, mind, but those bastards were bred to kill us. I remember back in—”

Rue raised a finger to her lips.

Minor Remon’s hands were behind her head now, her fingers on the knot of the gauzy fabric band tied across her eyes. The cloth fell away and despite herself Rue stepped back under the weight of recognition. Every flame in the hall seemed reflected in the one hazy eye. The other swallowed the light, its stare dark and even.

The damping shield snuffed out, as if with the unmasking. It had of course hidden the Cruelty’s presence. Even the bond that now stretched clear and taut between Rue and the sorcerer before her. Heart to heart. Head to head.