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“Yes.” Rue spotted a gemsmith’s. This far from the town centre, half the establishments, even on a well-heeled street sporting silversmiths and gemsmiths, bought much of their merchandise off those who thieved it from the gentry living closer to the seat of power. It was the sort of halfway place Rue needed. At a wholly legitimate jeweller’s, even with Sharp’s faded elegance, any deal of the sort she was about to make would end with them in a cell.

“Focus now. I’m going to need you to sell something.”

“Sell what? Where are we?” Sharp looked around curiously, just as she had been, but with a different light in her eyes.

Rue stopped outside a silversmith’s, the third the street had offered them so far. She knelt with a groan next to the scraper set by the door so that people could remove the mud from their boots before entering. Doing her best to shield her activity from prying eyes, she pulled the necklace of clay beads from around her neck. It had a sturdy cord, but she still considered it a miracle she’d managed to keep it through all her recent beatings.

She set one of the beads on the scraper’s support. “Not too hard…” and hit it with the hilt of her knife “…not too soft.” The bead broke into several pieces, revealing a brilliant diamond almost the size of her smallest fingernail. She swiftly pocketed the gem before fastening the necklace back around her neck, five beads remaining.

She prodded Sharp across the street to the gemsmith’s.

“Do not lose this.” Rue presented the diamond to Sharp.

“Sparkly!” Sharp promptly took it between finger and thumb. “Don’t lose it?” She splayed her hand, turning it this way and that.

“Where…” The gem had vanished. “Dark gods, Sharp!” Rue bent, staring at the flagstones for any sparkle.

“What’s this?” Sharp reached behind Rue’s ear and produced the diamond. “Lose it? You have me confused with someone else, my dear Molly.” She sniffed. “You may have let yourself go, but I…am still sharp.” And, so saying, she stalked past the burly fellow at the door and into the shop.

Rue followed, praying that this spark of her old friend would catch light and summon her from the darkness of her mind.

The shop’s interior suggested an establishment that sold to other merchants, artisans, and the like, rather than the intended wearers of its goods. Dimly lit and walled with innumerable tiny drawers, all secured by locking bars, the place smelled faintly of pipe smoke and old leather. A scrawny man wearing a white-ish apron over a black tunic emerged from a doorway at the back and eyed them both with suspicion.

“Can I help you?” he asked in a tone that very much suggested he could not.

“I have a diamond!” Sharp announced, holding it up, before seeming to run out of purpose.

“That she wants to sell.” Rue nudged her. Sharp’s participation would ensure a better price. She at least looked as if she might legitimately be selling off the remnants of her estate to fund her decline. In Rue’s hands the gem would clearly be stolen property and subject to all the discounts expected. In fact, the doorman might be called in to take it from her, given that she looked incapable of putting up a fight and was certainly not going to be taken seriously if she reported the theft.

Even with the gold now filling her pockets from the sale of her gem, Rue knew that the path to the castle would require a number of steps. The social ladder can be scaled at speed, but seldom can it be leapt in a single bound. A peasant with ten times the cost of a fine new set of clothes from the most exclusive tailor in the land will still not get past that tailor’s threshold. They would need to be so loaded with gold that they could hardly walk in order for that “exclusive” to be overcome along with the damage to the merchant’s reputation.

While Rue fretted and paced, Sharp seemed quite delighted by the process of buying Rue three successively grander sets of clothes, with a bath in between sets one and two. Each change of garb was the price of entry to the next stage. Sharp herself upgraded in a single step, from her faded and outdated finery to vivid, contemporary plumage that would see her through the doors of any house in the city.

Rue’s diamond had emptied the strongbox of the gemsmith, and even with a smaller, less finely cut ruby added into the exchange, the man had still come away with a bargain the like of which he’d never seen.

The price hadn’t surprised Rue. The diamond had once hung on the forehead of the Taveen empress as part of a constellation set in white gold, and even with the woman’s fatal transgressions it would have stayed in that dynasty for generations. Power, however, not only corrupts souls but clouds judgement, and the dynasty had ended on that day of retribution as the empress’s sons sought to debate with a Kindness rather than wrestle over the inheritance she had delivered into their laps.

Baron Mancer’s castle, a single large keep, crouched at the centre of the city, its walls of undressed stone rubbing elbows with works of architecture in which every modern sensibility found expression in arch and column and portico. The castle, however, had remained as a brutal reminder of times when neighbours might smile and make nice but should never once turn their backs. An uncompromising pile of bedrock that might resist even a Kindness’s wrath. If King Handelf had taken heed of that reminder, then the armies of his grandson, Sunder, might not have invaded from Abrona twenty years ago and stolen his kingdom from him.

Staring up at the walls, Rue found she had company. Sharp had moved in beside her and was studying the ancient blocks of stone. “We don’t have to climb?”

“No, dear.” Rue’s climbing days were behind her. The days when her lean form could hang from fingertips dug into a crevice seemed a dream now.

“Will this baron be enough for you?” Sharp asked. Sharp, who never had enough of anything, vengeance or violence, laughter or lovers.

“I think so.” In truth Rue hadn’t anything else to do. She feared success as much as failure. If she tore out the baron’s heart, what then? She would be alone with herself once more. “The debt will be settled.” That was the Kindnesses’ way. There had to be an end, a bill that could be paid. If for no reason other than to free them up to punish the next crime.

“It had better be. You know who would be next.” And in her moment of clarity, Sharp had cut to the truth of it. There was a hand behind Baron Mancer, and that hand belonged to Sunder. The same Sunder that they had challenged at the height of their powers. The same Sunder in whose path the Morrigan had attempted to set Rue once again.

There was a time when Rue had found the emperor-to-be so familiar that she had been convinced her brother Strong had been stolen from Sunder’s family. She had wondered if somehow Mother and Father had managed to take a royal child from its golden crib. To what end they would then poison and torture him, she couldn’t say at the time, but there seemed a real possibility that Strong could be Sunder’s true brother, perhaps even his twin, for they had surely been born in the same year.

“We won’t be calling on the emperor, Sharp dear.” Rue felt the tension leave her friend, and perhaps the clarity too, as the old woman slumped and turned away from the wall.

Rue had many reasons not to pursue Sunder. The suicide that taking on the baron was, was as glorious or perhaps inglorious an end as she desired or deserved. Even under the Creed, Sunder’s hands could be considered clean where Jayne’s and Ambeth’s deaths were concerned. Indeed, all of Pye was beneath his notice. He gave the direction of travel, but the baron chose the methods, and the baron’s minions executed the plan.

As important as any of those reasons, though, was that Rue did not like to be pushed, or steered, or told. She had had her fill of those things in the Academy and before that in the mansion. The Furies, whose poison burned in her veins, and the Morrigan were just two faces of a coin of very many sides. The bitch goddess was that coin. She whose hands were never still, spinning so many webs, trimming the cords of fate, weaving a tapestry on her loom wherein all stories were told. Rue didn’t know if she could beat the goddess, but with death just a step away, she might yet turn from the paths laid out for her. Win or lose, though, she would make the three-faced one, maiden, mother, or crone, work for it.

The last reason for leaving Sunder alone, and not the least, was that the man scared her.