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“Kill me, then. If that’s what you’re here for.” Rue raised her eyebrows at the man aiming his weapon and touched a fingertip to her forehead, daring him to loose the bolt. She snorted at the thought they might call her bluff. Sharp, thinking the same thing, or perhaps remembering a joke from thirty years ago, laughed, sounding unaccountably young.

“Time hasn’t healed me.” Time had told her that truth itself. Something as small as a slap could echo through decades. Rue knew there had never been any chance to recover from what they did to her. “I am what they made me.” She caught sight of herself in one of the mirrors on the wall: a used-up old woman, or in the next moment, a queen on her throne of bones, and a heartbeat later, both at once. She would have liked to meet the Molly who might have grown into the old woman she’d been pretending to be. But that was another life, another Earth, another story. “I’m a toxin, a wound in the world…” Time had soured her rather than healing. Rue knew herself a crack that ran through things, breaking them. That same crack had run from her, through her children, fracturing any love before it flowered. She met Milk-Eye’s fierce regard. “Kill me, then. Lip-Scar knew how to do it. There’s nothing but old magic and stubbornness holding me together.”

“That would be too easy. They call us Cruelties after all. First we destroy what you love. Your precious peasants. Their dung and straw huts. Your friends—” She raised her hand and one of the crossbows jolted with the release of its bolt.

Sharp, whose swaying fascination with the mirrors had yet to cease, flinched only when the bolt shattered on a pillar behind her.

“Ouch!” Her hand went to the crimson rawness where the very top of her left ear had been. Her cry, more one of outrage than of pain, coincided with Rue’s own strangled “No!”

If Rue hadn’t seen Sharp in so many fights, she might have imagined it an improbable accident and dismissed the idea that any human could dodge a crossbow’s bolt. As the second crossbowman raised his weapon to his shoulder, she knew with grim certainty that such overconfidence would not be repeated, and that even in her prime Sharp could not have sidestepped a chest shot at such short range.

Desperation can flower in a heartbeat. A prayer, as long as it is wordless, can be thrown nearly as swiftly. Rue found herself gripped by unexpected terror.

Almost before the bucking of the second bow, Sharp staggered backwards, clutching her side. “Oh, you cunts!”

The first of the masked Cruelties closed on her and, having underestimated Sharp for the second time, found himself impaled on her blade. He stepped back, blood jetting from the wound in his chest, and collapsed to his knees. For her part, Sharp straightened and with an oath pulled out a small black book from her waistband. A single lazy drop of blood fell from the tip of the bolt protruding from the back cover.

“The Creed?” Rue shook her head. “You’re trying to tell me the fucking Creed saved your life?” She felt the Morrigan’s hand all over this. The intervention she had begged for in one broken moment, made wordless promises for. But the Creed, though bound in leather and thick with hypocrisy, was surely insufficient to arrest the death that had so pointedly rushed towards Sharp’s vitals.

Sharp, still holding her sword out before her at arm’s length, gave a wild laugh and shook the book open. The bolt also transfixed the bronze mark that she had kept sandwiched within the pages. The coin Rue had given her a lifetime ago.

The second of the masked Cruelties closed on Sharp, more cautious than his friend, who chose that moment to complete his journey to the ground. Sharp, perhaps focused by the pain or the remnants of whatever luck the Morrigan had bestowed on her, squared herself to meet his advance.

Rue had seen Sharp bested with the knife as a child. Only by Wenda, though. And Wenda had been something of a phenomenon with a short edge. Rue had killed her by seizing her moment rather than through dagger skill. With a sword, though, particularly a long, light blade, Rue had never seen Sharp’s equal.

Tmanga had been right: life would not present any of them with many duels, neat little contests on level ground where a honed skill could shine. But Sharp had waited for a long, long time, and here was a duel.

Blades touched, a ringing engagement, the young man’s boots scraping the floor as he sought position. Sharp, for her part, stayed still. Her blade might gleam but her skill lay as rusty as her strength. She turned the Cruelty’s query aside, understanding as she did so quite how much she had lost.

She stepped back, holding up her left hand, long fingers bloody. Still straight, but withered. “I was never meant to grow old. It’s a cosmic joke. Look at me!” A glance at Rue. “What happened to us, Molly?” She beat down the attack the Cruelty launched as she turned her head, not even looking at him.

“Don’t toy with him,” Rue advised. “He’ll wear you out.”

“Him?” She flashed her teeth. “We can keep his mask after he’s done. Might come in handy. Better than a bag on your head in any case.”

The Cruelty came on, fast and fierce and measured, natural skill evident on top of years of practice. Sharp contained him with taps, with tricks, with experience, with the memory in old muscles, never once showing the breath-stealing speed that had won her fame.

She faltered, flesh unequal to the demands she made upon it, and he cut her, slicing through the expensive dress from elbow to shoulder, cutting rich brocade, plush velvet, pale skin. If it had been her sword arm that would have been the finish.

Sharp swore, filthy as ever, “Whore’s teats!” But even as blood soaked her sleeve she didn’t advance, didn’t hurry. She anticipated his feints, anticipated his pride, killed him when, for just a moment, he overreached. He didn’t die then, of course, but the cut tipped the scales, the second and third tipped them further, and the fourth spilled their contents across the floor.

“Ewww.” Sharp had always complained about the messes she made. Guts most of all.

Milk-Eye raised a brow. The two guardsmen who had helped escort Rue and Sharp from the Minor’s office had slipped away while Sharp was killing the Cruelties. “The training lacks its old bite since Father…left us, but I still would have bet on Jasper or Samd to take down this dried-out old stick. When I left her in that place, she could barely feed herself…” She smiled, a cruel thing that Rue felt had been made for her, perhaps crafted over years. “Still, what’s been given can be taken away.”

Milk-Eye extended her arm, hand clawed, and the darkness pulsed. Rue felt her wounds twinge with wakefulness, growing damp with their lust for life, even though she wasn’t the target. Sharp crumpled, as if every drop of the vigour that had animated her was now spilling from her faster than the blood from her arm, faster than the guts that Jasper or Samd still grasped at had slithered from what was left of his belly.

“That’s more how I remember you.” Milk-Eye deployed the razor of her smile once more.

Sharp, trembling and vacant now, clutched her sword with both hands as if it were all that kept her upright. She panted, cheeks hollow, lips bent around her gums as if she were toothless.

Rue stepped towards her friend with empty hands.

“Stay where you are!” Milk-Eye shouted. The blackness—unseen and all the darker for it—pulsed around her fingers, and the pain of the wounds that the Morrigan’s curse, or blessing, had kept at bay blossomed through Rue, staggering her.

Milk-Eye advanced on Sharp, ignoring her fellow Cruelties, the dead and the dying. “You want to help her? Her? Where were you when we needed you, Eldest?”

Somehow the weight of that name, Eldest, was harder to carry than all the hurting of her flesh. She had traded “Eldest” for “Mollandra,” or perhaps reclaimed it, but she’d worn the name “Rue” far longer than any other. She had taken it in place of the mourning she had found herself unequal to and had instead worn her grief as a name.