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“Good.”

“Good?” Senna croaked.

“If it could be changed it wouldn’t ever mean anything.”

“What would you say to her?” Senna crooned. “To Mollandra back then. Back in the crow tower?”

Rue shrugged. “If it couldn’t change things, why say anything at all?”

Senna made no reply.

“I’d tell her what she knows already. To fight. To never give in. To protect her friends because she won’t have many, and to avenge them when they’re gone. I’d tell her that she’ll never be rid of the anger they put in her. So, she might as well use it. I’d…” Rue pressed her lips together, remembering when she had heard her own words across the gulf of time. Senna had been right. It hadn’t changed anything.

The bird on her shoulder cocked its head at her and its eyes darkened, returning to normal. Rue tried to imagine who might truly be watching her through those twin drops of midnight. Was the crow still in there? Did the Morrigan watch too?

“You watched me? All those years?” Rue didn’t know how she felt about that. If Senna wasn’t lying, then the crow had seen more of her childhood than any of her parents, the false and the true. There had always been crows at the Academy: the place stank like a charnel pit. A single crow could have watched her unobserved from among the many, following through all the days of her life. At least they could have once she’d wriggled out of the mansion’s chimney, born back into the world, soot-black and full of terror. What had happened beneath that roof was beyond even Senna’s vision, shared only with those who had suffered beside her.

“Sharp and Tmanga were bad friends,” Senna said.

Sharp was glancing at the crow now, not seeming to understand what was being said but made curious by its warbling.

Once, Rue would have defended Sharp and Tmanga vehemently, and later, she might have agreed with Senna’s judgement. Now she saw both sides. “They were as good as they knew how to be.”

“You deserved more.”

And Rue, who always had a sharp answer for pity and had been marching clear-eyed towards her death, faltered beneath the weight of this simple truth. The soft pain in her chest, so different from any wound, made her throat constrict, her voice tremble, as if she were a child instead of an old woman, harder than nails. She gathered herself. “Fuck you.”

At last, they reached tall doors scrolled with elaborate ironwork, guarded by so many swords that only the baron could wait beyond. They would die with, or at the hands of, this stranger. There could be no escape. Rue wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Was it better to fall to a stranger? Live long enough and strangers were all that were left…

The doors opened noiselessly on oiled hinges, and once more Rue was striding unopposed into a seat of earthly power, facing a ruler beneath their own roof. The old days echoed in her footfalls. Perhaps to the callow youths arrayed in the finery of their master’s armour standing around the pillared chamber, it seemed that two old women had hobbled into view. But perhaps they would learn today that although age might twist people in its grip, that too might be an ordeal that, like the work of the Academy, revealed strength.

Sharp tugged at her sleeve. “I need the privy.”

Or perhaps not.

“Watch for the sorcerer,” Rue told Sharp without great hope.

They walked on with the Minor and four well-armed men at their backs. Rue passed ten pairs of pillars, each sporting burning sconces. On the walls hung towering portraits of barons past, paintings Baron Mancer must have installed after the emperor had granted him the keep and what it kept. Here and there stood tall mirrors, presumably for the baron’s vanity.

The Cruelty’s thin sword slapped against Rue’s leg within the confines of her long skirt. Slowly, the figure against the far wall came close enough for detail. Baron Mancer sat on a throne as uncompromising as his keep, a block of unadorned stone, shaped only roughly into a recognizable seat. In contrast, the baron’s robes showed every ostentation that gold could furnish this far from the heart of the vast empire Lord Sunder now rested his heel upon.

“A toad in peacock’s feathers.” Sharp’s tongue found its edge again.

Rue snorted. However expensive the vivid embroidery, its colours clashed, and the fine linens stretched across a body gone soft in its decline. Grey curls edged a circlet of silver and diamonds.

“This won’t do at all!” Rue declared as she approached the baron’s dais and two tall men-at-arms moved to halt her advance. “I came for a proper reckoning. With Baron Mancer. Not with some ageing man-baby crouching on the throne at the arse end of a failed dynasty gone rotten with inbreeding. It can’t be you I’m looking for?”

In the silence that greeted Rue’s question Senna took to wing, flapping noisily across the hall to rest on a marble bust set above the exit. Rue recognized nothing of her enemy in the man before her, but she was familiar with the sneer that now spread across his corpulent face. She had seen it imposed on the blunt features of Senna Weaver’s son. And she saw now what she should have seen—would have seen when she was younger—the man’s left hand was of immobile silver where the other had formed a fist. She knew then for truth what she had suspected based on lessons that Kindness Undu had long ago scored across her soul. She understood how the man’s sneer had crossed so many miles to find her.

Baron Mancer lifted the silver hand now, turning it to catch the light, as if announcing himself in a way that no throne or crown ever could. “You’ll regret those words, old woman. You’ll come to know me better as we explore the thresholds of your pain.” A fleshy, wet smile accompanied the promise. “I already know all about you, Mollandra Plight, last of the Kindnesses—”

Sharp gave an annoyed cough. The baron ignored her.

“—late of the hamlet of Pye. Ten years hiding in a peasant’s hovel. An inauspicious footnote to your order.”

“They were never mine,” Rue snapped. “I’m here for Ambeth Potter and Jayne Clay. They were dear to me, and you owe me for their lives. I am here to claim seven ounces—”

“Lies!” Mancer barked, standing unexpectedly from his throne, a rising wave of flesh, a thick gold chain spilling down his chest. “You’re working for Tavoland! Trying to stop Emperor Sunder’s advance.”