The priest tilted his head, as though the question were an interesting one and he wanted to answer it properly.
"Done to them," he repeated. "Well. Let's see."
He told her.
Natalia stood there and listened, and could not find a single word to put in front of it.
Because there had been kicking. That was where it started: a man in a good coat driving his boot into a child who had curled up on a stone floor with her arms over her head, and the sound of the others crying, and the man's voice going up and up over the top of it, delighted with himself.
They're replaceable! Do you hear me? Every one of you — there's a hundred more where you came from!
"You get breakage," the priest explained. "It's unavoidable in this trade. Some of them go wrong in the head, some of them stop eating, some of them simply stop being worth the food. So you throw those away, and you take in fresh ones, and the door never stops swinging. That's the beauty of it. There is an infinite supply."
Natalia was shaking from the jaw down.
He throws children away, she thought. Not sends away. Throws away, like a cracked plate, and orders more, and calls it a supply.
Behind the bars, along the far wall, there were shapes on the floor that were not sitting up. She had been trying not to look at them since the door came down. She looked now, and had to put her hand against the stone.
Beside her, Lilian had gone completely silent.
She was staring at the priest, and her face had emptied out.
"The children I healed," she said.
"Mm?"
"The ones you brought me." Lilian's voice was very small and very steady, which was the worst part. "Bruises. Broken fingers. A boy with a cracked rib, in the winter. You told me they fell. You said the little ones were always falling."
The priest laughed out loud.
"Oh, has it only just occurred to you? Truly? Children are so naive." He wiped his eye with a knuckle. "Do you know, I have wondered for a year how long it would take you. You are a very sweet little girl and you have never once asked a second question in your life."
Lilian put both hands over her face.
And Natalia, standing beside her, understood the rest of it — the part he had not bothered to say, because to him it was only good management.
He had kept a few children mended on purpose. Not out of pity. For show. An orphanage that produces bruised, limping, obviously beaten children gets talked about; an orphanage where the children in the yard look thin but sound keeps its reputation, and its allocation, and its quiet.
So the light in her hands had been used to keep the shop front tidy.
Bootsteps came slowly across the stone. The priest was walking toward them without hurry, still smiling.
Lilian did not move. She stood with her hands over her face and did not seem able to unlock her knees.
Natalia grabbed her and pulled her in against her shoulder.
"Don't listen to him," she said fiercely into her hair. "Don't you dare take one word of that. Nothing he did with his hands is on yours."
The priest laughed harder.
"Lilian." Natalia gripped her by the shoulders and turned her. "Look at me. Are you going to let that thing do whatever it likes to them? To all of them? Is that how this ends?"
Lilian's yellow eyes came up, wet and enormous — and then something behind them changed, and hardened, and caught.
"No," she said.
"No?"
"No." She scrubbed her face with her sleeve and stood up straight. "I'm getting them out. All of them. Every child in this room, I don't care how — that's what I'm doing, that's what I'm going to do."
"Good," said Natalia. "Excellent. Slight amendment: we also have to get ourselves out, because a rescue with three corpses in it doesn't count."
The priest laughed until it echoed.
"Saved!" he wheezed. "You genuinely believe you're going to be saved. Down here!"
He put out his hand toward Lilian, fingers spread, the rings on them catching the light.
"Come along, girl. A little noble with healing hands? I could sell you nine times before supper. There are men in this empire who would empty a vault for—"
A blade of shadow came across the room and took the air off his palm.
The priest jerked back with a yelp, and stared at his own hand — whole, unmarked, and about half an inch from not being there.
"Don't touch her," said Klaus. "Not with those hands."
The priest looked at him for a long moment, and his smile changed shape.
"Ohhh," he said. "So it's awakened. That's how you got out of my cell. Well, well." He shook his head, more in regret than anything else. "That is a genuine shame. I had plans for you, my lord. I was going to take my time. There were several things I wanted to try on a Nelt while he still had his manners."
Natalia glared at him and felt her whole body settle into something cold and ready.
"Ah, well," the priest said. "It hardly matters. You've all seen far too much of the operation to be allowed to leave it. The two of you are done, and the girl is inventory, and everything in this building will be turned into money by the end of the month. Every single thing in it."
"You are the most disgusting creature I have ever seen," Klaus said. "There's nothing in you worth saving. Nothing."
"How stern," said the priest. "How very stern, from a little boy who can barely stand up straight."
He snapped his fingers.
"But then, I've never had to be strong. That's what men are for."
They came out of the dark at the end of the room: eight of them, ten, more behind — big men in leather with clubs and blades, filling the space between the cells and the broken door.
"Take the pink one alive," the priest said. "The rest as you please. A few injuries on the merchandise won't matter, so don't be delicate about it."
Natalia shoved Lilian behind her.
There are so many of them, she thought, watching them spread out. This isn't one wicked man in a parish. He has staff. He has a payroll. This has been running for years with a dozen people carrying it.
The first man came at her with a roar and a sword swinging down.
Natalia turned Lilian bodily out of the arc and went the other way, and the blade struck sparks off the flagstone where they had been standing.
"Natalia!"
Klaus's voice, and a lash of dark across the room — it caught the sword-arm at the wrist and the weapon spun away out of the man's grip and clattered into the dark, and he stood there gaping at his empty hand.
"Thank—" Lilian started.
Something enormous came out of the shadows behind Klaus and lifted him off his feet.
The man had a scar down one side of his face and arms like a smith's, and he had Klaus by the collar with one hand. With the other he punched him full in the face.
Blood went across the stone.
"KLAUS!"
Natalia's scream tore something in her throat. She saw his head snap back, saw him hit the floor and skid, saw him not get up.
"Ha!" The scarred man shook out his knuckles. "Look at that. All that black smoke and he's still a little boy. Where were you running to, my lord? There's no door down here that doesn't have us behind it."
"Children," the priest sighed happily. "It's almost too easy, dealing with children."
The scarred man turned toward Natalia and raised his sword.
"Don't worry, sweetheart," he said. "I won't touch the face. Faces are worth money."
Natalia jumped.
She went straight up — off the flagstone, off the bars of the nearest cell, twisting in the air over his head — and the men below her shouted in surprise as she passed above them.
"HAAAH!"
She came down behind him.
The landing was perfect. She felt it go up through her knees and into her spine and hold, exactly as she had been drilled to make it hold, ten thousand freezing mornings in a yard she had hated.
The scarred man spun round, gaping. "How did you— what—"
"Did you think," said Natalia, "there was only one child down here to worry about?"
Her eyes had gone cold and flat and calculating.
"Because your luck just ran out."
She brought up the sword in her hands.
Behind her, one of the henchmen lay face down and unmoving with his blade lying a yard from his open fingers, where she had left him.
"Where," the scarred man said, staring at the weapon, "did a little girl get a sword?"
"I borrowed it," Natalia said, sliding a foot back into stance, "from one of the two men I put on the floor while you were busy admiring your own knuckles. There are two of us who can fight down here. You've now been told twice."
"Useless," the scarred man snarled at his own men. "Absolutely useless, the lot of you." He turned back, and to his credit he did not laugh. "All right. All right, girl. That's a fierce spirit for a noble. I'll give you that much — pity we're meeting like this. I'd have liked to meet you somewhere with better light."
He came forward.
His eye flicked past her as he came, and Natalia knew exactly what he was looking at: Klaus, up on one knee now, dragging air in through a bloody mouth, one arm braced on the stone. Beaten and emptied out — a boy who had picked two locks, blown a door apart, and taken a grown man's fist in the face, all in the same hour.
They can still fight, the scarred man thought. Both of them. But they're finished — the boy's spent and the girl is seven years old.
Which was, on the whole, the last serious mistake of his professional life.
He had decided what she was on sight, and nothing since had changed his mind: a well-bred little girl with a stolen sword, doing something surprising, the way a kitten is surprising. He had spent the entire fight so far assuming she would be simple.
And Natalia — who had walked into a parlour and drunk what she was handed, and had spent every minute since with that failure sitting in her chest — was not going to be caught off guard twice in one day.
"There's no chance," the scarred man said, hefting the sword. "Face to face, straight on, no tricks? Not a chance in the world."
He set himself.
"Wait for your little husband on the other side, sweetheart."
The blade came down.
Natalia's green eyes narrowed to slits, and everything in the room slowed to the speed of the shoulder she was watching.
The sword hit the floor.
It rang off the stone with a shock that jarred his whole arm, exactly where she had been standing a quarter-second before, and the flagstone chipped and the pieces sang away into the dark — and the man stood over the empty space where a child should have been with his eyes bulging out of his head.
Gone. She was gone. Nothing in front of him at all.
He wrenched round, searching, breath going ragged. Left, right, up — where — where is she—
"You're too slow," said Natalia, from directly behind him.
He froze.
The edge of a stolen sword was resting against his throat, steady as a shelf, held by two small hands that were not shaking at all.