Chapter 12
Einsa
Year Two
Einsa carried the knife that Kindness Terra had wrested from Bek and used to kill her.
It had been Einsa who brought the blade to the Academy—a gift of sorts from her mother, who had been a Kindness herself—and the blade had probably taken many lives in the woman’s hands.
It had always felt as if it still belonged to her mother, and that Einsa was merely its custodian.
But now she could only think of it as Bek’s knife.
The weapon with which she had tried and failed to change their world.
The knife hadn’t been all that Einsa’s mother had given her.
There was a reason behind forbidding Kindnesses children.
A reason beyond issues of focus and purity and the plain meanness that seemed to underlie much of the Creed.
There was in Einsa an anger and a fire that ran contrary to her nature.
Her calm and her tolerance, her blunt good humour, all of these were gifts from her father.
The man who would have fought to keep her from this place if her mother hadn’t fled from him with Einsa the year before she died.
He would have fought and he would have failed.
Just as Bek had. Her mother, Einsa had since reflected, had by her abandonment saved her husband’s life.
Einsa had spoken to her mother about the rage—not the natural anger born of circumstance, but something other, something alien, flowing in her blood, coiled around her bones.
“They put it in me,” her mother had said, twisting her mouth. “And through my blood I put it in you. It’s good that you are your father’s daughter. Never let that fire out. It will consume you and everything you love.”
And even as Bek lay dying and the fire had uncoiled within Einsa, smouldering on her skin, she had kept faith with her mother. The moment had passed, and by the time she left the chamber with the others, only sorrow remained.
Mollandra now kept a knife at her hip too.
The one with which she’d killed Wenda and that she had been allowed to keep.
Instructor Jane, who taught, along with torture, the binding and stitching of one’s own wounds, had sewn up the girl’s cheek with precision but little care for aesthetics.
She had hidden away the exposed teeth and gums once more, leaving Mollandra with a permanent half smile that gave fairer warning of the child’s hidden dangers.
With Wenda gone, her three became a two and Sharp parted ways with Tmanga to join Einsa and Mollandra.
Einsa would rather have had Tmanga, but the girl didn’t ask.
Both of them were among the most competent in the class, but where Tmanga was levelheaded and considered every action, Sharp would jump in with both feet, relying on her savagery to turn things her way.
Kindness Terra had not condemned Bek’s attack. Rather she had afforded the corpse a modicum more respect than was usual at the Academy and said that initiative was a requirement in all Kindnesses, but that it should be tempered with realism.
Einsa, Tmanga, and Sharp had left their friends on the cold stone floor of the Wound Garden while Mollandra had been taken to have her face repaired.
The next lesson had been the weekly instalment of the Creed, delivered by Kindness Marta, whose ordinariness Einsa was beginning to see for the superpower it was.
Nobody would ever underestimate the threat Sharp posed.
Put Sharp’s spirit behind a dull face that would seem to have been plucked from the breadline in any poverty trap, and that threat simultaneously vanished and multiplied.
Even though in the Academy everything mattered and slacking off was as likely to get you killed as blind testing in the poisons laboratory, Einsa slumped across her desk and let the Kindness’s words slide over her.
It was good that Mollandra’s wound had kept her from the lesson—she would still be raging.
When she’d understood that Bek was dead, she’d ignored her blood loss and the hopelessness of the act and had tried to throw herself at Kindness Terra.
If Tmanga hadn’t had the foresight to be ready to trip her, Mollandra too would be dead.
Einsa had seen over a score of her classmates killed since Lucia’s mysterious demise on the first night, but somehow it hadn’t prepared her for Bek’s passing.
Bek had had an air of permanence about her that made a lie of whatever cough was eating her from the inside.
Bek could make you believe, even Einsa who had steeled herself against emotion, knowing it for the weakness it was: chains to hold you in place, chains to drag you down.
“I was sure she’d make it.” Einsa realized she’d muttered her thoughts out loud.
Sharp elbowed her to silence, then returned her attention to scratching down the Kindness’s words.
Of all the deaths to date, perhaps the most shocking had been when Keeka, who aspired to being class clown, their light in dark places, had mistaken Kindness Marta’s motherly looks and quiet ways for softness.
She’d begun to talk in class, pass notes, feign sleeping.
On Keeka’s last day she had been rocking back in her chair humming some stupid tune to which she’d put words mocking all the instructors.
Kindness Marta somehow made the trip from the front of the room to Keeka’s side unseen.
All she did was touch a finger to the girl’s forehead.
A gentle push put her past the point of no return and her chair fell over backwards.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred this would have ended in painful embarrassment.
The way that the Kindness walked off without looking back and didn’t so much as flinch at the crack of skull on stone convinced the acolytes that Kindness Marta understood that this would be the hundredth time.
Returning to stand before the chalkboard, the Kindness had written in large white letters, When there is no need for speed, always wait for your moment.
Einsa, brought back to focus by Sharp’s sharp elbow, forced herself to listen to the Kindness’s words.
For several long minutes the woman merely repeated elements of the Creed, making a virtue of the implacable nature of the Kindnesses, lauding their refusal of compromise, and extolling the way in which the roots of that harshness ran through the Academy.
“Today an acolyte attempted to kill Kindness Terra.”
Scores of faces looked up from their slates. Kindness Marta suddenly had the class’s full attention just as she had had it the day she tipped Keeka into oblivion.
“The Academy of Kindness has taken in one hundred and seventy-three classes and not once in nearly two centuries—”
Einsa blinked. Surely someone else had tried to turn the tables on their tormentors in all those years?
“—has any class run its course from one hundred to three without such an attack.”
Einsa slumped. Not only had Bek failed, worse: she was nothing special, as expected as the sunrise.
“You might think that the record for the earliest attempt was on day one, and indeed there have been…
five…such attacks. But the record was in fact set fifty years ago when one enterprising girl broke into the Academy a week before intake and attempted to murder all three resident Kindnesses with an explosive device.
The longest any class has gone without an acolyte trying to kill a Kindness is Year Five.
“Although such acts of rebellion are in some ways reflections of the Creed in which I inculcate my pupils, they are also wasteful and misguided. Such initiative is not rewarded with mercy. The system here is designed not to break, and it will not break.
“It has been my habit to use a class’s first attack as the sign that it is time to add a further level of explanation to what we do here.
This is a talk that I withhold since the brutality, misfortune, and cruelty that the world throws at us does not come wrapped in justification, and acolytes under my care should experience the sharp edges of existence raw and without the comfort of any higher calling.
“A wise man once said that anger is an energy.
In the Wound Garden, Kindness Terra instructs you to put anger aside when you fight, for it clouds judgement and narrows choices.
It is easier to teach you the technicalities of killing with a sharp edge when your emotion is controlled.
Young Bek would have had a better chance of catching Kindness Terra unawares had she not worn her rage so openly.
Still a vanishingly slim chance, but a better one.
“But those few of you that we release upon the world at the end of your harrowing are not sent as warriors or soldiers or assassins. They are sent as avatars of the Kindly Ones. It is not sufficient that you be deadly, you must be what they are, you must embody anger, your blood must smoulder, ready to burst into flame at a moment’s notice.
“Have we upset you? Oh dear…Have we made you girls cross? Do you burn to get even? Does an ache for justice gnaw at your bones even now? It’s almost as if it were planned that way, no?
“To survive this place, you must consume that anger before it consumes you. You must become it—wield it rather than be wielded by it.”
Marta slowly scanned the desks, meeting every gaze, her eyes flint in the almost motherly ordinariness of her face. “Our anger is unceasing.”
Einsa returned that stare, saying nothing, hating the woman all the more.
“Our anger…is unceasing.” Marta, whose threat had always lain hidden, seemed suddenly lit by a different light, as if some unseen window had opened to a place of horror and in its harsh illumination every trace of softness, every touch of the ordinary had burned away.
She seemed for those moments to be a different kind of creature, gaunt, lips drawn back from teeth more feral than should be possible, every tendon straining, every muscle bunched, and an awful, ancient hunger glittering in the pits of darkness that were her eyes.
“Our anger is unceasing,” she repeated, each word resonant with threat.
“Our anger is unceasing.” Einsa joined in with the class.
She felt that anger today. Bek’s death had lit a greater fire than the Kindness’s words ever could.
Einsa had been born with the rage of the Kindly Ones burning in her, and only the love she had for her remaining friends had kept Bek’s death from making an inferno of it.
“We are vengeance.” Marta stamped her foot, and dark tongues of flame shadowed her like an echo, finding an answer in Einsa.
“We are vengeance.” Fifty-eight feet stamped the reply.
“High or low, we carry justice.” Fist thumped to chest.
“High or low.” Einsa pounded just beneath her collarbone.
“Justice.” Would it have been justice if Bek’s blow had landed?
Einsa thought so, but truly she hadn’t cared about rights or wrongs.
She’d just wanted to see her friend win.
“I am vengeance. High or low.” She locked eyes with Kindness Marta, undaunted by her aspect and throwing the weight of her own rage behind that stare.
She found no give in the woman, but perhaps, for a moment, she saw a measure of respect.
In the silence that followed, the Kindness dwindled once more to a middle-aged woman, but there was no doubting that any of the acolytes present would ever look at her again without also seeing the ghost of who she truly was.
Einsa left the lesson lost in her thoughts, easy prey for any acolyte who fancied reducing the odds or simply getting the practice.
It seemed that Bek watched her from everywhere the shadows gathered, pale, silent, still with the knife in her breast. Bek with her patience and her resignation, both at odds with her vision and her kindness.
It had been the compassion or the foresight that had somehow brought little Mollandra into their circle that first night and made the trio.
Which of the two, vision or kindness, Einsa still didn’t know.
She wiped away a hot, angry tear, then cursed. Einsa didn’t cry. Crying was weakness—the dam breaking—the beginning of the end in a place like this, not that there were any other places like this.
A hand on her shoulder, brief then gone before she could reach for a weapon.
“Courage.” Tmanga passed her.
That night Mollandra had come to the dormitory with the ugly black stitches holding together the wound that Wenda had given her.
She approached her bed and let her gaze settle on Sharp, who sat with her usual nonchalance, cross-legged on Bek’s cot.
Mollandra’s blue eyes sought out Tmanga, still in her own place halfway across the room, then returned to Sharp.
“What?” Sharp looked up, with her own slightly unhinged good humour challenging the smaller girl’s newly acquired half smile.
A fragile moment hung between them, and for the first time Einsa saw a hint of fear in Sharp, a nervous something that turned into her ever-dangerous laugh.
It wasn’t until that moment, viewing little Mollandra through another’s eyes, that Einsa was able to revise the opinion she’d forged on the first day.
“What?” Sharp asked again, tensing as if ready to attack or be attacked.
Mollandra held up three fingers, sweeping them round to indicate herself, Einsa, and Sharp. Through gritted teeth and with evident pain she said, “No more leaving.”
Sharp had the grace to show a fleeting instant of guilt at that, her glance flickering towards Tmanga. “No more leaving.” She laughed. “Kindnesses or corpses. It’s us three. Nobody else.”