Chapter 5 #2
Bek sat on the nearest cot. A hard and narrow thing, bolted to the floor, the blankets grey and worn, the struts stained, scarred here and there by barely legible words or names carved into the wood.
A covered bucket sat beneath the bed, the lid insufficient to hide the fact that someone had used it not so long ago.
Her father had called this a great opportunity, though primarily it was the opportunity to exchange the chore of having to watch her die for the handsome fee paid to the family of any girl sacrificed to the Academy.
Providing of course that she didn’t leave on the first evening.
She was dead whatever she did: the visiting healer had pronounced her incurable and promised a slow demise.
For Bek it offered only the chance to cut short the suffering promised by whatever poison her blood had decided to manufacture against her body.
Even so, though she knew that she should be crushed by the betrayal and terrified of what lay ahead, she found herself oddly intrigued at the prospect of being trained by the Kindnesses.
This she knew to be a surer diagnosis that something within her lay broken already at the tender age of twelve than any of the healer’s bleeding or their divining stones.
“I’m Einsa.” The girl on the bed beside her, solidly built, broad face framed by dark curls, grinned.
Someone had broken her nose at some point and left it crooked.
The small eyes that sat to either side of it, like black stones, held an unexpected amount of good humour—the warm infectious kind rather than the malicious type.
She’d been the one saying her uncle had a man waiting on the slopes to stop her running.
“Maybe we should keep a watch tonight. Some of these bitches might want to tip the odds in their favour while everyone’s asleep. ”
Bek grunted noncommittally. Maybe it was Einsa who wanted to cut her from the list. Just visible past Einsa’s wide shoulders a small girl, perhaps the smallest in the room, crouched in the centre of her cot, legs drawn in tight within the circle of her arms. A painfully thin and delicately featured child who Bek considered would be well advised to take her chances on the slopes no matter how many people her family might have set to watch them.
The girl looked up as Bek studied her, meeting her gaze with bright, pale blue eyes. Bek felt a faint shock of recognition, a moment of connection, though she didn’t know her at all.
“Mollandra,” the girl said, barely audible above the conversations all around.
Was this how Bek was going to find her friends?
Forming alliances with the very first girls to speak to her?
It seemed too random, but perhaps that was just how life was.
Maybe the three of them would be sisters.
The only three to survive the nightmare years ahead.
Bek found herself smirking at the idea. More likely they’d wake up dead, standing by the black river, waiting to cross.
Certainly, Mollandra looked to be one of the best bets for girl-least-likely-to-survive-the-night.
“Here.” Bek waved the frail, blond child over and she came meekly, her feet bound in the cloth strips that the very poor pretend are shoes.
“Really?” Einsa looked the trembling girl up and down dismissively.
Mollandra, standing between the two girls’ beds, said nothing, only looked from one to the other with those almost faery eyes of hers.
Bek shrugged. Her illness would get her if the other students didn’t, so why play to win? She could be the sort of Kindly One where “kindness” wasn’t a stage curtain drawn to hide the horror. “Small can be useful. Maybe she’s fast too. Are you fast, little girl?”
“I…I don’t know.”
Bek considered slapping her to find out, but remembered she’d aimed herself at kindness only moments before. “You don’t look fast.”
Einsa shook her heavy head. “We should get someone else. The girl with the scar.” She nodded towards her choice.
The girl wasn’t the only scarred face in the hall, but this girl with the shaved head truly did have a magnificent scar that had torn open one cheek and healed pink against the smooth brown as if it were war paint.
“We should stick to three. If there’s four of us then we’ll always be wondering which one isn’t going to make it,” Bek said.
“None of you are going to make it!” said a wild-eyed girl with an untamed mass of red curls who perched on her bed like a bird of prey in some high place waiting to strike.
Einsa ignored her. “So we throw the minnow back and choose a better third.”
“Sometimes fate delivers a better choice than anything we can come up with ourselves.”
“Huh?” Einsa furrowed her brow. “You sound like you’ve had tutors. Someone’s been tipping gold down your throat.” Disapproval edged her voice.
“My father’s a scribe,” Bek said. She kept the “not a good one” to herself. “And if he had gold, he wouldn’t have sold me to this place.”
Einsa grunted. “The little fish can stay, then. I mean, if the gods have sent her…” She snorted and lay back on her bed.
“We’ll watch each other tonight. Take turns. Sometimes the first night can get very murdery.” Bek looked around the room. The curly-haired girl flashed her a white grin that split her face like a wound. The scarred girl watched with dark eyes, statue-still. “I’ll take first watch.”
“How will you know when to—”
“I’ll guess, I guess.” Bek cut Mollandra off and waved her back to her bed.
Heavy shutters covered the hall’s tall windows, and the light came from a score of candles in niches around the room, ushering shadows to the centre.
Already a few of them had guttered out, and none of those remaining alight had more than an inch of wax to burn.
Slowly, but faster than Bek liked, the gloom thickened, and soon, despite her plan, she’d have nothing to watch save the blackness of the first night.
“How do you know?” Mollandra called. “About the murdering?”
“Reading,” Bek called back. “It often pays to read ahead. They’ve been doing this for years, you know. Nearly two centuries.”
“I don’t know how—”
“They’ll teach you here. They won’t let you leave without knowing how to read.”
Einsa snorted and pulled her blankets around her. “They will if you forget how to breathe first.”
Somewhere across the room a girl with her face pressed to the shutter cracks called out to inform them that the sun had fallen behind the ramparts.
A short while later, the low bubbling of nervous voices died away entirely as the door grated open. All across the hall, girls sat up. Bek could see nothing past the crowding heads. She stood in time to see a shadowy figure slipping out through the gap.
“Two!”
“No, three.”
Three girls taking their last chance to escape.
A fourth left some while later. Bek was sure that the sun must have already set, but as she focused on listening now that the light had all but leaked away, she heard the clunk of a heavy key turning in the lock.
“Now you’re mine.” Lucia’s voice in the darkness. “All of you.”
Shortly before dawn the shutters were drawn back from the outside without ceremony or any great noise, but it proved sufficient to wake Bek. Einsa’s snoring identified her in the next bed. As dawn’s grey fingers tested the night, Bek raised her head. She could see that Mollandra was also sleeping.
Grinding her teeth, Bek slipped from her bed and went to poke the child awake.
“Ssssh. Sit up. Don’t tell Einsa.”
Bek returned to her bed on quiet feet, followed by suspicious eyes both from the allegedly sleeping and those set to watch over other groups.
The light increased. Bek kept her place. She had no clothes to change into, no water to wash with, and until they unlocked the door the fact that she didn’t know how to find the breakfast hall wasn’t relevant.
Finally, a girl near the front stood up and tried the door. It had been unlocked without anybody noticing.
A mass migration towards the exit roused Einsa from what was a remarkably deep sleep given the circumstances.
“Come on.” Bek joined the exodus, Mollandra trailing her.
She turned at the door to wait for Einsa and they were among the last to leave.
Despite their fears only one girl had died in the night. She made a conspicuously large lump in the centremost bed. Lucia’s head hung slightly past the top end of the cot, the discolouration of her face visible even in the gloom, as was the strip of cloth that had been used to throttle her.