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“The lichgate, there on the left by the sanatorium.” She pointed to a door so studded with diamonds of black iron that the wood barely showed. “In a moment Kindness Undu will open it wide and until the sun sets all of you will be free to leave without repercussions.”

“Without repercussions from them!” A girl behind Bek snorted. “My uncle has a man out there ready to kill me if I leave. The Academy takes its money back if we go, unless our bodies are returned by morning.”

Kindness Marta’s address continued. “Your last chance for a change of heart. Please do consider taking this opportunity. After sunset the gate will return to its purpose—to allow for the carrying out of any corpses to which families lay claim—and it will continue to be the only way to leave this establishment before completion of your training. Unauthorized departures from that point on will result in the miscreant being hunted down. And as you know, hunting miscreants is what the order does best.”

A figure, previously unseen in the shadow of the wall, now moved to open the lichgate. A fat, bald, fish-belly-pale woman also in the black cloak of a Kindness. Bek wondered how such poor specimens as Marta and Undu could have survived the training that would kill up to ninety-seven of the children huddled with her in the wind’s teeth. Though, even as she wondered this, around ten of the candidates hurried shamefacedly towards the exit. Whatever threats or promises their families had made to get them through the front gate now proved insufficient to stop them slipping out of the side one while the chance remained. Perhaps in Undu’s and Marta’s years everyone but them had had the common sense to leave at this stage.

Kindness Marta opened her mouth to speak again only to be interrupted by a shrill cry from the slopes outside. It seemed that it wasn’t just the girl in the second row’s uncle who had killers out there.

“The world that gives us one hundred daughters each year to spend in such a cause is not one that would tolerate the loss of one hundred sons. A hundred and seventy-three classes. A hundred and seventy-three years. Seventeen thousand three hundred children.

“It’s a world that many of you would return to in a heartbeat to escape the death that haunts our halls. But in our early years the records say that we had no bars on our windows and that no threats of retribution were needed to keep the girls here. We did not hunt down those who left us.

“In those days the Academy paid only a token fee to the families of our acolytes, a loaf of black rye: daughters were unwanted mouths to feed. But payment is a necessary part of our Creed, whether a token or a burden. Money is older than our civilization and as old as any of those that have passed. Money is the salve that keeps the vengeance on which we trade from consuming the world. Some sins can be paid for only with blood; but naked murder, absent compounding crimes of hospitality, oath, or kin, is, according to the ancient lore, something that may be atoned for by the paying of a wergild—the blood-gold that may comfort and sustain the victim’s family.

“And similarly, when we take a child from a family, a price must be paid in compensation. When I came here the Academy paid my father one bronze mark. I paid your fathers nine, each bearing the Academy’s three-whip stamp. Next year we are offering a silver mark for each girl. You can get a sturdy young donkey for a piece of silver!

“Try buying a hundred sons of Abrona for silver. Even for a gold mark you might struggle to find a healthy man-child for sale within a day’s march of this spot. These facts are not a surprise to you. You know them to be true. You have been taught your value since the day of your birth. Likely by your own parents, and if not, then by the streets, by the institutions, the faiths, and the leaders of our society.

“Here, and here alone, can a woman take up a blade and slice away a life. Here and here alone does our world learn to fear us, and only through fear can respect be wrested from unwilling hands.

“If we merely trained you to be deadly. If all we did was to produce the most skilled assassins and sword masters, surpassing in their art, this would not be sufficient. We would be swept away, stamped out. Those who held power over us would have seen the danger, like the first flames flickering among the furniture, and they would have accepted the necessary cost to reverse what would suddenly have seemed like a foolish decision: that of allowing the triple-goddess her own house among the faiths.

“Fear was required. Terror. We needed to produce monsters and to be seen to do so with such reckless ferocity that our first Kindnesses would be accepted as the flesh-borne avatars of the three sisters who chastise the gods themselves.

“We are as vicious as we have to be. As loud as we must be. As cruel as is needed. What we do here is a dark prayer to the eternal. A threat carved into our own flesh. We say to the world that if we hold the lives in our care more cheaply than do you who sold them to us, what price do you think we set upon your life, be you priest or general, lord, duke, or king?

“The people know what we do here. They speak of it in whispers, but the unspoken part is deafening: if we do this to ourselves—what will we do to them?”

She paused her oratory and continued, in less theatrical tones. “Once your training has begun you cannot of course be allowed to leave with those secrets save as a fully approved graduate. So please do think about the decision. And for now, that’s all I have for you. Kindness Terra will take you to your chamber. Breakfast is served at dawn, lessons begin at sunrise. Miss the first and you’ll go hungry. Miss the second and you’ll get a strike.”

Kindness Terra actually looked the part: a lean, terrifyingly tall woman with scars seaming her hollow cheeks, and eyes like pieces of broken glass. She beckoned the children and set off towards a nearby door.

The Academy had been built in a great square, with fortress walls facing outwards, and castle-like chambers filling the space within, save for the central courtyard that accounted for perhaps half the area enclosed. Overhead, crows circled, black against the red stain of the sky. Others crowded the tower tops, and the stink of death rose whenever the wind fell.

Kindness Terra led them through unlit corridors of rough stone. The light pooling beneath infrequent wall slits made islands of illumination through which the bowed heads of children bobbed in her wake. She stopped at an arched door and unlocked it with a heavy key. The hall they filed into was large enough to accommodate the full intake of one hundred. Bek imagined that the chambers farther down the corridor where Years Two to Ten were housed would be progressively smaller. The thought rekindled the mild panic that had seized her ever since the day her father had summoned her into the tiny room he called his study and explained that a great opportunity had opened itself to her.

As the last child shuffled into the room, the door closed behind her. A long, still moment passed, broken only when a particularly large girl with a brutally blunt face declared loudly, “We’re allowed to kill each other, you know.”

“We know, Lucia!”

“You first!”

A wave of responses, mainly anger and outrage, bubbled through the hall as the girls nearest to the big one pushed back, seeking to claim more distant beds. Lucia just sneered and settled her mountainous form down on her blankets as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

Bek sat on the nearest cot. A hard and narrow thing, bolted to the floor, the blankets grey and worn, the struts stained, scarred here and there by barely legible words or names carved into the wood. A covered bucket sat beneath the bed, the lid insufficient to hide the fact that someone had used it not so long ago.

Her father had called this a great opportunity, though primarily it was the opportunity to exchange the chore of having to watch her die for the handsome fee paid to the family of any girl sacrificed to the Academy. Providing of course that she didn’t leave on the first evening. She was dead whatever she did: the visiting healer had pronounced her incurable and promised a slow demise.

For Bek it offered only the chance to cut short the suffering promised by whatever poison her blood had decided to manufacture against her body. Even so, though she knew that she should be crushed by the betrayal and terrified of what lay ahead, she found herself oddly intrigued at the prospect of being trained by the Kindnesses. This she knew to be a surer diagnosis that something within her lay broken already at the tender age of twelve than any of the healer’s bleeding or their divining stones.

“I’m Einsa.” The girl on the bed beside her, solidly built, broad face framed by dark curls, grinned. Someone had broken her nose at some point and left it crooked. The small eyes that sat to either side of it, like black stones, held an unexpected amount of good humour—the warm infectious kind rather than the malicious type. She’d been the one saying her uncle had a man waiting on the slopes to stop her running. “Maybe we should keep a watch tonight. Some of these bitches might want to tip the odds in their favour while everyone’s asleep.”

Bek grunted noncommittally. Maybe it was Einsa who wanted to cut her from the list. Just visible past Einsa’s wide shoulders a small girl, perhaps the smallest in the room, crouched in the centre of her cot, legs drawn in tight within the circle of her arms. A painfully thin and delicately featured child who Bek considered would be well advised to take her chances on the slopes no matter how many people her family might have set to watch them.

The girl looked up as Bek studied her, meeting her gaze with bright, pale blue eyes. Bek felt a faint shock of recognition, a moment of connection, though she didn’t know her at all.

“Mollandra,” the girl said, barely audible above the conversations all around.