Chapter 28 #2
But as Mollandra’s gaze lingered on this tall, broad-shouldered young prince, something refused to let her look away. There was something about him. Something…something she recognized?
“Sunder,” someone, maybe Lurgan, whispered behind her.
So it was the king’s nephew, and the man must be the king’s youngest brother, since two of the others were dead, and one married overseas to the daughter of the Warlord of Darrak far away on Gog.
At least this was the case according to the late Instructor Clakka’s “World” lessons, the only window that Mollandra had to offer views other than the distant city walls and the surrounding patchwork of woodland and field.
The instructor’s replacement, Quendri, knew far less than Clakka had.
Until recently Quendri had been a tenth year, saved from the catacombs only by Mollandra’s act of murder.
She stumped around at the front of Vault Studies on her broken leg, her freshly mutilated nose still weeping, and frequently repeated that Mollandra had only herself to blame for reducing the quality of her own education.
Mollandra caught another look at this Prince Sunder.
Again that sense of familiarity lanced through her.
She shook her head and held back a snort of amusement at her own foolishness.
The king’s nephew. She had felt for a moment that she had seen him before.
Foolishness in itself, for she knew no one outside these walls and never left them.
Why would she think she had a bond with someone who might, if a handful or two of nobles died, inherit the throne?
She snorted then, unable to hold it back, and dragged her gaze away to the boy’s father.
What was the king’s little brother doing here beneath a rain-dark sky?
She guessed it must be an inspection. A statement, however hollow, of authority over this vicious hive of women that sat so close to their city.
Although the Kindnesses considered themselves to be far above worldly considerations, delivering justice to the high and mighty without fear or favour, the Academy did have to sit somewhere, and that somewhere inevitably lay within a kingdom.
History had chosen the undistinguished kingdom of Abrona for the holy site.
Abrona had seemed for generations to be a country destined to be consumed by its larger neighbours. The luck of its rulers would surely run out, but time and again, fortune favoured them.
The presence of the Academy had led to a certain tension between the kings of Abrona and the new cult seeking to put down roots in that soil.
Inevitably, large and uncharacteristic doses of pragmatism had been required by the Kindnesses.
They’d aimed themselves at miscreants beyond the kingdom’s borders, whilst all the while building their strength so that when their gaze turned inwards, they were too dangerous to be evicted.
This presented an obvious problem for the present incumbent King Orrin Devin.
Mollandra’s eyes had returned to Prince Sunder when she sensed it.
A sick dread thrilled through her, a once-familiar feeling that she had long ago managed to crush down into the darkest and least visited corner of her mind.
Glancing frantically around the grounds, she saw it.
The shape moved between Years Two and Three on the far side of the courtyard, refusing definition, denying its presence.
None of the young acolytes so much as twitched as the thing prowled around them.
If not for the unnatural way it moved, the alien, almost insectoid motion, fluctuating from frenzy to statue in the space of a heartbeat, Mollandra might also have let the enchantment seduce her into believing that it wasn’t there.
Even as she looked, a terrible understanding washed away illusion and the man stood revealed in the act of lifting a small girl’s hair, sniffing her neck, staring into her eyes, taking care only not to block her line of sight to the alluring prince.
The first heavy drops of rain started to fall.
The man, clad in black, black-haired, black-eyed, skin pale as if his blood had been drained, glanced this way, then that.
He moved past three more girls in that ungainly flurry of motion, stopping to examine the fourth.
Instructor Mary, standing to attention near the back of the group, frowned and glanced his way.
Her gaze flittered across to the Year Threes, then returned to the visitors.
Mollandra stood with a stillness she had never called upon since stepping through the Academy’s gate, an immobility that would challenge a statue, stilling her breath to the faintest whisper, even quieting her heart despite every instinct trying to make it race, trying to set it pounding against her ribs.
Again, the man sniffed at an acolyte, as if inspecting a carcass at a poultry stall. The rain started to fall in earnest.
Leave, damn you! Mollandra couldn’t see the royals but she knew they were still there, subjecting their finery to a soaking.
What kind of aristocrat endures a downpour to discuss future dead girls?
Leave and we can leave too! She wouldn’t feel safe with half a dozen locked doors behind her, but she’d feel a whole lot safer than standing out here in the open, on display.
As if sensing her eyes upon him, the man spun, reversing himself as quick as a finger snap. Mollandra kept her gaze nailed to the royals who, now darkened with rain, had sedately interposed themselves between her and the intruder.
Cold rain ran down Mollandra’s back and chest. The downpour reached epic proportions, thundering earthwards with a ferocity rarely seen in the east. Mollandra blinked it from her eyes, puffed it from her lips.
Desperately focused on the king’s sister, all the while tracking the man in her periphery as he crossed the courtyard.
She had forgotten how to feel this terrified.
When he moved he was at his most alien, fixed where he should flex, supple where humans weren’t meant to bend.
His head and shoulders seemed peculiarly connected, as if both arms looped over an invisible broom handle that ran behind his neck.
He moved in loping triples, eating up the distance, stopping, devouring more.
He circled the dripping royals and the Kindnesses, his clothes as black as their robes.
Kindness Undu sniffed the air as the man came close, causing him to veer off.
Kindness Terra half drew her knife, out of the royals’ sight, and glanced around in suspicion, her gaze briefly attaching to the man before sliding away.
Marta, in conversation with the older man, Prince Sunder’s father, seemed to sense nothing.
Only the king’s nephew saw the man for certain, looking away, not in fear but as if he might be an accomplice in the deception of eyes and minds.
The intruder kept his distance from the Kindnesses, moving clear of them. He became a ghost in the rain until he loomed suddenly from the deluge at the front of the Year Five group, so close that Mollandra could almost reach out and touch him.
She kept her eyes locked on the Kindnesses and their guests, teeth clenched, painfully aware of the man at the edge of her vision, running his hands across an oblivious Sharp, a scant inch from making contact.
The intruder abandoned Sharp and circled to the end of Mollandra’s rank.
Somehow when he insinuated himself between the sodden rows of acolytes they accepted it as the buffeting of a nonexistent wind.
He paused at Tmanga’s side, and she turned, rubbing at her scar, mouth twisting as if tasting something foul.
An acolyte in the front row staggered forward as the man gave Tmanga space and moved towards Mollandra, reaching for her with a hand at once both human and monstrous, the fingers limp and dangling as rainwater trickled from the tips.
Mollandra caught his wrist, though she was almost too slow.
A black pulse beat through her. Sick-making, nearly powerful enough to carry the world away.
She would have sliced through every vein and tendon in his arm, but by the time her blade made it from her belt he’d wrenched free.
The spell broke, its fragments washed away with the rain in the space of an eyeblink.
The acolytes saw him first, some screaming in fear—a difficult reaction to provoke after five years of the Academy—others crying out in alarm or anger.
All of them, through some unnamed instinct bedded in their shared humanity, recognised the man as something alien, something unclean and dangerous.
Even acolytes who might in two or three years be fully fledged Kindnesses drew back as if fearing that Father might sink his teeth into their flesh.
Instructor Maggery, whose lessons in concealment had never even scratched the surface of the intruder’s skill set, got to him first. Or would have if he hadn’t danced out of reach. His laughter, high and wild, sent shudders through Mollandra, and her strength almost deserted her.
Kindness Terra closed on him, her great sword bared and held before her in both hands. On all sides the instructors came forward, knives at the ready.
“Ladies! Ladies!” The man motioned with downward palms for the lowering of blades, his grin so wide that one might expect it to bleed. “I’m not here to fight.”
Kindnesses Marta and Undu arrived to flank Terra, a pace or two back. “You may not have come here to fight.” Marta spoke into the weakening rain. “But you seem to have come here to die. State your business with the Academy.”
“Oh, that’s simple enough.” He levelled a bloodless finger at Mollandra. “I came to take my daughter home.”