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The parade of intruders shambled on, some horribly maimed, one with her head cracked wide, others with a single stab wound. Along the corridor, past three other dorms, up stairs, another corridor, more stairs. A door whose lock the children from the manor had already defeated on their way in, and onto the windswept roof.

Mollandra, Sharp, and Tmanga tumbled the dead over the parapet, releasing them from the bondage of necromancy as they fell. A lone crow looked on. There would be more soon. Mollandra winced as each corpse thumped the ground far below, feeling anything but victorious. Most of the children had been at the mansion when she was. They had followed her lead, and the unspoken bargain had been that she would look after them, never abandon them, never flee her family.

The bodies hit the rocks where the waste from the privy pipes splashed. It wasn’t, Tmanga explained, an act of disrespect but to disguise the stench as they rotted.

“I mean,” said Sharp as they returned to the dormitory, “there’s a bit of disrespect in there too. The fuckers came to our house!”

“They were my family. Our parents, they forced them to do it. The same way the Kindnesses force us.”

Sharp snorted. “You were there when Old Mary told us how babies are made, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” Mollandra said, defensively. “The man puts his—”

“Not the quick bit,” Tmanga joined in. “The slow bit.”

“Three quarters of a year,” Sharp said. “No way one woman squeezed out so many in such a short time.”

Tmanga led the way down the stairs. “I thought you understood this, Mollandra. Those can’t have been your true parents.”

Mollandra nodded. She supposed that the fact she was given to the mansion’s family rather than stolen by the monsters who ruled it was one of the secrets they would need to share if they were ever to combine fully as a trio. But not today. For today at least, for a little while longer, let them think of her as someone who would need to be taken and not someone who was discarded.

Honesty. Sometimes Mollandra felt she’d rather take a knife to the guts than surrender the truths of her life. She knew that the three of them had nearly failed to animate their attackers’ corpses. If there had been just a few more of them, or if they had been just a little older and less full of life, or if they had been a little less angry…“If we don’t join better, we’re never going to leave this place.”

“It’s true,” Tmanga acknowledged, pausing on the stairs without looking back at the other two. “It’s also not something I know how to do.”

“Maybe…” Sharp looked speculatively from Tmanga to Mollandra.

“No, Sharp.” Mollandra shook her head in exasperation. “It’s not that kind of closeness we need. It works for some trios, but that’s not what ours needs. And besides—” She spoke over Sharp’s protest. “Sharing a bed isn’t closeness at all, not when you do it. It’s just fun. A kind of sport. And you know it. What we need is honesty.”

“So, be honest with us, then,” Sharp challenged, as if she knew that while Mollandra’s secrets were not so obviously there as Tmanga’s, she too dragged them behind her like anchor stones bound in many chains.

“I…” Mollandra shut her mouth and passed Tmanga to take the lead.

The stairway still smelled faintly of char, drops of blood visible here and there on the steps. Mollandra slowed to a halt. “I think…every child imagines at some point that they’ve been stolen away from their real life.” She spoke hesitantly. More nervous than before any fight with sword or spear under Kindness Terra’s scrutiny. “Every child imagines that they’re special, chosen, and that the terrible people steering their lives away from what they were supposed to be, those people have somehow replaced the wonderful parents that were taken from them.

“A lot of my brothers and sisters said that, but I think it happens in softer lives too. Children whose only hardship is the disappointment of not being a prince or princess imagine their dull peasant parents are simply guarding them until the day that the king and queen come to explain the ruse and make everything better.

“But yes.” She raised her hand against a repeat of the logic. “Yes, we were too many and too different to have the same mother. The two monsters who raised me were not my true parents, and I’m glad of it, though my true parents were not good people. Even so, born or made, I’m a monster now. And that’s enough honesty for one night.”

Without looking back she carried on down the stairs.

39

Rue

Rue and Sharp stood over the unconscious chamberlain whose name they had both forgotten. The iron-bound door that had resisted the man’s involuntary headlong charge remained closed and locked. If this “Minor Remon” who had organized Sharp’s care at the mansion by the Wentwash was inside, they were showing no inclination of opening up for unannounced visitors.

“Where are we?” Sharp looked around speculatively.

“Baron Mancer’s keep.”

“Why?”

Experience had taught Rue that if she answered enough of Sharp’s questions she would find herself back at the start, repeating the cycle. “I’m not entirely sure myself. I suppose I was hoping that if I murdered him I’d feel a bit better about the whole dying business. I’m not so sure I will, but I’m still ready to give it a try.”

Sharp nodded thoughtfully. “It’s quite clean.”

“When did you start worrying about dirt, Sharp?” The old Sharp…the young one…had never been so fastidious.