Chapter 11 #3
Sharp swaggered after Wenda, bumping into Bek’s shoulder on the way. “You could ask to be excused from the Hard Run if you won,” she murmured.
Bek felt tempted. She might not be quite as good as Wenda or Sharp, but she was good. Luck plays its part in any fight. Perhaps…
“I’ll do it.” Mollandra stepped forward meekly. Head down, face hidden in the sea of blond curls that she refused to cut despite the dangers of such tresses.
“No!” Bek reached for the girl, but Einsa pushed her arm down.
The Kindness would not approve. “She’ll die,” Bek hissed.
Mollandra was at best average with a knife, far too defensive.
She never got badly injured but that was perhaps because the others took pity on her—she was still small for her age and never stood up for herself.
The best you could say for her was that she was lucky.
“She decided,” Einsa murmured, her face a mix of pride, astonishment, and horror.
“This isn’t right.” Bek shook Einsa off, coughing. None of it was right. Not one piece of the Academy, from deepest dungeon to tower top, was in the least bit right.
“No one else?” Kindness Terra ran a cold eye over the trio of volunteers as if deeply underwhelmed.
Nobody came forward. Bek stood, every muscle trembling with the need for action, torn by a dozen emotions.
If she volunteered, the Kindness would pick her and Mollandra to fight each other. She knew it.
Kindness Terra looked around a final time. “Then Acolyte Mollandra will fight Acolyte Wenda.”
As those not fighting spread out around the edge of the duelling circle, Bek reached for the knife concealed at Einsa’s hip. The big girl caught her wrist. “What are you doing?”
“Something stupid.” The wheeze was in her voice all the time now.
“Well, I won’t let you,” Einsa hissed, pushing Bek away. “Especially not with my knife.”
Bek met Einsa’s hard stare. “I decided.” If Mollandra could decide, then so could she.
“So I get to lose both of you on the same day?” Einsa hadn’t shown any real emotion in all the time Bek had known her.
Scorn and irritation had been her limits.
But it was there now, leaking past the impressively strong walls that protected her inner self.
Fear colouring her voice. Fear and something more.
Bek banged a fist against her chest. “You can’t keep carrying me.
And maybe I can be the one to make a change…
” She paused as Kindness Terra’s disapproval swept across them.
In the ring Mollandra and Wenda had both taken up their knives.
Bek reached again for Einsa’s and this time the girl let her take it.
“Don’t…”
“I will.” Bek locked eyes with Einsa once more, then tore herself away, moving slowly around the circle as if hunting for a better view.
Kindness Terra stepped back from the combatants and the class made room for her at the edge.
Bek still had no clear idea of what she was going to do, how long her nerve would hold, or how far it would take her.
She should have volunteered for the fight—she knew that now.
She had missed that chance and Mollandra had taken it.
For a horrified moment Bek halted, midstep, seized by the sudden conviction that it had been to stop her having to do the Hard Run that Mollandra had volunteered.
She shook the notion off. Even Mollandra wasn’t that dumb.
Bek came closer to the Kindness. In the ring Wenda and Mollandra had clashed once, and surprisingly both had come away unscathed. All eyes were on the pair as they circled, looking for advantage.
Another flurry of activity and somehow it was Wenda who broke off, holding one arm to her chest, staining the light grey cloth with her blood.
Whispers started around the circle. This wasn’t how Mollandra fought.
The acolyte had been disguising her skill.
Wenda would be more careful now. She would still win, they said.
Bek suddenly wasn’t so sure. It was hard to fight while carrying a wound, and the fear that the pain put into you was not your friend.
Pain urged you to caution, but a knife fight required that you gamble with your skin.
Bek reached her destination, right behind Kindness Terra.
Her decision shouldn’t depend on who was winning the fight.
This wasn’t about who was friends with who, this was far bigger than that.
The wrongness, the evil of the Academy extended endlessly, but if all the students, the remnants of a thousand, were to say no together, how could three Kindnesses stand against them?
Even so, with Kindness Terra’s black-robed back within the reach of her arm, and Einsa’s knife gripped tighter than tight in her fist, Bek paused and watched past the woman’s shoulder to see Mollandra close with Wenda once more.
Both girls’ faces showed only focus, Mollandra’s bright blue eyes locked to Wenda’s dark ones.
Wenda lunged, snapping out her knife thrust. Almost too fast for the eye and with unnatural grace Mollandra twisted inside the attack and drove her own blade into Wenda’s side.
The collective gasp had only just started when Wenda somehow slashed Mollandra across the face and, as the girl staggered back, caught her with a spinning kick to the head just as Instructor Suni had taught them.
The stab at her ribs seemed not to have harmed Wenda at all.
Mollandra fell like a tree taken by the axe.
“No!” Bek’s cry lost itself in the onlookers’ roar.
Stabbing the Kindness suddenly became the only logical thing to do. Bek swung, bringing Einsa’s seven-inch hunting knife down in an overhead blow aimed squarely between the woman’s shoulder blades.
In a rush of motion Bek found herself on the ground. She remembered the punch against her chest and not much else. She tried to get up, but her body paid only vague attention to such commands. She lay within a forest of legs, with the Kindness’s black robe sweeping the flagstones beside her.
Rather than look up at the woman towering above, Bek lolled her head to the side and found Mollandra, also curled on the floor, alone save for Wenda standing close by.
Mollandra rose as Bek watched. Wenda, drawn by the drama around Bek, had her back to her defeated opponent.
Any noise Mollandra might have made was drowned out by the commotion filling the hall.
The girl rose as if pulled by an invisible thread, and although she held a glittering blade, and although her face hung open, blood spurting from her gaping cheek, Wenda didn’t notice her at all, seeming unable to look away from the spectacle of Bek’s disaster.
As Bek struggled to draw a breath into corrupted lungs, she saw the hilt of Einsa’s knife jutting from her own breast. She wanted to ask how Terra could have been so fast. How the woman had even known to move.
But she let the questions go. She let everything go.
And the last thing she saw before the darkness took her was Mollandra.
Bek saw her sister then, recognizing her as the scales fell from her eyes.
She smiled even as blood sputtered from her lips. Sister.
Mollandra stepped up behind Wenda while the darkness fell and drove her blade deep.