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“That’s it?” Sharp looked around.

“We’ll know if they want us to know,” Tmanga said. “Handsome, was he? Might be Prince Sunder, one of the king’s nephews. They say he’s breaking highborn hearts in the city.”

“How would you know?” Mollandra stamped her foot. “And if you say ‘Einsa told me,’ goddess help me, I’ll make you eat that sword!”

“I heard Twendri talking about it. You should practise your espionage more.”

Mollandra grunted. Twendri was one of the six Year Nines and got to go out into the world on practice missions. It was plausible that Tmanga had got it from her. Though Mollandra still suspected her friend of having secret channels. Certainly, with the exception of the elixir, there didn’t ever seem to have been anything she hadn’t known about in advance.

The call came less than an hour later. Year Ones, being most plentiful, were dispatched to summon every acolyte to the courtyard. A red-faced child, nearly drowning in her robes, hammered on the door of the practice hall.

“Parade! Parade!” And she was off.

“Were we ever that small?” Sharp frowned.

Tmanga flicked a bit of fluff from Sharp’s sleeve. “Mollandra was.”

“Parade” simply meant lining up by year in the courtyard. There were no flags or special uniforms or ceremonials. Mollandra had heard that in the city in high season there were dancers in the streets, priests of many faiths decked in silver chains, carrying jewelled staffs, foodstuffs sold from stalls, and colour everywhere. The Academy eschewed colour. The only way to see more than grey was to bleed.

The acolytes lined up beneath a dark-bellied sky, the blanketing cloud pregnant with rain. All six instructors strode around imposing order with sharp looks, loud commands, and the occasional slap. The full complement of servants stood in a grey wall by the entrance gate as if ready to block any bids for freedom.

When the three royals came through the main gate led by Kindnesses Marta and Terra, and trailed by Undu, the vivid hues of their costumes—Mollandra could only think of them as costumes donned to play a role—were an assault on the senses. Plush blues deeper than any sky, green velvet no leaf could match, the sparkle of gems. The people too looked more than real, as if their current bleak surroundings might be scenery in some play, Mollandra and the rest of the acolytes merely a supporting cast in drab.

“Who are they?” Sharp had ended up standing in the front rank of the Year Fives even though they were supposed to be arrayed by height. Her whisper reached over her shoulder, carried on the chill breeze to Mollandra in the second rank with Tmanga at her side. Receiving no answer, she continued with her potentially suicidal indiscipline. “Treecie would have known. She was rich. But no, Mollandra had to go and kill—” Even Sharp had the sense to shut up when Kindness Terra’s gaze swept the courtyard from beneath a frown.

The royals moved with infuriating sloth. Much as Mollandra didn’t want to get back to the business of frequently fatal training, she also didn’t want to stand in silence in the courtyard for hours, alone with her thoughts. She imagined there would have to be more lessons in being silent and alone as the class shrank further and the survivors came closer to being sent out into the world. She doubted Kindnesses were welcome guests…anywhere.

It seemed unlikely that the older pair were in fact the king and queen of the nation. Surely someone would have recognized them and sent the whisper round. But clearly, they were important enough to command the attention of three Kindnesses, not to mention the entire academic body. Whoever they were, they seemed to have a million stupid questions and to enjoy staring at acolytes.

Quite a few of the aforementioned acolytes, Sharp among them, were staring back when they felt they could do so unobserved. Not at the older couple doing all the talking but at the young man slouching in his finery behind them. His colours were less garish, primarily black and silver, his hair a dark gold, falling between his shoulder blades to a length few of the acolytes dared to match for fear of handing classmates—or their tutors—a weapon to use against them.

Mollandra had seldom had the time to reflect on qualities such as “handsome” or “pretty,” and couldn’t say with confidence whether the prince’s even features were one or the other or neither. But she had no trouble describing him to herself as “striking.” Even from a distance. Sharp was fond of saying that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to fight someone or fuck them, concluding with “first one, then the other,” and Mollandra was pretty sure from the intensity of her stare that the girl was thinking it now. Especially as boys were in rather short supply in the Academy and Sharp always liked to try new things.

But as Mollandra’s gaze lingered on this tall, broad-shouldered young prince, something refused to let her look away. There was something about him. Something…something she recognized?

“Sunder,” someone, maybe Lurgan, whispered behind her. So it was the king’s nephew, and the man must be the king’s youngest brother, since two of the others were dead, and one married overseas to the daughter of the Warlord of Darrak far away on Gog. At least this was the case according to the late Instructor Clakka’s “World” lessons, the only window that Mollandra had to offer views other than the distant city walls and the surrounding patchwork of woodland and field. The instructor’s replacement, Quendri, knew far less than Clakka had. Until recently Quendri had been a tenth year, saved from the catacombs only by Mollandra’s act of murder. She stumped around at the front of Vault Studies on her broken leg, her freshly mutilated nose still weeping, and frequently repeated that Mollandra had only herself to blame for reducing the quality of her own education.

Mollandra caught another look at this Prince Sunder. Again that sense of familiarity lanced through her. She shook her head and held back a snort of amusement at her own foolishness. The king’s nephew. She had felt for a moment that she had seen him before. Foolishness in itself, for she knew no one outside these walls and never left them. Why would she think she had a bond with someone who might, if a handful or two of nobles died, inherit the throne? She snorted then, unable to hold it back, and dragged her gaze away to the boy’s father. What was the king’s little brother doing here beneath a rain-dark sky?

She guessed it must be an inspection. A statement, however hollow, of authority over this vicious hive of women that sat so close to their city.

Although the Kindnesses considered themselves to be far above worldly considerations, delivering justice to the high and mighty without fear or favour, the Academy did have to sit somewhere, and that somewhere inevitably lay within a kingdom. History had chosen the undistinguished kingdom of Abrona for the holy site.

Abrona had seemed for generations to be a country destined to be consumed by its larger neighbours. The luck of its rulers would surely run out, but time and again, fortune favoured them.

The presence of the Academy had led to a certain tension between the kings of Abrona and the new cult seeking to put down roots in that soil. Inevitably, large and uncharacteristic doses of pragmatism had been required by the Kindnesses. They’d aimed themselves at miscreants beyond the kingdom’s borders, whilst all the while building their strength so that when their gaze turned inwards, they were too dangerous to be evicted. This presented an obvious problem for the present incumbent King Orrin Devin.

Mollandra’s eyes had returned to Prince Sunder when she sensed it. A sick dread thrilled through her, a once-familiar feeling that she had long ago managed to crush down into the darkest and least visited corner of her mind. Glancing frantically around the grounds, she saw it. The shape moved between Years Two and Three on the far side of the courtyard, refusing definition, denying its presence. None of the young acolytes so much as twitched as the thing prowled around them. If not for the unnatural way it moved, the alien, almost insectoid motion, fluctuating from frenzy to statue in the space of a heartbeat, Mollandra might also have let the enchantment seduce her into believing that it wasn’t there.

Even as she looked, a terrible understanding washed away illusion and the man stood revealed in the act of lifting a small girl’s hair, sniffing her neck, staring into her eyes, taking care only not to block her line of sight to the alluring prince.

The first heavy drops of rain started to fall. The man, clad in black, black-haired, black-eyed, skin pale as if his blood had been drained, glanced this way, then that. He moved past three more girls in that ungainly flurry of motion, stopping to examine the fourth. Instructor Mary, standing to attention near the back of the group, frowned and glanced his way. Her gaze flittered across to the Year Threes, then returned to the visitors.

Mollandra stood with a stillness she had never called upon since stepping through the Academy’s gate, an immobility that would challenge a statue, stilling her breath to the faintest whisper, even quieting her heart despite every instinct trying to make it race, trying to set it pounding against her ribs.

Again, the man sniffed at an acolyte, as if inspecting a carcass at a poultry stall. The rain started to fall in earnest.

Leave, damn you! Mollandra couldn’t see the royals but she knew they were still there, subjecting their finery to a soaking. What kind of aristocrat endures a downpour to discuss future dead girls? Leave and we can leave too! She wouldn’t feel safe with half a dozen locked doors behind her, but she’d feel a whole lot safer than standing out here in the open, on display.