Chapter 27
Rue
“Why are you running away?”
Rue ignored the crow and continued what could at best be called limping briskly away.
“Stay and fight!” Senna cawed. “I thought you were all set on justice!”
“Anything that won’t bend can break us. It’s convictions that make monsters.” Rue shook her head. “I set my convictions aside early on. It’s part of what made me so hard to kill.”
“That sounds like a very long way to say you’re scared.”
“I’m scared,” Rue growled.
“I thought you Kindnesses were the big bad.”
“The important word in that sentence is ‘were.’ The news is five years out of date this far from civilization, not thirty. Didn’t your memory fit inside that bird skull?”
Rue stamped onwards. Her body felt one part dead and three parts alive, and all of the parts were too old for any of this shit. Her injuries hurt less than they should and impeded her less than they should, but they still hurt and still got in the way.
The road out of Pye led west towards the border.
Pye, the Vale, and the rest of the region that had once belonged to a copper-crowned king named Handelf had been swallowed by the empire ten years before Rue’s arrival.
Villages had burned, and fields had been watered with the blood of Handelf’s axemen.
He’d been a warrior who had carved his way to his throne and wasn’t ready to surrender it, whatever the opposition.
There had been battles, but in Pye they’d seen only distant smoke and the gathering of ravens.
Those fields now belonged to Emperor Sunder, though he might ride three swift horses to death in as many days and still not reach them from his golden capital.
He’d given their administration over to one of his barons, Baron Mancer, and whether the man had considered it a gift or a reprimand, Rue didn’t know.
The emperor’s newest neighbour to the west was now King Armand, third of his name and ruler of Tavoland, whose mountains rose in sharp defence before falling away in a long descent to the sea.
Or it would have been had Armand not himself fallen…
from his horse mere yards from the gates of his palace and succumbed by degrees to an infection that sank its teeth into a fractured hip.
The two years that had passed since had seen the title settle on his widow, the “Battle Queen” having crushed opportunistic invasions from the north and south, giving the lord of the rock-strewn kingdom of Hard Hill a very bloody nose and wreaking worse ruin upon the Marsh King.
To judge from Senna’s report the mercenaries were burning settlements on both sides of the empire’s border with Tavoland.
Rue knew for certain that the emperor didn’t give a bent copper for the lives of the peasants out in these supposedly unfarmable hills.
She doubted that this Battle Queen out of Tavoland would give one either, but pile enough corpses on the margins of a country and eventually the ruler’s pride would be hurt sufficiently to do something about it.
It had to be said, though, that the Battle Queen forged her name fighting alongside peasants.
Shortly after the invasion of Regon, twenty years earlier, she’d supported Regonian rebels up in the Red Hills on their side of that same border.
They still sang songs about the battle of Caden’s Pass.
So Armand’s widow might respond this time.
If Tavoland stayed silent, though, Sunder would have to pretend to care about his farmers and use his own antagonism as a pretext for expanding to the western sea.
Similar tactics had initiated wars with Svellard to the north and Kintcha to the south.
Both countries now mere provinces of Sunder’s empire.
Rue’s friends, home, and village had all been destroyed as part of the pretence staged so that Emperor Sunder could claim the moral high ground in a war of his own making.
Senna swooped low, cawing. “Your lot got a taste of your own medicine.” The bird’s thoughts were still on Rue and the Kindnesses that had raised her. “A bitter enough taste! I remember that.”
“They stopped being ‘my lot’ long before Sunder’s purge.
” Rue struck out over a ploughed field, the ruts swerving here and there to avoid stones too large to move.
In her mind’s eye Rue could still see Martha Craven cursing her ox, Low Bo, as she coaxed him round the turns.
“Sunder saved me the effort.” A lie but it soothed her.
“Sunder and the Cruelties that served him.”
“Burned that big castle, didn’t they?”
“Academy,” Rue muttered. Try as she might to distract herself, the crow’s cawing scraped along her spine.
Rue might have taken flight and eventually lost herself in the backwaters of empire, but Senna was right, whether she knew it or not.
The Kindnesses had been “Rue’s lot.” And when their end had come in fire and chaos, despite the wrathful vows of her youth, it hadn’t been her doing. “Not castle. Academy.”
Senna flew ahead and fluttered to a halt on the gatepost at the field’s exit. Beyond the dry-stone wall the ground became progressively rockier and sloped up to a wooded ridge where the trees leaned sharply with the prevailing wind.
“Running from one man…Wasn’t one man tore down your castle, was it?”
“I wasn’t there.” It had been a mob. Not one man.
Senna was right about that. Thousands had flooded out of the city once the resident Kindnesses were gone.
With that many there together, driven by the surging collective will, they hadn’t known if they were there to save the children, to kill the monsters, to wipe the slate clean to remove the stain on their conscience, or just to loot and burn, hunting for the fabled wealth that surely must lie behind the next locked door.
“Why are you running?” Senna cawed. “They told us the Kindly Ones brought the fire. Said they could crack the earth itself. Raise storms. Call the waves.”
“You’re remembering a lot all of a sudden.
” Rue made a lazy swipe as she passed the gatepost. Senna took to the air, squawking, a stray feather whirling in her wake.
“And I did bring the fire.” She glanced back at the black smoke rising.
The sun had poked out between cloud wracks, and the flames below the smoke were hardly visible in the light of day.
Senna swooped by. “You didn’t bring that fire. Those bastards set it alight. They burned the place and killed everyone. And you let them do it.”
Rue didn’t answer. She had never managed to unleash the full might of the elixir.
The talent was rare, and few among the Kindnesses had burned as brightly as legends like Heera and the handful of others once remembered in the lesser creed.
And nowadays nobody did. That fire had gone out of the world.
Rue considered this to be a good thing, since as small as the number who could touch divinity were, the number who could survive the experience were smaller still.
Heera herself was said to have endured two grand rages before being carried off at the height of her third and final unleashing at the gates of Themda.
The propensity for holy rage increased with each draught of the elixir consumed, but having found candidates for a trio at the expense of a sizeable portion of the class, the Kindnesses were loath to kill off their promising acolytes with a second drink of the poison.
It wasn’t an act of compassion. All but three of any year were doomed.
But the process over the five years of the second half of their training was designed to select those best suited to the role.
Simply dosing the class with the fabulously valuable elixir until all but three of them had exploded, burned to a crisp, or just keeled over dead would not allow the rest of the training to achieve the brutality required when honing a Kindness.
The fact that Kindness Undu had poured Rue a second draught following her insubordination had, however, still not gifted her the power to unleash the full rage of the Kindly Ones.
Nor had it served the punitive function the Kindness intended.
Rue had gulped the liquid down, felt that same distressingly familiar blackness flutter in her chest, and then…
nothing. She had found the Kindness’s eyes again, but this time had refrained from voicing her thoughts, instead releasing a belch that Sharp later gleefully recounted as being far too loud and long to have come out of such a slight child.
On a very small number of occasions, Rue had been a door for some fraction of the Furies’ fire. But to open that door required the incandescent fury that only true calamity can provoke. She prayed never to visit such extremes again.
Rue stumbled over a rock and cursed. She shook off the memories that had stolen her attention.
“I wish—” But Rue wasn’t quite self-absorbed enough to complain to Senna about the things she wished she’d had time to recover from her hut.
She might have had useful possessions burned up, but Senna had lost family.
Senna’s husband had left with a visiting tinker woman years before Rue arrived, tired, no doubt, of her sharpening her tongue on him.
But her son, his wife, their children…Rue clamped her lips together.