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Mollandra had, for the longest time, been hardening her heart against such loss. If the Academy’s mythology were literal truth, she welcomed her draught of their poison. Anything that put the fire of the Furies in her belly she would drink without hesitation. Death’s axe swung at her every day and offered little save the whittling away of her competition. This time something was being offered in exchange. Something unexpected.

Undu took up the tongs and the flask again, arms trembling with a strain that suggested a much heavier burden. She stepped towards Sharp but stopped short, angling the flask towards Sallay, who sat beside Sharp’s neighbour, Gane.

“Actually, I think we’ll start here.”

Sallay, a slender girl with milk-white hair that fell past her ears, looked startled.

“Let’s see if you’ve been paying attention.”

The girl swallowed. Undu’s displeasure seldom failed to leave a mark wherever it landed.

“Fetch the goblet.”

Sallay looked wildly around. Several girls in the circle pointed to the black heart and at last Sallay spotted what lay there.

“No!” Mollandra threw her knife as the girl started to stand. The blade, a small one she’d fashioned herself, hit Sallay in her calf before she reached her feet and set her rolling, clutching at her leg with a muffled scream.

Undu shrugged, speaking into the pause as Sallay drew breath, sitting now, and staring daggers of her own at Mollandra. “The acolyte saved your life, child. You may not have heard my instruction, but Kindness Terra did, and she would have put a much larger hole through you had you reached your feet.”

With the small knife still jutting from her leg, Sallay crawled over to recover the goblet. She returned without meeting Mollandra’s eyes.

“Hold it out, then. Steady. If you spill any your corpse will be my new project down in the catacombs.”

Undu removed the flask’s stopper with uncharacteristic haste. Mollandra had never seen the Kindness scared before. Despite that hint of fright, Undu’s hands, when she poured, remained steady. The dark red fluid flowed like hot water, steaming as it fell in a thin stream. The scent of spice and of wrongness intensified, along with the stink of a dead fire, blackened timbers in the rain…and most of all, anger, as if anger had a smell and just by breathing in they were being filled with it.

With effort, Mollandra resisted. It wasn’t that anger was a stranger to her, more that she didn’t appreciate it being imposed from the outside. She didn’t want the snarls she saw around the circle to be mirrored on her own face. The Academy already pulled too many of her strings.

“Well, drink, then!” Undu urged. “It’s not for putting behind your ears.” She stoppered the flask.

Sallay hesitated. Years of being locked into coffins, thrown off walls, dropped into pitch-dark wells armed only with a hammer…all of it had toughened the survivors but there was only so far most could go. Humanity and its associated concerns were tenacious. “I don’t wa—”

Undu gestured to Kindness Terra, who lowered her aim, adjusting the monstrous crossbow on its stand.

“No!” Sallay gulped down the measure of elixir. A mouthful at most.

Mollandra had been trained in several broad classes of poisons. The ones you hoped a victim would ingest of their own free will had either to be without taste or to mimic the flavour of something appealing. Many of the deadliest poisons were sweet. She’d experienced torture poisons too. Some slow, taking hold hours after they were swallowed, some instant, acid on the tongue. The elixir seemed to be one of the latter, not immediately as bad as the worst in Instructor Jane’s arsenal, but Sallay’s pain had twisted her face, and her nails left furrows where she clawed her throat. She lowered her head, trembling, threads of drool hanging below the thin veil of her hair.

Sallay had been on the edge for more than a year, her skills just enough to get her to Year Five but seeming unlikely to carry her further. Her swordplay, knifework, and unarmed combat all placed her in the lower quarter of the remaining acolytes, and while she scored higher in other areas—poisoning ironically being her best—in none of them was she outstanding. She had a mild, unmemorable face, her faint prettiness the sort destined to evaporate with the first flush of youth. Never once had she looked intimidating, her anger a lightweight thing.

Now, as Sallay slowly lifted her face, the veins in her neck stood in sharp relief over rigid muscle, and the rage that possessed once-familiar features smote like a fist. Even though Gane and Sharp sat between Mollandra and this stranger in Sallay’s place, some primal instinct made Mollandra shuffle away on her rear.

The scream that burst from Sallay as she threw her head back and aimed her gaze at the vaulted roof seemed to contain within it every piece of Mollandra’s own anger, harvested from a lifetime of grievance and released in one soul-tearing sound.

Sallay tore Mollandra’s blade from her leg, and the blood that poured from the wound smoked. With another shattering howl she shot to her feet and her neck disappeared into a mess of crimson chunks and spraying gore. For a moment Mollandra believed it to have been the force of the scream. But as the corpse fell, she understood that Kindness Terra had followed Undu’s threat with action and that the great bow had spoken, less loudly than Sallay but with greater effect.

Einsa’s mother had drunk this devil’s brew. Mollandra knew it now. And some measure of its potency had passed to the baby in her womb, released only in the moments of her death, perhaps by Einsa’s fury at Treecie’s treachery rather than by fear of her own demise.

“Gane.” Undu nodded to the goblet that had bounced but not broken. It would be Sharp next, then Mollandra.

Gane, smaller than Mollandra these days, was a dark-haired ferret of a girl, quick on her feet and quick to betray. Sallay had been an unlikely friend and her only one. She shuffled across the spattered, steaming floor to gather up the goblet and held it out, staring hate at the Kindness.

Unperturbed, Undu poured Gane’s measure. “Quickly now, no sipping.”

Gane looked around the circle as if fixing the faces of her enemies in mind so she might find them in the afterlife. “Slanthe.” She knocked the brew back with an eastern drinking salute.

For the space of three or four heartbeats Gane merely looked surprised, smacking her lips as if she had expected more flavour. In the next moment, as if held in the palm of some invisible giant that had suddenly made a fist, she curled up into a ball of sharp-angled pain. Every exposed patch of skin turned scarlet, and her growls sounded like those of a trapped animal. Fumes rose from her hair. The air was filled by the acrid scent of burning. The acolytes stared in horrified fascination, flinching away as a single flame lit on the back of the girl’s neck.

One flame became a gout of fire, the inferno erupting through Gane’s robes with the ferocity seen in the chemical flares Mollandra had been taught to make. The girl burned with such violence that chunks of her spat across the floor, prompting Sharp to roll clear. The cremation caused almost no smoke, as if it were too fierce to allow anything to escape. Limbs fell away, became bones, and finally a smouldering skull detached from the carcass and rolled a surprising distance, stopping just shy of Tmanga’s feet.