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She turned away and pushed through the doorway. She knew she should have taken the knife, carefully wiping the blood from its hilt so that her hold would be true, but a strangeness had her in its grip. The imprint of a narrow foot seemed to burn cold between the blades of her shoulders, propelling her forward, and though Rue had long ago refused to let herself be pushed around, she decided to allow it this one time. After all, a failure to embrace change would truly be an admission of her age.

Her unexpected appearance stilled the conversation in the room. Perhaps ten of the newcomers crowded the space. Lorrie Smith’s girl looked up from where she knelt between two of the mercenaries seated at Debban’s rough-hewn tables, pale desperation on her face.

“I’m looking for whoever’s in charge here,” Rue said.

It took several moments for the drinkers to swallow their surprise. Perhaps if a warrior with an axe had kicked down the door they would have reacted fast. Rue hoped for the sake of whoever paid them that they would have. She used the time to step to the side, removing her silhouette from the door and revealing the twitching collapse of their friend in the street. The light would blind them just as the gloom had dimmed her own vision.

One man, young with long hair in braids, pushed past Rue, his light mail rustling. He hung on the side of the doorframe, ignoring her, his gaze hunting the street for the killer, first left, then right. One of two women in their number, broad as an ox and with skin so red she might have been sunburned but for the season, came towards Rue, reaching with a sausage-fingered hand as if she were gathering up an errant child.

Rue plucked a knife from Long Hair’s hip. If their underestimation of her weren’t so close to being deserved she would have been offended. As it was, she welcomed the opportunity it offered to slightly extend this final foolishness. Rue caught one of the woman’s outstretched fingers and broke it. At the same time, with her other hand, she sliced open the side of Long Hair’s neck, his blade proving keen enough to cut off three of his braids in the process.

“I’ve come about two deaths in Stones Corner Market.”

Rue’s advantage was over. Good things never last. Rue had outlived a great many of them in her time. The burly woman’s snapped finger quickly recalibrated her opinion of the ageing peasant before her, and ignoring the pain, she backhanded Rue, slamming her into the wall, before backing off to draw her blade.

As Rue slid to the floor, the thought bouncing between the front and back of her skull was that she’d seen the blow coming and that the woman she used to be would have ducked in time. She hit the ground feeling like a sack of broken bones and spat out a front tooth in a spray of blood. The force of the impact shocked her to her core. She had become brittle. And as she tried to curse the fact she became aware of her broken jaw.

“Wait!” The command, barked from the rear of the room, halted the thrust of a sword.

The mercenary drew her blade back, snarling, clutching the hilt in an awkward, broken-fingered grasp. “The bitch killed Rakkar!”

That was a lie. Rakkar’s eyes were still following the proceedings, though like Rue he was lying on the floor, and the increasingly sluggish pulse of crimson from his slashed neck indicated that he would not be getting up again, at least not of his own accord.

“The great Tabtha, shield-breaker, heart-taker…she needs a sword to finish off a grandmother?” The man doing the talking sat between two larger warriors, both wearing leather caps and sharing a blunt-featured brutality that suggested they were brothers. The speaker looked the more dangerous, though. Something about his lack of adornment announced it, that and the creases running the length of his wind-worn face from the corners of his narrow lips to the corners of colourless eyes that watched the world with curious hunger.

“Bitch had a knife…” Tabtha glanced around for the weapon.

Rakkar tried to speak but only managed scarlet bubbles and the faintest gurgle.

The man stood up from his stool, setting down his leather mug and wiping his lips, all without hurry. “I’m a simple man. ‘Isik,’ they say, ‘go burn this shithole.’ I go burn it. ‘Isik,’ they say, ‘go slaughter the farmers and salt their fields.’ I slaughter and I salt. But there’s no saying we can’t enjoy ourselves first. This old girl’s got a bit of fire left in her—”

“She broke my fucking finger!”

“And you were just going to run a sword through her?” Isik tutted. “What happened to breaking all her fingers first? What happened to good old-fashioned entertainment? You’re not going to let the little girl here”—he nodded at Soosa—“carry that load all by herself?” He came to stand at Tabtha’s shoulder, nearly as tall but half as broad. “See how she’s looking at us. All murder. No give. I’d sign her up if she were twenty years younger. Get up, Granny. Let’s have a look at you.”

Rue made the effort. Grunting in pain and spitting blood, she got to her knees in slow, jerking movements, each punctuated by a gasp.

“Hurry. Up.” Tabtha loomed over her, reaching with her good hand to haul Rue to her feet.

Rue let the knife she’d taken fall from sleeve to hand and cut the woman’s wrist, slicing veins and tendons, scoring a groove across the small bones. Tabtha’s roaring retreat pushed Isik back, but not before Rue stabbed her in the meat of the thigh too, twisting the blade as she pulled it free.

She stood in the space cleared by Tabtha’s exit and showed what she knew to be a gap-toothed crimson smile. “If I were twenty years younger, you’d all be dead already.”

5

Bek

Year One

“Welcome to the Academy of Kindness.” The address came from a dumpy woman of middling years with an apologetic face. She seemed out of place on a platform that looked more like a gallows than a speaker’s podium. “Most of you will not survive the next ten years.”

Bek glanced at her cohort, one hundred children huddled on a windswept courtyard, still wearing the clothes their parents or their own cunning had provided them with. A mixture of emotions fluttered across their faces: fear, determination, some measure of defiance, even amusement. Surprise was the absentee. Whatever illusions they had carried through the gates with them, none were ignorant of the basics. The Academy graduated three students a year, three Kindly Ones, supposedly incarnations of the trio whose name you did not speak. The three who came for those who broke the oldest laws, the three who would hunt down any transgressor—mortal or god.

Some held that the Academy of Kindness trained nothing save assassins. Very, very good ones, but common murderers even so. Many more believed, though, both in the promise and in the threat. Retribution and its embodiment were something that the servants of many different faiths could agree upon, an ancient, natural justice that cut through lesser laws, both the secular and the sacred.

Bek’s mother, who had let her slip from tear-soaked hands, told her to believe. It was, her mother had said, belief that would carry her through the trials ahead. The same belief that the Academy’s power rested upon. It was, after all, their reputation as much as their skill that opened doors for the Kindly Ones.

Bek listened as the unimpressive woman laid out a series of horrific truths before the children. The woman—Kindness Marta—stood wrapped in a dark swirl of cloak that the wind kept trying to snatch from her.