Daughters of Ruin - K. D. Castner Page 0,1
feet wedged on the front axle braces.
The bandit yelped in surprise.
The girl smiled. In one backhand motion, she swung the dagger and cut the reins. There would be no stopping. Iren closed her eyes and let herself fall. The carriage sailed over her. She hit the ground flat and spread her arms and legs to scatter the impact. When the horses noticed the impending wall, they whinnied and twisted a sharp turn to the right, planting the broken rear axle into the dirt.
The flaming carriage toppled over.
The little one shrieked from inside the coach.
The earless bandit lost his footing, and the carriage’s motion sent him flying.
The horses wailed and fell sideways.
Burning satchels bounced in every direction.
A cloud of dirt poured over the crash like a yellow fog.
As the dust settled in the Royal Coliseum, the five-year-old from Tasan sat on the dirt floor, where she had landed after falling from the coach, and continued to cry. The other three princesses circled around her, swinging their daggers at one another’s faces.
No elegance. No showmanship. Not even the prudence to stab the blades at the exposed wrists, where any damage would cripple further attack. No love for the craft.
Just the pure hate of children forced to live together.
Hiram Kinmegistus watched from the conductor’s trench, unamused and overheated in his academy robes. His shinhound sat beside him, licking a paw.
The tutor, Marta, shouted instructions to the girls.
“Suki, get up! It’s okay, darling. No need to cry.”
“Rhea, close your position.”
“Like Iren. Look at her lead foot. Her left one.”
“Her other left one.”
“Too aggressive, Cadis.”
“Suki, for the love of anything holy, please get up.”
The girls only ever seemed to aim for the eyes, but had no sense of the length of the blades, or even their arms. They flailed at one another like flustered geese.
Near them, a broken carriage lay on its side, one wheel spinning in the breeze. Two horses, still attached by the harnesses, struggled to free themselves. Two men lay dead beside them.
The tutor glanced at Hiram, the king’s man, standing in the trench with his arms crossed under his magisterial robes. He would report back to King Declan—from the look on his face, it wouldn’t be positive.
The servants preparing the stadium for the upcoming Revels—washing the seats and hanging banners—quietly watched the princesses from the grandstands.
Marta shouted, “Suki, please, stop crying.”
Perhaps it was unjust to pick on Suki, the youngest, when she and Cadis and Iren were taken from their parents only six months ago. They were driven—each from their homes, their own families, their own countries—to Meridan as “wards” of King Declan. Suki was five now, while the others were on either side of seven. They were to be raised as sisters, equal to Declan’s own flesh-and-blood daughter, Rhea, as if such a thing were possible.
Half the court of Meridan couldn’t tell if the Sisterhood of Queens was a gesture of ludicrous optimism, or a cruel joke that only Declan appreciated.
Six months ago, when Hiram Kinmegistus had appeared at Marta’s garden fence and hired her to instruct the young queens, she had asked him exactly that. “Is this a political farce, Magister? Am I a tutor or a prison guard?”
The magister loomed above her tomato plants like the specter of a reaping angel and smiled crookedly. “If you’d ever attended the Corentine Academy, Marta, you would know they are roughly the same job.”
Rhea was the one to pull the first knife. Even before the wheels stopped turning on the wrecked carriage, she screamed, “You did it on purpose!” And she charged Cadis. “You crushed my hand on purpose!”
Cadis was tallest and strongest already. She had sailed on ships back in Findain, with pirates. She blocked Rhea’s downward swing easily with her own knife and slashed quickly to counter.
“Ow! You cut me, you bestiola!” Rhea dropped her blade and grabbed the bleeding slash on her forearm, just above the vambrace.
“Yeah,” said Cadis. “That was the point.”
“Actually, I don’t think that was the point of this exercise,” said Iren, tossing her knife aside, uninterested in explaining herself.
“Besides, my boots slipped,” muttered Rhea. She let the words die off, disgusted with her own excuse.
Cadis didn’t even bother to reply. She turned to Iren instead. “Do you think they just want us to make her look good?”
Iren shrugged. She nodded at the king’s adviser in the conductor’s trench. “I think they want us to show off, to dance in front of them, make them feel safe.”
Cadis held her knife in her teeth as she