At first Anji felt nothing, only the pumping fear in her bowels, the watery panic rushing, rushing, rushing. Then the pain came like a roaring storm as her vision tunneled on the length of reddened flesh lying in a thickening pool on the stone. She looked again at her own mangled hand and watched the knife slice into her middle finger where it met her palm. Another splatter of blood oozed and popped from the cut, and like an apple torn from a tree another part of her was wrenched away forever.

“For order restored,” said the Bear, placing the second digit beside the first.

Anji screamed. She screeched and cried and bled and crumpled, kicking, in the Ox’s arms.

Her cries echoed in the ruined church, and if a god or an entire pantheon was present in that holy place, it cared nothing for her.

Chapter 22

22

Anji was six when her father first took her past Mudtown’s border and into Linura proper. She’d begged him to bring her along on his many outings as far back as she could remember, and he’d always had an excuse for keeping her home. He couldn’t carry her, she’d get lost, the meeting had to be kept secret—any and all reasons for her to stay put. But one day, while Anji was reading in the loft, she’d heard the familiar thuds of her father’s large feet taking each rung of the ladder to her room.

“Come on, sprout,” he’d said, and she’d bounded out the door still jumping into one of her shoes as her father locked up and ascended the steps from their basement into the alley above.

Her hand was swallowed in her father’s grip as they’d navigated Linura’s shouting, scrambling press, the gray stone arch of East Gate looming ahead. She’d waded toward it, her legs like jelly, breath caught in her chest at the noise and conglomerate bustle of it all. A voice called from high above, and before Anji could discern the source, something splashed at her feet, soaking the only dress she owned, coarse liquid coating her face and hair and shoes. Anji had stumbled back, one hand still gripped in her father’s, and in the confusion felt an enormous weight pass over her toes, followed by the bellow of a gruff man sitting atop a cart led by a wide-eyed mule.

All at once everyone was shouting, her father included. But whether incensed at her or the driver or the mule or the entire mess, she didn’t know. She only knew the breaking, pounding pulse in her toes. It felt as though shards of thick glass were being slowly pressed into the little bones, through to the marrow and out the other side. She screamed all the way home, wriggling and whimpering in her father’s arms.