Chapter 21
Mollandra
Year Four
It was said by the people of Tandra-ah, the city whose spires could be seen from the heights of the Academy, and whose walls had once encircled Mollandra’s life just as completely as those of her new home, that the three towers of the Academy each housed a single Kindness.
In truth, Kindnesses Marta, Terra, and Undu slept in rooms within the main body of the fort.
Wealth was not a promise that the Academy made to its pupils or teachers, nor was power really, for although the Kindnesses had the ability to accomplish many things and to wield great influence, this was not their purpose.
Instead, they were agents of chaos or fate or revenge, depending on what angle you chose to view their activity from.
The greatest promise made to the acolytes was that were they to survive their education, they would be free, free to interpret the will of the triple-goddess, free to be judge, jury, and executioner. The only restraints upon them would be those of their fellow Kindnesses—a conclave of equals.
The Kindnesses claimed a kind of divine guidance from their patrons, or perhaps patron, for the Furies took many forms and sometimes the three were one.
Sometimes they were Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera, but in other shrines they were the arbiters of fate, waiting by the foot of Yggdrasil weaving the fates of mankind, Urd holding the threads of the past, Verdandi clutching those of the present, and Skuld holding tight to many futures.
In the north they spoke of the Grey Sisters, a trio sharing a single eye, a single tooth, and many secrets.
The travelling folk carried the sign of the Morrigan, and their heroes held her as both bane and benevolence.
She of the crow and the wolf and the three who are one, Macha, Badb, and Nemain, whose scream could make armies flee the field.
The Furies bore many other names, other guises, and among them all lay a common core of belief from which power might be drawn.
This many, this multiplicity, sprang from the ancients who had fled across the sea in their great armada.
Those who had beached themselves on the great islands of Gog and Magog were not a single people.
They had hailed from more cultures and creeds than there were ships in their fleet.
A multitude united by fear and divided by every other measure.
But they all knew about guilt and carried with them belief in some or other avatar.
Even the followers of the cross had angels and demons who between them judged and punished sin.
The Kindnesses, they said, could see guilt, smell it, follow its trail across trackless paths and even the storm-tossed sea.
Whether that was true or not, and what guilt Kindness Marta might see in the children who suffered beneath her tutelage, Mollandra couldn’t say.
Perhaps, if she lived long enough, she would learn the truth of it.
The eastmost tower where Mollandra, Sharp, and Tmanga came for their war meetings in the fourth year housed only a single bronze bell, far taller than the tallest acolyte and streaked with the green of verdigris and the white of bird shit.
The confection of perforated stone that veiled the bell from the city’s eyes did little to stop the rain and even a full-grown crow could, and did, find its way through in places when it had a mind to join a murder.
Ravens, Sharp had said, would not be welcome, for a gathering of ravens was an unkindness and that could hardly be tolerated at the Academy of Kindness.
Mollandra, who had never before heard Sharp attempt any humour that was not aimed, blade-like, at someone, was so surprised that after preventing herself from falling down the narrow spiral of stairs that had brought them to the belfry, she said so.
“Was that your first joke?”
“Fuck you,” Sharp said, comfortably, continuing to hone the blade of her knife.
“Bek told it to her,” Tmanga said without looking up from the scroll in her lap.
“When did Sharp ever talk to Bek?” Mollandra asked, genuinely surprised.
“All you ever see is a part of someone’s life, even when we live in each other’s pockets like we do here.” At this point Tmanga did lift her black eyes from the writing that had fascinated them. “Don’t confuse your handful for the whole.”
“Why are we here again?” Sharp reached out with her foot and used the strength of her leg to impart the slightest motion to the great bell.
It would take a lot more than that to set it tolling.
A sound they had all heard at least three times.
The bell was rung at high summer when the three newest Kindnesses left the Academy’s gates, never to return, unless as a replacement for one of the resident trio.
“We always meet when the class shrinks.” Tmanga returned her attention to the list of ingredients. Poisons tests were never anything less than harrowing, and failure to brew either the right toxin or an effective cure was often fatal.
“We’re here to plan our attack,” Mollandra said with feeling. “This place needs to burn.”
Sharp twisted her mouth. “It’s not exactly flammable.”
“The rocks we can push over after everything else is ash.” Mollandra’s anger burned hot enough to consume stone in any case.
The fire had started with Bek’s death and flared when Einsa passed.
She had thought that killing Treecie might help, but it hadn’t given her even slight respite.
The solution, she had decided, was to not only kill the Kindnesses, instructors, and servants, but to burn the Creed, break the shrines, and raze the place so low as to wipe it from human memory.
“We’re a little outnumbered.” Sharp didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand.
“We’ll succeed because we have the element of surprise on our side.”
“Child, we do not.” Tmanga traced a finger down the list in her lap.
Mollandra hated it when Tmanga called her “child.” “Don’t call—”
“Almost every acolyte goes through this phase, usually in Year Four or Five. And the ones who don’t tend not to last to Year Six. You’re not even early. If this place ever wasn’t full of Year Fours plotting, the Kindnesses would know they were doing something wrong.”
“That’s a lie!” Mollandra jumped to her feet. Tmanga didn’t sound as if she was lying, but Mollandra wanted it to be a lie. “How would you even know that?”
“Einsa told me. She started reading histories of the Academy after Bek died.” Tmanga put the scroll aside. “Sit down, you’re making Sharp nervous.”
Sharp smirked.
Mollandra shook her head. “Einsa wouldn’t…She hated this place too!”
“You can hate a place and still know that you’re expected to hate it.
” Tmanga shrugged. “Einsa’s mother was the same.
Einsa found a record saying when her mother was here she even killed an instructor.
She didn’t tell you? Probably didn’t want you copying Bek.
Did you know that if you kill an instructor and fail to reach the last three in a way that’s not immediately fatal, they make you a servant here?
Or—if you got to Year Nine or Ten, they might put an instructor’s staff in your hand. ”
Mollandra waved all that away. “How does this…I mean…Why’s it all still here?” She paused. “Years Four and Five? And what then? They just stop trying?”
“This place turns you.” Tmanga tapped her scroll. “The Academy is a poison and we’re part of the ingredients, stuck between mortar and pestle.”
“That doesn’t mean anythi—”
“When a thing holds you captive long enough you start to love it. That’s how this poison works. When we walk out of the gates we’ll sing the Creed with our whole hearts and think that we were stupid children to ever doubt it.” Tmanga held Mollandra’s gaze, inviting the challenge.
Mollandra slumped, but slowly, fighting the inexorable realization.
The Academy had stood the test of time. It hadn’t been waiting nearly two hundred years for someone as extraordinary as her to turn up and fix things.
She was ordinary, expected, part of the system before she had even known that there was a system.
The truth that Tmanga had already accepted and that Sharp didn’t care about was that the place would twist them, crush them, only to reshape them and put them out into the world, or—more likely—into the catacombs with all the other failures.
“I don’t believe it.” Mollandra growled it out as a challenge, but truly the challenge was for herself, the deep core of her that did believe it and perhaps had known it from the start. She spat into the yawning space beneath the bell. “It wasn’t right what happened to Thurli.”
Thurli had been solid in almost every regard, a doughty fighter, clever fingers, able to climb and delve far better than her stocky figure had implied. More importantly she had known how to endure.
“Everyone but us has to go in the end.” Sharp stretched luxuriously.
“You and her…” Mollandra shook her head. Sharp had visited a lot of beds but Thurli’s more than any other. “How can you—”
“You’d rather I chose Thurli and let you fall?” Sharp put an edge on her reply.
“Vault Studies, though? They killed her over dates! She was tough, dependable—” Likeable, Mollandra wanted to say. Loveable. “She could have been something. She was…useful…dammit.”
“They think she’s more useful this way. Spurring us on to try harder. Keeping the legend of the Kindnesses alive.” Tmanga stood to go.
“But Vault Studies?” Mollandra herself was no great shakes when it came to the academic stuff that Instructor Clakka insisted they absorb from the dusty tomes in the library vault.