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As if sensing her eyes upon him, the man spun, reversing himself as quick as a finger snap. Mollandra kept her gaze nailed to the royals who, now darkened with rain, had sedately interposed themselves between her and the intruder.

Cold rain ran down Mollandra’s back and chest. The downpour reached epic proportions, thundering earthwards with a ferocity rarely seen in the east. Mollandra blinked it from her eyes, puffed it from her lips. Desperately focused on the king’s sister, all the while tracking the man in her periphery as he crossed the courtyard.

She had forgotten how to feel this terrified.

When he moved he was at his most alien, fixed where he should flex, supple where humans weren’t meant to bend. His head and shoulders seemed peculiarly connected, as if both arms looped over an invisible broom handle that ran behind his neck. He moved in loping triples, eating up the distance, stopping, devouring more.

He circled the dripping royals and the Kindnesses, his clothes as black as their robes. Kindness Undu sniffed the air as the man came close, causing him to veer off. Kindness Terra half drew her knife, out of the royals’ sight, and glanced around in suspicion, her gaze briefly attaching to the man before sliding away. Marta, in conversation with the older man, Prince Sunder’s father, seemed to sense nothing. Only the king’s nephew saw the man for certain, looking away, not in fear but as if he might be an accomplice in the deception of eyes and minds.

The intruder kept his distance from the Kindnesses, moving clear of them. He became a ghost in the rain until he loomed suddenly from the deluge at the front of the Year Five group, so close that Mollandra could almost reach out and touch him.

She kept her eyes locked on the Kindnesses and their guests, teeth clenched, painfully aware of the man at the edge of her vision, running his hands across an oblivious Sharp, a scant inch from making contact.

The intruder abandoned Sharp and circled to the end of Mollandra’s rank. Somehow when he insinuated himself between the sodden rows of acolytes they accepted it as the buffeting of a nonexistent wind. He paused at Tmanga’s side, and she turned, rubbing at her scar, mouth twisting as if tasting something foul. An acolyte in the front row staggered forward as the man gave Tmanga space and moved towards Mollandra, reaching for her with a hand at once both human and monstrous, the fingers limp and dangling as rainwater trickled from the tips.

Mollandra caught his wrist, though she was almost too slow.

A black pulse beat through her. Sick-making, nearly powerful enough to carry the world away.

She would have sliced through every vein and tendon in his arm, but by the time her blade made it from her belt he’d wrenched free.

The spell broke, its fragments washed away with the rain in the space of an eyeblink. The acolytes saw him first, some screaming in fear—a difficult reaction to provoke after five years of the Academy—others crying out in alarm or anger. All of them, through some unnamed instinct bedded in their shared humanity, recognised the man as something alien, something unclean and dangerous. Even acolytes who might in two or three years be fully fledged Kindnesses drew back as if fearing that Father might sink his teeth into their flesh.

Instructor Maggery, whose lessons in concealment had never even scratched the surface of the intruder’s skill set, got to him first. Or would have if he hadn’t danced out of reach. His laughter, high and wild, sent shudders through Mollandra, and her strength almost deserted her.

Kindness Terra closed on him, her great sword bared and held before her in both hands. On all sides the instructors came forward, knives at the ready.

“Ladies! Ladies!” The man motioned with downward palms for the lowering of blades, his grin so wide that one might expect it to bleed. “I’m not here to fight.”

Kindnesses Marta and Undu arrived to flank Terra, a pace or two back. “You may not have come here to fight.” Marta spoke into the weakening rain. “But you seem to have come here to die. State your business with the Academy.”

“Oh, that’s simple enough.” He levelled a bloodless finger at Mollandra. “I came to take my daughter home.”

29

Eldest

In a dark corner of a dark room, soot-black hands found the ruin of a garden and understood the shape of a betrayal that had been too large to comprehend.

Eldest ran, and stopped only when her legs and lungs refused her. She stood propped against the wall of a house, gasping. She had expected to reach a city wall or fields before exhaustion trumped her fear, and yet the metropolis had kept on going, street after street, block after block.

She’d passed people and houses, men and women, children from rich to poor, though none quite as ragged as her. Several women had called at her to stop. One fat man had tried to block her path, grinning broadly. Another had shouted, “Thief!” But she had left them all behind.

She’d ended up in an area dominated by warehouses whose gaping mouths seemed ready to swallow her. None of the workers appeared much bothered by her presence, save to wave her away from the stacked crates, lines of barrels, and heaps of mysterious bundles.

A light rain had started to fall and although the cold numbed her aches and pains, it had also begun to sink through her tired flesh towards her bones.

New sights, sounds, smells all threatened to overwhelm her. But overwriting even her astonishment were the faces of those she’d left behind. Father’s manic, twisted rage, and the look Milk-Eye had given her at the last.

Milk-Eye had called her “traitor” and told her to stop. But what if that had been for Father’s benefit while he could still reach into the chimney and catch a trailing foot? What if she’d trusted Eldest to see past the words? What if—

Eldest doubled over, leaning against a wall, and vomited the acid emptiness of her stomach.

She pushed away thoughts of what she’d left behind and looked around. As she’d run she had let chance decide her path, or rather, she had surrendered those choices to the deepest part of her mind, beneath the layers where words and images swim, the place where the most basic, instinctual foundations of thought hold sway. Eldest might swear that she had never seen this place, never walked this street or viewed those distant towers. But even so, there was something familiar here. Nothing specific, but something general and pervasive.

She turned from one path to the next, aiming herself at one alley, a tower top, a road, a gap between two buildings hardly wide enough for someone to walk. If she tried to argue a case for any one of them, she would drown in “maybes.” Instead, she chose without thought, pushing away “what ifs” and setting off on sore feet.

Constantly she looked behind her, expecting to see Father’s tall figure looming. Time and again there was nothing, or just more suspicious strangers whose stares told her to keep moving. She kept moving.