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“That was a foolish thing to give someone like me, Mollandra Plight. You know how I like to spend.”

Mollandra gave a lopsided shrug to go with her lopsided smile. Sharp used up favours and goodwill with a gambler’s haste. If she were ever let out of the Academy and given money, she would no doubt burn through that with equal speed. Even so, Mollandra would trust her to keep this one bronze mark. She shrugged again and turned away. She held out another of the coins to Tmanga. “Everyone else I’ve given these to has died. So, better not to take it.”

Behind her, Sharp snorted.

“Bek and Einsa?” Tmanga asked.

Mollandra nodded, her mouth suddenly too dry to speak. She knew Sharp would take the coin the moment there was a hint of danger associated with it. Tmanga, however, was a deep thinker.

“Was that man truly your father?”

“I had another, but I killed him.”

“This one seems dangerous.”

“You have no idea what he is.”

Tmanga took the coin. “You will have to tell us everything so that we can be sure to do things right when we kill this one too.”

32

Rue

“You told him to fuck off!”

“I know what I did.”

“But he’s the ferryman! He’s Death with his scythe! He’s the winged ones who take the warriors straight from the battlefield! He’s—”

“He’s probably used to it. Dying’s enough to give most people an attitude.” Rue kept to her course, putting both the river and the black sun to her back and striking out into the Badlands, an area scarred by water that never showed itself, deep gullies set around with ridges of coarse volcanic rock, all of it blowing with a black dust that made her skin hurt.

“There’s nothing out here,” Senna croaked. “I’ve been up high. It goes on forever. Just like this.”

“That’s what they say.” Rue trudged on, her feet already sore from the sharp rocks. “You can be a ghost two ways. When the living won’t let you go they keep a shade of you on this bank of the river. A shade will stay until it’s not needed anymore. I don’t know if the person who went over the river even knows that something stayed behind. Maybe it’s just like a painting, or a reflection and the person has no real ties to it…” She wasn’t sure if she wanted Bek and Einsa to be aware of her need, of how she couldn’t let them go. If they had found something good over the river, would her cares reach out and tarnish it somehow? Or if they suffered, would it comfort them to know that their spectres still owned part of her mind? “I’m the other sort. The unquiet spirit. And I’m planning on being as unquiet as I need to be.”

“There’s nobody here to care.” Senna swooped past.

Without days, without the wheeling of stars, and under the ceaseless stare of a black sun whose light seemed a kind of blindness, it was impossible to measure either time or distance save in units of pain.

In Rue’s youth, pain had been a frequent visitor, but a visitor nonetheless; however excruciating the wound, injury, or flat-out torture inflicted by the instructors, there would be a return to a kind of normal. Rue’s youth had hauled her from the depths of agony, repaired her damaged flesh, and delivered her to another day. Some hurts were, of course, irreparable, and the cumulative effects of these would remove girls from the class, leaving a few who by luck or skill or a combination of both endured.

Age had marked a slow changing of that relationship. Pain became a guest who overstayed their welcome. Pain acquired its own room, a place it preferred to be and to where it might retreat when all else was fine. And later pain became a resident, moving in for good, wandering the length of her body in search of new forms of entertainment. The sharpness of any hurt kept its edge, but added to that were new notes on which torment might play a melody. Dull persistent aches, deep throbbing hurts, the crawling itch, the dry tickle, the twinge of sockets, and the grind of bone on bone.

Each mile Rue strayed from the river seemed to take her deeper into the territory of pain, as if it were not the physical effort of her journey taking its toll upon her ageing body but the very land itself. She crested a black ridge and gazed at the unending vista before her. The scream of her flesh insisted that it was this air, these rocks, this place that was hurting her and would have hurt her just as badly had she been set upon the spot by some great bird without ever once stretching a muscle to achieve the distance from the river.

“Where are we even heading?” Senna demanded, landing to peck at a pebble among the dust. The pain assaulting Rue appeared to give the crow no problems.

“Away,” Rue snapped. “Away from the river.” She bit down on the irritation that hurting had put on her tongue. “I don’t think it matters which route I take. It’s all the same.” A sweep of her hand encompassed the gullies, ridges, distant hills.

“It matters.” Bek’s ghost stood close by, fainter than at the river’s edge. “It’s not an easy path to walk, and it will get harder each time you walk it.” Across her phantom knuckles the girl passed the memory of the bronze mark that Rue had once given her, flipping it from one to the next in a complex shuffle. “Why would you even do this, Mollandra? You had the coin for the ferryman. The world has never once done you a single favour. Aren’t you finished with it yet? Isn’t it time to leave?”

When her ghosts spoke, the bitterness that had never left Rue grew thin, almost as spectral as the girls still frozen in their youth. She remembered them amid the nightmare of their education, where somehow they had found space for hopes and dreams, for joking, even for the love that friends should share in such hardship but seldom manage. That bitterness had coloured her vision every moment of her life, fading during the soft years she had spent hidden in the Vale but never fully absent, a wound across the breadth of her soul that refused to heal.

“Isn’t it time to leave?” Bek asked again.

“I don’t know.” And for a moment she truly didn’t. It would be so easy to let it go. To cross the river and leave everything behind. Perhaps something better waited for her over those dark waters.

“Let her be, Bek.” Einsa sat close by on her other side. For once the girl was dry, the truth of her death left unremarked. This was the Einsa of her first year, with the rough grin, that mix of resignation and resilience she’d got from her mother. “You know she’ll go her own way. We never knew it back then, but she was always about righting wrongs. Hitting back no matter how big the bully. No point trying to stop her.”