Chapter 3
Molly Plight
The signs that someone is about to commit an act of violence vary wildly. Those without the proclivity will need to build themselves up to it, like a horse galloping towards a high fence. They become loud, angry; their complexion may darken. Sweat and trembling herald the storm.
In those familiar with such acts, the indicators are smaller but just as certain for one with eyes to see.
Only the broken-minded, in whom compassion, fear, and excitement itself are flattened to almost nothing, can surprise the wary.
And even these ones may give themselves away by the necessary preparation, the positioning to gain advantage, the blocking of exits and the like.
Molly left one needle with her knitting, thrust up through and held in place by the ball of yarn—Jayne would know better than to mess with it. She angled past an old couple and their thickset daughter, all hunched together across their table, no doubt whispering about the newcomers.
The first mercenary was a boy of thirty, a child in Molly’s view, but an old man when it came to the game of swinging blades.
A short, dark beard hid a weak chin. Pale eyes spoke of a heritage in the frozen east. The rune tattooed on his neck looked like a target as he turned to glance at the second man, a frown furrowing his brow, half question, half irritation.
Clearly, the easterner had intended to down an ale before commencing any of the other business that had brought him to the village.
“Quickly,” the second mercenary said. “We need to get to it.” He nodded at the bar.
This one’s height threatened the low ceiling. A younger warrior, more guarded than the first, two scars stitching an off-centre cross through his features. Lucky, then. Lucky or dangerous, or both.
Molly had been intending to be quick. But for a moment doubt seized her, its grip physical, arresting her arm, squeezing cold about her guts, bladder, and heart.
She should be sure before she acted. There were other explanations.
Maybe these men had just stopped to slake their thirst and would soon be on their way?
Survival depends on turning doubts into probabilities and playing the odds. Act or don’t act. Hesitation will kill you more surely than an arrow. Already the larger man’s eyes had settled on Molly, her quivering indecision separating her from the background of curious peasantry.
“Fuck…” Molly let her remaining knitting needle drop into her hand and drove it through the smaller man’s neck, skewering the tattooed rune while deliberately missing his spine.
She jerked the needle back out before her victim understood what had happened, and, with its crimson length in hand, launched herself at the swordsman.
Her slowness shocked her. But for his surprise at having a grandmother rush at him, the grey tatters of her hair flying behind her, he would surely have impaled her on his blade.
Molly hit the man with less force than intended and he took only one step backwards.
She had thought to drive her shoulder into his chest, but the breastplate changed her mind, and she ended up embracing him, legs locked around him, heels in the backs of his knees.
The shock of the impact stunned her, and she had nearly bounced clear even as the mercenary roared in surprise and reached to pull her off.
As her opponent’s right hand sought purchase in Molly’s hair, she felt his other hand hunt for his knife.
Thick fingers tangled and yanked, but Molly stayed put, thrusting forward to sink her teeth into neck flesh.
Another step back. Cries of alarm rose around them: the inn’s clientele only now catching up with events, their attention still on the smaller man stumbling behind her, trying to stanch the blood pumping from his neck.
The taller mercenary should have spotted the needle but somehow had not.
Molly reached round and stabbed it into his back.
She almost didn’t pierce his jerkin and failed to reach his heart by a considerable margin.
The knowledge that she was certainly dead now didn’t stop her biting down, or from twisting her head and struggling to force the needle past his ribs.
Any decent fighter would have ignored both needle and teeth and opted to stop the pain by stabbing her repeatedly. The fortune that forever evaded Molly in games of chance smiled on her now as the man instead grabbed her with both hands, trying to haul her off him.
There should have been no contest. Beefy soldier against old woman.
And in truth the outcome of the struggle was never in doubt.
Age hadn’t laid a finger on Molly: it had wrapped its whole hand around her and squeezed until the juice ran out, leaving nothing but dry bones and venom.
Her strength was a shadow of what it had once been, and even in her prime she wouldn’t have defeated a large man in a simple contest of muscle against muscle.
But a wiry tenacity had always run through her, capable of making an inexorable noose of her slim arms, claws of her fingers, and a rope of her body.
Even now, some memory of that remained, and for several vital, agonizing moments she clung on, tightening her legs, tearing at his flesh.
One more step back. The low table where Jayne Clay still sat, frozen in astonishment, hit the backs of the man’s legs. The table slid, jammed against the wall, and in the next moment the man fell backwards.
Whether it was the needle which Molly had set there that killed him as it punched through his neck, or whether the other needle found his heart as it was forced farther in, Molly didn’t know. What she knew with great certainty was that her knitting days were over.
Amid the screams, tumbling stools, and pushing bodies as Molly stood up, she saw that Jayne Clay’s rheumy eyes had found her. The shrivelled little woman downed her ulik with a rapid motion, swirling her tongue around the glass, then gulped.
Molly had once been used to seeing that same look.
The recalibration as some familiar thing reveals itself to be something entirely new, something in opposition to its stated purpose.
Like a knitting needle used to take a man apart rather than to fashion garments to keep him warm.
The look had stung her before, and it stung Molly now, perhaps more deeply because this time she had also believed the lie.
She had thought herself free at last of the awful truths of her life.
Free at the very end to join in with everyone else, even if only in that final shuffle towards the horizon where the sun sets and never rises.
The exodus, which started with the opening of the door and a blast of fresher air, swept Molly with it, taking away her view of Jayne and of Ambeth.
She would have resisted, twisted, kept her place, but her body felt broken, every muscle put twice through the mangle to squeeze out what little vigour remained in her withered limbs.
The bellowing and crashing of the first mercenary fuelled the panic.
He would take his time to die. He could even have stopped Molly when she grappled the other man.
But there’s something about a fatal wound that takes the wind from the sails of most people.
Anger and fear are what carry a person on at a time like that. Surprise is no help at all.
To begin with, it felt like an escape, from the inn’s dim confines and the crashing of the dying man, to the brightness of a day still bitter with winter’s trailing edge.
It took longer than it should have for Molly to understand the new danger.
Ahead of her the beefy frame of Senna Weaver seemed to be ploughing into the emerging crowd, fighting the flow.
As the panic of the inn’s patrons began to ease, an entirely new set of shouts and cries started to override their protests, underwritten by the thunder of hooves.
The noise came from the direction of the market square.
Senna, blocked by a farmer in overalls, turned her head to look back the way she’d come.
The woman jolted, then fell like a discarded sack of grain.
As the crowd scattered, Molly saw the arrow jutting from Senna’s eye and the loose line of horsemen charging from the square.
“Fu—”
Something hit her from behind.