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“Going somewhere?” The instructor advanced on Mollandra with a measured pace. “Some desperate need of the privy?”

Mollandra should have leapt at the unexpected offer of escape. Instead, she took it for weakness. Sharp sensed it too. Both of them had a killer’s instincts.

Do or die.

Mollandra shook off Tmanga, moved clear of the desk, and brushed Sharp’s arm aside. She stepped to meet the instructor. Acolytes snapped all the time at the Academy. Bek had. There didn’t have to be a reason.

Thurli was beyond saving. But she could still be avenged. Wasn’t that the Academy’s lesson, after all? Vengeance above all.

She still had her book in one hand, gripped around the spine. Elwin Madory’s Crowned Heads of North Magog. The volume trembled in her grip. Not from fear but fury. She should be shouting Thurli’s name, or Einsa’s, or Bek’s, or even claiming some defence of Sallay, but her mouth couldn’t frame a single word. The snarl that broke from her had little in it that was recognizably human. Mollandra would have scared herself had she not been so very angry.

Clakka swung, understanding that the shield of her authority had broken. She was fast. Much faster than Mollandra had imagined possible. It wasn’t conscious thought that placed the Crowned Heads of North Magog in the ruler’s path and captured its razored edge among the dullness of its many pages. It wasn’t Mollandra’s strength that so easily twisted the weapon free of the instructor’s grasp. Rather it was something the rage loaned her—drawn from unsuspected wells.

Years of training lived in Mollandra’s muscles now, and she relied on it as she threw herself at Clakka. Her fury left no room for conscious control. Mollandra felt Clakka’s strength as she bore the woman to the floor. She beat at the instructor’s ruined face with both hands, howling, each blow bearing with it all her hate and rage and need for justice, revenge, and above all that, an end to the pain inside her.

The instructor fought back, but Mollandra’s fists seemed like a storm, as if she were a dozen girls and not just a single acolyte. And, seemingly in the next moment, she was falling back panting, deserted by her strength, being pulled away from the unrecognizable mess that had been their instructor. Mollandra sat on the floor, supported by Tmanga. She held her bloody hands before her, heaving in great lungfuls of air, sobbing and laughing, both at once.

Others among the class were still kicking the corpse when the door opened, for in the end it truly had been all of them. Sharp was in the act of stamping on Clakka’s head as Kindness Terra pushed through into the room. She completed the action and met the Kindness’s gaze, an undeniable challenge in her eyes though Terra was a battle-seamed veteran of the chase and not a broken-down teacher.

Terra cast a flinty glance around the classroom. “You’ll be needing a new instructor. The rest of this lesson will be courtyard time.” She sniffed. “And get Acolyte Mollandra to Instructor Jane. She’s been stabbed. Best not to mention Clakka until the wounds are seen to.” The Kindness paused, her gaze lingering on the instructor. “Clakka was her aunt.”

23

Eldest

Tune found the petals in the cold and dusty clutch of the parlour grate. Two white and one pale blue, shaken from a bird’s tail, Eldest said. The blue, though faint, was as vivid a colour as had ever entered the mansion. To repay Tune’s gift Eldest shared the secret of the garden with her, though the child was too clumsy to be allowed to touch.

They added a petal to each of the fungi and called them flowers, though none save Eldest, Tune, and Milk-Eye would ever know that they had bloomed.

“There were three sisters. Three terrible sisters. They were made to chide the gods, to chase them across the heavens should they transgress. Fashioned not by any being but by necessity. Necessity was their mother, and they are her invention.” Day-Father had the children gathered in the parlour. He sat in the scarred, high-backed chair, his own back straighter than that of his seat, his black hair as ragged and unkempt as the children’s. He had their gaunt and hungry look too, though who kept him from eating his fill they couldn’t say.

He held a heavy book open on his knees but did not read from it. Instead, he watched them all with night-black eyes and spoke his words from memory. “Humanity lay beneath their notice and stayed there for thousands of years. There are, however, creatures older than the gods, perhaps even older than the sisters and their mother. The titans were born of the sky and the earth, conceived where one touches the other, from the sunset or the sunrise according to their nature. They are many and various in their ways. Much of our world is fashioned from their corpses.”

Eldest longed to ask her questions, but the answer would be a slap. Had the mansion been built from the bones of titans? What killed them? Were any still alive?

“Theus,” Day-Father continued, “was clever and stupid at the same time. He liked to walk among men, as if he were a father to them all.” Day-Father glanced around at his children, seeking challenge. All of them looked away, save Eldest, who watched him but kept her lips pressed tight together. “Theus gave fire to humanity, and with that spark they burned the world. The sisters noticed our kind then. Alecto—she of unceasing fury; Tisiphone—mother of revenge; Megaera—greatest among equals, she who has bathed in the rivers of memory and forgetting, she who swims in the currents of time, she who will never forget.

“They chased the wrongdoers, across continents, across oceans. No vault was so deep that they could not find the guilty, no door too thick for them to breach. They pursued those who woke the fire of the sun on our green earth, sought them across endless seas, even to the shores of Gog and Magog. The sisters are immortal, eternal, but the bodies they fashioned themselves to bring justice into the mortal world were not. And here, at last, on our shores, after centuries of war, those bodies fell.”

Eldest tried to imagine it. The three sisters running across the limitless ocean, the last scraps of humanity scattered ahead of them in a final armada, lashed by whips of flame. Had the sisters been vast as titans wading the deeps? Did they burn with the fire of their wrath? And when at last they reached new land, had they sunk to their knees and fallen apart like the armour in the great hall?

“Their spirits returned to the heavens to hound whatever gods still dwelt there, and their flesh, all but incorruptible, lay untouched by wolf or raven until the land itself drew a veil across the remains. But what was lost can be found, and—”

Eldest blinked. She had been sitting with her brothers and sisters, listening to Day-Father’s story. But now she stood by the long table with the tongue-shrivelling taste of the trough in her mouth and her vacant siblings on every side. The meal always stole time from her, but today it had stolen part of the lesson they’d just had. And she was the first to waken from it. Would the rest of them even remember that there had been a story?

Memory. That was what was being taken from them. Without shaking the others back into the moment, Eldest stepped away from them, away from the table and the trough. The understanding didn’t come in an instant, like the flint’s spark, kindling a greater light. Instead, it seeped into her, a liquid knowledge soaking into parched ignorance.

Eat of my body. Drink of my blood. That was what the priests told the followers of the cross. She had read it in one of the books strewn so carelessly across the parlour floor. Of the various faiths Day-Father had said vied for power, the followers of the cross were not alone in consuming their deity, or at least believing that they were. But here, now, in this mansion, Eldest and her siblings truly were being fed the remains of the divine, or of something that divinity had reason to fear.

And where did their power lie? Surely the heart for Alecto’s burning fury and Tisiphone’s icy revenge. But Megaera’s eternal memory would haunt the labyrinths of her brain.

Eldest returned to the table. She touched her fingers to the cold slop still lying an inch deep in the trough. The urge to choke it all down seized her, to drink it as if it were the River Lethe itself, and drown in the oblivion, as unremembered as the brothers and sisters whose names scarred the attic rafters but left untouched the minds of those who remained. Strong, there had been a Strong. A brother. Eldest before her.

“Eldest?” Tune’s voice broke the spell.

“Wake the others.” Eldest turned sharply and walked away into the gloom, carrying her own darkness with her, and another that had been put into her by the man who called himself their father.

Later, in the scant privacy of a corner, she forced fingers down her throat until the meal returned in a retching spew, emptying her stomach. The resulting hollowness soon turned into a hunger that gnawed at her all day.