Page 98

“Milk-Eye.” The name seemed as silly for a grown woman as Lip-Scar had for a grown man, but Rue had no other. And in all the long years since they had been children together in the Tandra-ah mansion, there had been no Cruelty more savage in the prosecution of their task. No Cruelty to slay more Kindnesses. “Milk-Eye,” she repeated. Her sister-from-the-dark. Seemingly unburdened by the age that weighed so heavily on Rue’s shoulders. Milk-Eye with guards at her back, and Rue with no one to stand by her, save a broken-minded Sharp.

40

Mollandra

Year Six

“Do this or you die. Do that…or you die. How about you fucking die for no reason today?” Mollandra strode before Sharp and Tmanga in the freezing bell tower as if she were an instructor and they the pupils. “That’s how they train us. That’s how we’ve lived. Well, today it’s my turn! You two are going to do this or we all die. I swear it by the dead gods and the dying.”

“You’re going to kill me, little Molly?” Sharp grinned her dangerous grin. She sat to Mollandra’s left on the ledge, with the drop beneath the great bell just an inch from her left hip. “You know you’re our weakest link? You do know that, don’t you?”

“She’s not.” Tmanga sat cross-legged and to Mollandra’s right, hidden from Sharp’s view by the bell’s bronze immensity. She spoke quietly, but as ever she fitted her words neatly into a quiet space so that she was heard.

“What?” Sharp made to stand. “Everyone knows I could beat her in the Wound Garden.”

“Sit down. Mollandra’s our strongest link. Always has been. And life won’t be offering you many duels, Sharp. If Mollandra comes for you, you won’t see it. Be thankful she’s your friend.”

“Fuck you.” Sharp wouldn’t have taken it from anyone but Tmanga. But she sat down.

“Mollandra’s exactly what Kindness Marta is looking for. Terra wants warriors, and Undu wants necromancers, but that’s why Marta is in charge. First among equals. She’s looking for survivors. Mollandra’s karren grass in the wheat. When the blight comes, or the hunger-bug, and the wheat gives up, she’ll be left. It’s not something this place put into her—it’s something they can’t take out. My cleverness, your speed, they’ll take us a long way. But if you bet against Mollandra here not still marching along the path when we’ve both fallen to the side…well, chances are your money’s lost. Let her speak.”

Mollandra blinked. Tmanga had never said anything like that about her before. Tmanga had seldom said as much about anyone or anything. Mollandra gathered her thoughts and stopped her pacing at a spot where she could see both girls.

“We’re all going to die if you don’t do what I say. We’ll die because Brooth, Brenna, and Kaya will be the Kindnesses for our year. None of them can beat us at anything of consequence—except Brooth with her corpse-work—but when they’re a three they can crush us. They trust each other.”

“I trust—”

“They’re…friends.” Mollandra cut across Sharp’s protest, her throat constricting with unexpected emotion. “You trust us with your life because it’s something you don’t give the slightest shit about, Sharp. And neither of us knows why that’s the case. If I believed you’re as endlessly shallow as you make out, then perhaps it would be all right. But I don’t.”

“It’s not like you tell us anything,” Sharp snapped, her humour gone. “Five years. Five fucking years of murder and torture and sheer fucking hell, and it takes that madman actually walking in through the gates before you say a word about the craziness that drove you here. You SOLD YOURSELF. You didn’t think that was worth mentioning?”

Mollandra set both hands to the cold bronze before her and leaned her weight upon it. The bell gave by degrees. “But I did tell you.”

“Eventually.” Sharp snorted. “If ‘Daddy’ hadn’t come calling we might have been old ladies before you told us.” She laughed, and Mollandra, thinking it must be at the idea they would ever be old, joined in despite herself.

“I’m angry.” Mollandra fixed her gaze on the dark drop that her toes overhung, a space the bell’s retreat had made wide enough to swallow her. She spoke in a low voice and the wind carried it away through the perforated stone enclosing the tower top. She half hoped the wind would keep what she said from the others. Even though the whole thing had been her idea, her demand. “I’m so angry. All. The. Time. I’m worried that this anger might be all I am, not just the sea I drowned in. I’m worried that even if none of this had ever happened to me, I would still be this rage and nothing else. And you, Tmanga, you make me feel worse every day I’m with you—you’re like that hole the Tallowmen throw their curses into on strips of lead—you give nothing back. Not even the Academy can ruffle your feathers, and I don’t know how that’s possible. How haven’t they broken you like they broke every other child that ever came through their gates? Sharp and me, we were in pieces before we ever came here. But you. You’re whole. Complete. Not so much as a crack. Nothing for us to hang on to you by, not even just by our fingernails.

“And if the Academy couldn’t break you open, then I have to. Otherwise you’ll never let us in. And, yes, you might die with all your secrets intact. But you’ll still die. And so will Sharp and I. Because we’re not a three. And we need to be.”

Mollandra closed her mouth and listened. Waited. The wind hissing through the tower’s irregular gaps, sighing in many voices. The red light of the setting sun, cast in sharp-cornered glory across the gentle bronze curve. The fall at her toes and the great silent tongue of the bell. Mollandra felt herself at the top of more than one fatal fall, with Sharp’s narrow hand and Tmanga’s broad one pressed to her spine, high up between the blades of her shoulders.

The cawing of a crow, shockingly loud, surprisingly close at hand, broke the silence and startled Sharp into speaking. “I don’t want to tell you.”

The strain in Sharp’s voice was as if she were lifting a weight beyond any dared before. She hit the bell with enough force that Mollandra felt the pain, though the bronze swallowed it all without comment. “I don’t want to tell my story, even to you, because it’s small and dirty and so fucking ordinary it bores even me even as it’s making me cry. Is that what you wanted? To break me down, make me dull and stupid just like everyone else? You need my tears before you’ll believe I’m real? ’Cos I won’t do it. Not even for Mollandra-fucking-Plight.” She held Mollandra with a stare that had murder in it, and fire, perhaps that of the dying winter sun, or perhaps the flame they’d put in them deep down in the vaults, the inferno every Kindness carries and few can release.

“You will,” Mollandra said, and if not for Tmanga, who had circled the walkway and come to Sharp from the other side, they might have fought, or burned there together, a funeral pyre in that high tower, red tongues licking through the cut stone and the great bell falling to strike the floor far below with its final exclamation.

“You must.” Tmanga took Sharp’s arm, closing her hand over the girl’s pale fist.

“You know what it is. My story happens all the time, out there.” Her head jerked towards the city and ten thousand tiled roofs beneath which the human saga played out, variations of the same theme on so many different stages. “I don’t even…” Sharp always kept an edge on her tongue, but the words she applied it to were few and simple, sufficient for the facts of her pain but incapable of expressing the subtle ruin they had wrought upon her, blood to bone. “Things like this…” Sharp shook her head, as if hoping the red foam of her hair would sweep forward to hide her.

Mollandra’s breath caught on the ache in her chest. The first prickle of tears. She had asked for truth, demanded it, and now she wanted to stop her ears.

Sharp continued in the monotone that sounded nothing like her. “You had it easy, Mollandra—” She bit her tongue. “Not easy. No. But at least it was special.” She shook off Tmanga and took both Mollandra’s hands in hers, staring into her eyes, imploring, almost pleading. “At least it was…unique. Nobody would ever look at it and see no problem, nobody would just shrug and turn away. They wouldn’t say ‘That’s just life’ or that it ‘happens on every street.’ They’d be horrified. They’d shout. Get the pitchforks and the torches. They wouldn’t tell you to shut your mouth, say you were lying, then sell you so you wouldn’t carry on making a scene.

“I mean…it’s a crime on the Kindnesses’ books. They’ve killed kings and princes over it. Nailed their manhoods over their golden doors. But on the way to those palaces they hardly walk down a street where…and they do nothing.”

Sharp held Mollandra’s gaze the whole time, showing her no mercy. The fire in her eyes flared and guttered and fell to hot embers, but all their tears couldn’t put it out.