Chapter 34
Mollandra
Year Five
“Tell us, then.” Sharp sat on the end of Mollandra’s bed.
“Everything.” Tmanga from the next bed pulled up close.
The other members of the class—fewer than two dozen of them after the elixir—shot curious glances across the dormitory but knew better than to intrude on their privacy.
Mollandra sat cross-legged, unwilling to speak though knowing she must. They were memories she had buried as effectively as she knew how, and now that they bubbled to the surface, like shrivelled corpses in a tar pit, she knew that forgetting was part of what they had taught her back in her old home.
“My family. It wasn’t a normal one. I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know anything except what my parents told us.” Half of her mind was still in the courtyard, shrinking from the shock of Father’s appearance.
“You had brothers and sisters?” Tmanga asked.
It seemed that every acolyte had siblings, too many of them.
It was generally part of the story behind them being sold to the Academy.
Tmanga was a rarity, having none. Sharp had eight siblings that she knew of.
All of them sisters. She hadn’t been the oldest or the youngest, a fact that Mollandra had felt as an ache in her chest when Sharp first told it.
There should be some easy reason like that for choosing which child to be rid of.
“I did. Brothers and sisters. Too many of them—”
“We all had too many,” Sharp said. “Except Tmanga, of course.”
“I had too many to make sense. I was the oldest.” Mollandra had been the oldest when she left, when she abandoned them. But there had been others, other Eldests, other abandonments. “I was the oldest, but none of us was under five and there were at least two dozen children in that house.”
“That is too many,” Tmanga agreed.
“Were they stealing babies?” Sharp asked. “Or were you all quins and quads?”
“Not even twins.” Mollandra shook her head. “It was bad there. Worse than here.”
Two sets of eyebrows elevated, but neither Sharp nor Tmanga called her a liar. Tmanga drew her knife as if taking comfort in the edge. “They killed their own?”
“Worse. They hunted us. Torture and fear. We were never safe. Not when we slept. Not any time. And it was our whole world. We didn’t even know there was an outside. Just walls and bars.”
Sharp’s face grew tight, her eyes narrow—the look she got when she was about to murder someone.
“Why?” Tmanga asked the obvious question.
“Some people just do stuff like that.” Sharp nodded, as if agreeing with a voice in her head.
“They enjoy it. People say necromancy is evil. They’d call Undu a monster.
But there are people in the city who smile and laugh and have friends and look like all the rest, yet under the skin they’re filth.
Demons waiting to close the doors on the world and let themselves out. ”
Mollandra unclenched the fists she hadn’t chosen to make.
“They had a reason. I don’t properly know why, but there was a plan.
They taught us things too. Fighting. Reading.
It wasn’t like here, more chaotic, but we had lessons to learn.
And…” She faltered. Next to the stalking and the hunting and the hurting, next to the biting and the twisting, it seemed a small thing, but somehow it was the worst, the hardest to remember, the most difficult to speak of.
“Did he touch you?” Sharp had gone deathly still, murder trembling in her hands. “He looked the sort.”
Mollandra shook her head. She knew what Sharp meant. “It wasn’t that. It was…You know the elixir?”
Tmanga and Sharp nodded rather than tell her how stupid her question was.
“They fed us…something…in the food. And you had to eat it, or Mother…Anyway, it made you forget things, sometimes just for a while, and sometimes it took them and didn’t give them back.
I don’t remember being really small, not at all, not any part of it.
And if the forgetting sickness got too bad, you just vanished like you’d never been.
When that happened we all forgot about whatever sibling had gone under.
Not like pretended to forget—it was as if they hadn’t ever been.
We only worked it out because my brother Strong… ”
Mollandra’s voice died in her throat. Strong.
She saw him now, a shadow of himself, weak, crawling away, so thoroughly forgotten by everyone in the mansion that even their eyes couldn’t help them remember him when he was right there in front of them.
She understood now who the young prince, Sunder, had reminded her of.
“Your brother Strong,” Tmanga said, “what about him?”
The ache in Mollandra’s chest made it hard to speak.
The prince really had looked like him. “Strong carved his name into one of the attic rafters with a bit of tile, and part of the lettering went over something I’d written there.
Something I remembered putting there the week before.
So Strong’s writing must have been done later.
But I didn’t remember him. Still don’t. Whatever they gave us…
it took him away, stole him from all of our minds.
” Only starvation had returned that scene to her, of Strong crawling away, a ghost to all of them.
“There were others taken away like that too. Maybe Father’s poison wiped them out of the world entirely. I don’t know…”
“Why would they feed you shit like that?” Sharp asked.
“Same as here. It did something to us. They’re breeding a family for some purpose.
” Mollandra had had plenty of time to think about it, but it wasn’t until the day Kindness Marta had taken them to the deep vault and slaughtered nearly half the class with the elixir that the corner of an idea had started to intrude into the vicious circling of her mind. “Repeat the Creed of the Three.”
“Alecto, unceasing in her anger, implacable. Her whip of fire lashes heaven. Thunder rides her rage—”
“Next.” Mollandra cut Sharp off.
“Tisiphone,” Tmanga supplied. “She who avenges. Retribution made flesh. No door shall hold—”
“And?” Mollandra circled her hand.
“Megaera, keeper of grudges, custodian of feuds, jealous guardian of old fires. Her histories are written in bl—”
“Megaera. Memory. Alecto. Anger.” Mollandra counted them out on her fingers.
“Tisiphone, standing between them, revenge—it’s a combination of memory and rage.
Here they feed us the elixir, whatever it is, and it unlocks the gates to rage, and they make us angry, they make us hate.
” None of them had seen a Kindness unleash the rage of the Furies, but the potential hung around every one of them.
It was what opened castle gates and kept the guards’ swords in their scabbards.
“That stuff…the Ingredient…it changed us somehow. Father’s had it too, too much of it.
Nobody saw him when he came among us. He wasn’t sneaking in the shadows, and he wasn’t invisible either, you just forgot him from one moment to the next. Memory.
“They terrorized us to wake that power, so we would hide, and so we would forget the worst of it and not go mad. I used to feel it, like a blackness running through the middle of who I was. Father could do more than that, though. He could make things forget how to be what they were or remember it. He could make a thing rot, or make a broken chair remember how to be whole. He could make you forget how to breathe.”
“Wait.” Tmanga stood as she understood. “You made the fire forget to burn up Sharp. That day down in the vault. That was this darkness inside you?”
“Either it made the magic forget how to work, or it just made Sharp forget to be angry. Either way, yes. I didn’t do it on purpose.
I don’t know how to. Sometimes it’s like a hunger, like a hole that just wants to swallow everything away.
That’s how it was when Undu gave me the elixir.
That was the first day I properly felt it here, the darkness.
And then he came. Like he’d felt it too and known where I was after all these years. ”
“How much do you think Marta knows? Or Undu?” Tmanga asked.
“I don’t know.” Mollandra shrugged. “They didn’t give me up. But that could just be them being Kindnesses. They wouldn’t let any of you go either. There was that first night we could leave and that was it. They like their rules.”
“So, are you going to tell them?” Tmanga asked.
“Fuck them,” Sharp swore softly.
Mollandra pointed at Sharp. “What she said.”
“What if your parents come for you again?” Tmanga asked. “Your father. That man who says he is, at least. He got in when everyone was watching. What if he does it again?”
“It’s not an if,” Sharp said. “It’s a when. Didn’t you look at him properly? He makes me look sane.”
“They’ll come tonight.” Mollandra could feel it in her bones, feel her family pressing around the Academy, out there in the night, waiting, but not for too long.
“They’ll come while the Kindnesses are talking about it, planning what to do.
” She looked up suddenly, eyes drawn to the ceiling.
“One of them’s here already. On the roof maybe. ”
“Good.” Sharp stood up, knife in hand. “I hate waiting.”