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She ran out of the back door, through the shared yard with its single box of withered blooms, past the outhouses, over a wall, alleys, another wall, a short street, a long road, lost in the grinding bustle of the city again. She ran without fear. Even her sorrow and her bitterness were whispers. The emotions that had brought the darkness roaring from her had themselves been flattened by its power. She had hollowed herself such that her thoughts echoed within her, and when she finally stopped her running she stood alone among the crowding city, a husk that a wind of any strength might carry off in whatever direction it blew.

Eldest returned a day later to haunt the family, drawn by the faint strings of what few memories remained to her. She had, after all, no other place to go. She watched them using the skills Day-Father had cut into her. Not the explosive flood of power that had stolen all trace of her from their minds, but the constant refrain that removed her from their notice as she shivered on the steps of a tenement opposite.

Day-Father did not return. His kind wouldn’t fathom her attachment, twice betrayed and still lurking like an abandoned dog. They had sold her to him when she was barely old enough to know it and called him to collect her when she’d escaped and found her way back. A small but persistent voice that she didn’t recognize urged her to enter the house during the night and slice her parents’ throats. She cut two lines on her forearm instead, staining her mirror shard crimson. That quietened the voice for a while. Or throttle them, the voice returned, and she realized it had been her own all along. Take a shirt from the chest and throttle him first, then her. That would be quieter. Cleaner. Slower.

It was a relief when Rebekka emerged with her father as the light was failing. Their mother’s weeping followed as Father led one sister away by the hand and the other by a very different bond. Eldest tried to imagine that the tears were for her. That someone, anyone, had once cared enough to cry for her.

Father and Rebekka headed off in the direction of the West Gate. Rebekka walked as if she were being led to her own funeral, but she didn’t fight. Some battles are lost before you start them. She coughed once, twice, three times, and then no more.

Eldest followed them. She followed through the poor quarter known as the Lean, through the warehouse district, through streets of finer homes, and out with the dwindling evening traffic into the farmland that haloed Tandra-ah. Followed three miles along the Padlow Road, until the city shrank behind them and a squat fortress loomed ahead.

Eldest watched as Father and Rebekka lined up with hundreds of others, parents and girls, outside the grim lump of stone that must be the Academy. The stink of death hung about the place, unapologetic. It stood within sight of the city walls, but not too close. Like an outhouse, needing to be close enough to serve, but at sufficient distance that the unpleasantness there could be forgotten until it was required again.

Although Father arrived early, the sun was falling toward the horizon by the time Eldest saw her sister sold. Rebekka never broke, never wiped her eyes, even as girls on every side wailed, begged, pleaded, and fought.

Eldest watched her father return with a lighter step, his hand going constantly to his pocket, never once looking back. She killed him amid the lengthening shadows, feeling nothing as she slit his throat from behind, only empty. She left the mirror shard beside him and scattered the money across his body for whoever found him first.

The queue was short when she returned to the Academy. Several families were turned away—their daughters found wanting for some unspecified fault. Eldest steeled herself against the same rejection. She expected no less. And it seemed as the numbers dwindled, more and more were being sent away.

She didn’t have to wait long. The woman with kind eyes and a long robe seemed surprised to see her unaccompanied. Her father had had kind eyes too. Eldest no longer trusted them.

“What are you doing here, child?”

“I’m coming to the Academy.” She didn’t make it a challenge, but her tone brooked no argument.

“We do have a few places left. Some girls are unsuited, and there are always others who manage to change their parents’ minds at the gates. It’s the smell. It makes things real.” She fixed Eldest with eyes that no longer seemed kind. “Do you know what that smell is, child? Do you know what we do here?”

“Death.” Eldest sniffed. “Death and rotting. You do bad things here.”

“We pay nine marks.” The woman scoured the night as if still expecting a father or a mother to step forward.

“You can pay me.”

“And your name is?” The woman waved and a taller, younger woman, also in robes with a noseless horror of a face, stepped forward, slate in hand to add her to the tally.

“Mol,” Eldest said. “Mollandra.” She frowned, remembering the name on her father’s certificate, hanging even now on the wall of his office. A voice urged her to return and burn the place down. “Mollandra Plight.”

30

Rue

Rue stood in the clearing, hemmed in by trees on all sides. Spring had trailed its fingers through the forest, touching every bud, waking the green. But still the day was dying, and Rue felt the cold of a reaching winter. Every part of her ached, the muscles with misuse, the joints with too many years, the bones with old sorrow.

She held the knife at her side. No point setting off to find trouble: it would find her soon enough. At her age you let others do the walking where possible. There had been years when she strode the world as if she could walk forever. She had tracked the Bone Shaper across the width of Magog. She’d even taken ship to Gog and hunted the northern mountains for the Earl of Huunakka when he fled his crimes.

The wind flexed and leaves filtered down into the glade. Rue shivered as if she were a branch herself. But if she had been a branch, it would have been her very last leaf she was clinging to now.

The ghosts of her past watched her from the gloom that gathered among the tree trunks, Bek and Einsa clearly seen, others mistier, standing at their shoulders, rank upon rank, back beyond sight and memory. Even so, it was to Jayne and Ambeth her mind returned as Senna cawed her warning from on high.

The bird landed close by, crashing onto the bough of a tree that looked to have wandered into the clearing, then stopped when it realized it was alone.

“I’d never spent much time with people.” Rue hadn’t meant to speak but here at the end of the road she found herself in a reflective mood, and even if her only audience was Senna Weaver dressed in feathers, Rue’s mouth seemed set on talking. “I wasn’t much for company. Not until I came to your shitty little collection of houses.”

“You don’t say?” Transformation hadn’t blunted Senna’s sarcasm any.

“I’d never spent much time with people,” Rue repeated. “Not ‘real’ people.” She turned her knife, catching the light. She watched the shadows where the bird’s attention was aimed. “They call you peasants simple folk. But actually, you’re a lot more complicated than everyone I grew up with.”

Before Jayne, and then Ambeth, Rue hadn’t ever had a “real person” as a friend before. Not once formed a bond with someone who was not themself a product of nightmare.