Chapter 22
Mollandra
Year Four
Afull day passed before the next Vault Studies lesson.
In the break before the class Mollandra didn’t follow her fellow acolytes to the courtyard.
Instead, risking punishment, she climbed the stairs to the roof and picked the lock that almost every girl in the Academy had picked.
She went to the western tower, twin to the one she had visited with Sharp and Tmanga but, instead of a great bell and a shaft in which its voice could resonate and its rope could hang, solid floored.
The Academy housed the messenger crows here.
Birds of a larger, more cunning breed than the carrion crows who haunted the rooftops, drawn by the stench of death.
These wine-dark messengers sometimes accompanied Kindnesses on their duties.
The Academy also maintained towers for them in a score of cities so that far-ranging alumni could always send back word of their progress or send requests for reinforcements.
Not only could the birds find their way back to the Academy and the city towers, they could also be imprinted on individual Kindnesses and by some instinct of their breed could seek them out across hundreds of miles.
Drawn by some poorly understood instinct of her own, Mollandra entered through the wrought iron gate, having to pick a lock considerably more complex than almost every other in the building.
The crows watched her, wise-eyed, patient.
One in particular, its eyes a ghostly grey haze rather than the black beads the others watched her from, studied her with peculiar intensity, its beak parting momentarily from time to time as if on the point of passing comment.
Ignoring the scrutiny from nesting box and perch, from the birds still in the perforations of the tower’s outer skin, and from crows that had paused their strutting outside to peer in, Mollandra sat cross-legged, careless of the dirt and droppings.
“I can’t do this.”
A scatter of gentle caws answered her. Not the harsh cries of crows on the wing, but the crooning that such birds use between themselves at close quarters. Half curiosity, half commiseration.
“I need…”
She didn’t know what she needed. A void echoed within her, the empty space she had thought that killing Treecie might fill.
The grey-eyed crow dropped from its perch, feathers and wings and flapping.
It landed before her, meeting her stare with a luminous regard that had to be a trick of the light.
And it seemed that the day was dimming around them.
The tower’s interior grew darker as more and more crows arrived, filling every one of the many irregular entryways perforating the stonework.
Dozens, scores, hundreds perhaps, extending their wings to create a false night in which the eyes of the crow before her became twin pearls that promised a view into a different world and time if she could only look beyond to what lay hidden.
The crow croaked, cawed, and croaked again, and somehow it sounded like words. “What would you say to her? To Mollandra back then. Back in the crow tower?”
In the grey depths of the bird’s eyes, through the obscuring mists, Mollandra could make out two old women, both of them strangers to her but also curiously familiar.
The closer one, seamed with age, answered, her voice also the croaking of crows.
“If it couldn’t change things, why say anything at all?
” She paused as if expecting a reply, then sighed.
“I’d tell her what she knows already. To fight.
To never give in. To protect her friends because she won’t have many, and to avenge them when they’re gone.
I’d tell her that she’ll never be rid of the anger they put in her. So, she might as well use it. I’d…”
And in the next moment the scores of crows that had been blocking the light took wing with raucous cries. Half-blinded by the sunshine streaming in, Mollandra took a moment to clear her vision, and by the time she had, the grey-eyed crow had gone too.
Instructor Clakka had survived at the Academy for longer than any of her five fellow instructors, all of them serving beneath the three Kindnesses.
The woman was all bone and gristle. Her skin, wrapped too tight to wrinkle, had the appearance of paper that has been crumpled and then smoothed out many times.
The pages of the older tomes in the library were often foxed, marked by the brownish mottling that age brings, and Clakka appeared to have caught that same contagion.
Mollandra imagined that the instructor had had a patrician nose.
The ugly hole she had been left with when the Kindnesses of her time mutilated her was there to shame her for her failure, to remind every class that sat before her that this woman had fallen short.
The lesson here was that this was as close to mercy as the Academy came and that here even mercy was not a pretty sight.
The woman favoured her class with a wintry stare, her mouth a tight pucker, as if their youth was sour to her. She rapped on Mollandra’s desk with the short metal ruler she habitually carried. “Attend to your books.”
Outside, on the Academy wall, Thurli still suffered in her cage.
She had fallen silent in the night but would still be waiting on death’s mercy.
Beside Mollandra, Tmanga bent over her open text.
Mollandra, still bound by the strangeness of her vision within the crow tower, continued to stare at Clakka’s back as the woman walked away.
World Studies had once been Mollandra’s favourite subject, widening her narrow window on the world with each lesson.
Mollandra had felt constant astonishment as Clakka pushed the horizon ever outwards.
World Studies had later become Vault Studies when the acolytes moved past the woman’s verbal accounts to the source material in the library vaults.
“Acolyte Sallay will summarise the structure and importance, both political and economic, of the Callornian Spice Guild.” Clakka indicated Sallay with her ruler.
The girl, who threaded sharp twists of wire into her braids to stop others from grabbing them, stood with a look of panic in her eyes.
Thurli’s punishment still held the foreground in everyone’s thoughts.
Clakka’s talk of trade and of nations was a far cry from the stories told in Creed where the Furies, having chased humanity’s remnants across the ocean, finally relented and let their earthly bodies fall, sprawling across the landscape, sinking deep into the ground as if it were a mire rather than forest and bedrock.
The three’s true essences then returned to the celestial for long-overdue reckonings with miscreant gods.
While Sallay stammered through her account of the guild in distant Callorn, Mollandra’s thoughts slid towards her first lesson with Clakka.
The instructor had produced maps depicting the two islands, Magog and Gog, named for a pair of legendary giants.
The many borders dividing these two great land masses made both islands resemble plates that had been dropped and then glued back together.
Scores of cities and the banners of more than a dozen royal houses were picked out in bright illumination.
No map, Clakka had told them, remains useful for long.
The ocean’s work may take eons to change the coastline through eroding storms, but the love of power ensured that the borders within those coasts swept back and forth with such speed that the old could hardly recognize the world they had grown into.
Even so, it had struck Mollandra as a bright and colourful world, overflowing with mystery and possibility, so much bigger and more complex than she had ever imagined it might be.
A second map provided a very different perspective, rendering the pair of islands tiny despite Magog being nearly five hundred miles in length.
On this second chart the twins huddled together like lost children, surrounded by the endless and unbroken blue of the ocean.
It was, Instructor Clakka had told them, all the world.
The seas had risen and drowned the rest. Perhaps some day the gods would tire of the twins and drown them too.
The city of Tandra-ah, which had once seemed endless to Mollandra, wasn’t even the capital of the kingdom in which it lay.
And the kingdom of Abrona was far from the largest or most powerful of the seven realms into which Magog had at some point fractured.
Abrona survived not by strength but by alliances, trade, threats, and subterfuge.
History, Clakka had shown them, was a great churn in which kings, queens, countries, and castles were in continuous chaotic motion, swelling their borders, swallowing their neighbours, dying of indigestion.
A struggle hardly less vicious than the one in which the acolytes had engaged every day of their short lives.
In rare quiet moments Mollandra liked to place her finger randomly upon the map of Magog and imagine the life she might have had if she had been born in the spot that her fingertip landed.
On her last attempt, fate had delivered her to a place she’d never even heard of.
The Westfold barrens on the westmost border of the kingdom of Regon, Abrona’s western neighbour.
Beyond the Westfold lay the serrations of a great mountain range, sloping down into Tavoland, a wild place that claimed a long stretch of coastland—the sea was likely the only thing that made life possible there, for it’s hard to grow crops among snowcapped peaks.
A sharp slap brought Mollandra’s attention back to the classroom. Not a blow against her but the flat clap of the instructor’s ruler against Sallay’s cheek, leaving a white imprint surrounded by scarlet flesh.
Mollandra was half out of her chair before Tmanga caught her arm and Sharp leaned out from the next row to stop her desk from falling. Instructor Clakka didn’t even look around. She finished addressing Sallay. “Do better next time, acolyte. Your analysis was shallow. The work of a lazy mind.”
Only then did the woman turn slowly to face Mollandra.
And Mollandra, who didn’t even particularly like Sallay, was left wondering how it was that she had snapped now.
Not for Thurli, who she had both liked and admired, not for Einsa, who had been her friend, not even for Bek, who had felt like she had always imagined family should.
To fight. To never give in. To protect her friends.
Sallay probably had done a poor job. And she’d got off lightly—the edges on the ruler’s lower half were razor sharp. Several girls bore crudely stitched wounds from its touch.
“Sit down!” Tmanga’s hiss held an unfamiliar edge of desperation as she hung on to Mollandra.
“Going somewhere?” The instructor advanced on Mollandra with a measured pace. “Some desperate need of the privy?”
Mollandra should have leapt at the unexpected offer of escape. Instead, she took it for weakness. Sharp sensed it too. Both of them had a killer’s instincts.
Do or die.
Mollandra shook off Tmanga, moved clear of the desk, and brushed Sharp’s arm aside. She stepped to meet the instructor. Acolytes snapped all the time at the Academy. Bek had. There didn’t have to be a reason.
Thurli was beyond saving. But she could still be avenged. Wasn’t that the Academy’s lesson, after all? Vengeance above all.
She still had her book in one hand, gripped around the spine.
Elwin Madory’s Crowned Heads of North Magog.
The volume trembled in her grip. Not from fear but fury.
She should be shouting Thurli’s name, or Einsa’s, or Bek’s, or even claiming some defence of Sallay, but her mouth couldn’t frame a single word.
The snarl that broke from her had little in it that was recognizably human.
Mollandra would have scared herself had she not been so very angry.
Clakka swung, understanding that the shield of her authority had broken.
She was fast. Much faster than Mollandra had imagined possible.
It wasn’t conscious thought that placed the Crowned Heads of North Magog in the ruler’s path and captured its razored edge among the dullness of its many pages.
It wasn’t Mollandra’s strength that so easily twisted the weapon free of the instructor’s grasp.
Rather it was something the rage loaned her—drawn from unsuspected wells.
Years of training lived in Mollandra’s muscles now, and she relied on it as she threw herself at Clakka.
Her fury left no room for conscious control.
Mollandra felt Clakka’s strength as she bore the woman to the floor.
She beat at the instructor’s ruined face with both hands, howling, each blow bearing with it all her hate and rage and need for justice, revenge, and above all that, an end to the pain inside her.
The instructor fought back, but Mollandra’s fists seemed like a storm, as if she were a dozen girls and not just a single acolyte.
And, seemingly in the next moment, she was falling back panting, deserted by her strength, being pulled away from the unrecognizable mess that had been their instructor.
Mollandra sat on the floor, supported by Tmanga.
She held her bloody hands before her, heaving in great lungfuls of air, sobbing and laughing, both at once.
Others among the class were still kicking the corpse when the door opened, for in the end it truly had been all of them.
Sharp was in the act of stamping on Clakka’s head as Kindness Terra pushed through into the room.
She completed the action and met the Kindness’s gaze, an undeniable challenge in her eyes though Terra was a battle-seamed veteran of the chase and not a broken-down teacher.
Terra cast a flinty glance around the classroom.
“You’ll be needing a new instructor. The rest of this lesson will be courtyard time.
” She sniffed. “And get Acolyte Mollandra to Instructor Jane. She’s been stabbed.
Best not to mention Clakka until the wounds are seen to.
” The Kindness paused, her gaze lingering on the instructor. “Clakka was her aunt.”