she had only been a child, and starving. But she was not afraid now.
One of them leapt forward, swinging his knife sidearm. Niya dropped low, moving with the fluid dancer’s grace that had first caught the Fetch’s eye. Clutching her manacled hands together, she knocked the man’s knife hand aside, popped to her feet in front of him, and battered his nose with her locked fists. There was a satisfying crunch as the nose fragmented, and the man fell backward, his hands clapped to his face, blood gushing between his fingers.
The other one had moved behind her; Niya felt his breath on the nape of her neck. She ducked to her left, spun, and straightened to find him overbalanced, his knife now sweeping in a downward arc toward his knees. Niya tackled him, driving him backward into the soot-covered wall of the pub. His head thudded against the stone, and while he tottered there, dazed, Niya drove her booted foot into his groin. He went down without a sound.
Panting, Niya backed away. She was sweating, though it was a chilly morning. A fine shroud of mist had begun to collect at either end of the alley. Niya wondered whether she should question one of these God-monkeys, find out how they had identified her and, more importantly, whether they knew about her identity in the Keep. But she quickly abandoned the idea. The sun was well up. Soon the early-morning pros would be stirring, and publicans slept all around her. Screaming would awaken someone.
After another moment’s thought, Niya reached for the man who lay on the ground. She yanked his shirt open at the neck and saw without surprise the gold cross, inlaid with diamonds: the mark of the Arvath Guard. Niya jerked the cross from his neck—the chain snapped easily—drew his head back, and cut his throat. Then she dug into his pockets, looking for the keys to her manacles.
They were all wearing the crosses, which pleased Niya; the diamonds alone would fetch enough to feed an Almont village for a month. The second guard was unconscious when she sliced him, but the third, the leader, woke up as she pulled his head backward. The man looked up at her with a gaze that Niya fancied imploring, but she was not moved. If these three had managed to get her to the Arvath, His Holiness would have handed Niya over to the Queen—and thus to Welwyn Culp—without a thought. The man on the cobbles gasped, struggling to cry out, and Niya sliced him, as neatly as old Maeve would slice up one of her chickens, smiling kindly at the children who gathered around every morning to watch. Then she took his cross as well, slipping it into her pocket with the others.
“Diamonds for God,” she murmured to the three corpses at her feet. “Diamonds and gold, while the rest of the kingdom starves. But we are the Blue Horizon, and we don’t fear your God. In fact, we’re coming for his head.”
Chapter 5
CUTTING TIES
Seen in the light of our times, the tenancy system of the early Tear centuries was a horror. Nobles set the quota for each harvest, independent of conditions or circumstance, doled out a subsistence portion to the tenants, and took the rest to sell for profit. Nobles’ bailiffs—and now that history has progressed, we can call these bailiffs what they actually were: overseers—had the power of life and death over the tenant farmer, his house, and his family; a tenant’s output was what the bailiff said it was, and rape was a routine perquisite of the job. There was no court of appeal, no independent arbiter to whom the tenant could complain, save the monarch, or the noble himself. Needless to say, complaints were few.
—Out of Famine: The Almont Uprising, Alla Benedict
Aislinn was tired, so tired that she felt her arms would fall off if she tried to lift the basket of strawberries. But lift it she did, hoisting it carefully onto one shoulder as though it were filled with precious stones. In a normal June, they would be buried in strawberries as far as the eye could see, but this year most of the plants lay limp and wilted, crushed into the ground. There had been no rain for months, and what berries had grown in the patch had a wrinkled, desiccated look. But they were berries, all the same. It had taken Aislinn the better part of an hour to find enough to fill the