Mantis approached the dilapidated building and opened the door with one decisive pull, causing the piece of fabric to fall on a heap at her feet. “In. Quickly,” she said to them.

  They didn’t question her, and with only a few quick looks of confusion they all filed into the open space of the small house’s main area like mice entering a hole in the wall.

  Once inside, Mantis closed the door behind her and lowered her hood. “Good afternoon. I’m afraid I require your assistance,” she spoke to the only other person there.

  Sitting on a short stool in the far corner of the room that could have once been a kitchen was an older woman, perhaps Mother’s age. On her lap she held a pair of brown linen trousers that she’d been mending, her hands resting loosely on the forgotten garment. The dress she wore was old and stained, with moth-holes and patches showing its age. She had long brown hair streaked with a few rogue strands of white, and a face grave and earnest. She was watching Mantis, and Mantis alone, with severity and a downturned mouth.

  The stranger spoke. Her voice was clear but accented similarly to the Sunmen they’d encountered on their way to Pirn, with a sharp edge at the end of certain words. “What do you need?”

  “A place to stay. Can you point us to someone who will shelter us?” Mantis asked.

  The woman just nodded slowly without taking her eyes off Mantis. “I’ll shelter you.”

  Leroh was so confused he could have said it himself, but naturally it was Teela who uttered the words first. “Who are you?”

  Mantis answered the question, “One of my followers.”

  Leroh flinched.

  What?

  “What?” his sister asked.

  Mantis only gave her a sideways meaningful look, but didn’t reply. A mistake, if what she wanted was for the girl to keep her mouth shut.

  “But I thought no one knew of Omb—your Goddess, I mean. How can you have followers?” said Teela.

  Mantis looked like she was about to strangle his sister, so Leroh reacted to her foolishness for the first time in a while. He put his hand on Teela’s shoulder and said to her under his breath, “Shut up, will you?”

  “We support the Mantis, as we can hardly swear ourselves to a nameless God,” the stranger explained with her sour light brown gaze on Teela.

  “Who is ‘we’?” Leroh heard himself ask.

  Did Mantis have a secret following, a group of supporters like some of the smaller Gods did?

  If so, it was alarming news. Everyone believed the Mantis worked alone, that her God was entirely unbeknownst to all but her. There was one creature of her kind with the vibrant red mouth to look out for, one person to keep track of and whose visit men needed fear. If she was a part of a bigger group, a leader among a wider net of followers throughout Yriaa, men needed to know that, to beware.

  Just when Leroh was coming to the decision that he would spread the word of his discovery as soon as he got a chance, the older woman spoke to him.

  “Who are we?” she scoffed. “Women, boy.”

  “Women?” Teela repeated.

  “But women don’t know of the Mantis,” Leroh was aghast.

  “‘Course we do,” the stranger chuckled at him, a mocking laugh.

  “Enough.” Mantis gave Leroh and Teela a warning look, her orange eyes severe and unmistakable in their meaning. “What is your name, may I ask?” She turned to the stranger.

  “Pirria.”

  “Pirria. I have a carriage and two horses. Where do I put them?”

  Mantis ended up leaving them there for a small portion of the day as she went on Pirria’s directions to stable Clover and her black stallion at an alehouse in the inner city. According to the older woman, the Sun servants who ran the business were trustworthy people, sympathetic, and often donated food and resources to the unsworn. They were also known for offering refuge to any desperate folk looking for a place to sleep for a night. They would take good care of their mounts, she said, even if their eyes were piss yellow.

  Still, before she’d left, Mantis had gotten an earful of Teela’s demands on how to properly keep their horse, and a desperate plea to be careful with ‘her gentle friend’. Clover was fussy, she said to Mantis. He didn’t take some foods well, and he liked to be groomed a certain way—nice and tender, not like any old beast. He was special, she said.

  Leroh had only rolled his eyes and gone to sit on the street-facing windowsill.

  And there he’d stayed. Now all was quiet as they waited for Mantis to return and tell them what to do next. Pirria was still sitting on her stool in the back of the room, and Yilenn and Teela had taken a seat side by side on the only other windowsill, separated from Leroh by the door.

  Then, abruptly and in a manner that surprised even himself, it was Leroh who broke the silence first.

  “Where I come from, women aren’t aware of the Mantis,” he said to Pirria.

  She only looked at him for a long moment before shaking her head. “How did you know of her?”

  Leroh paused for a moment, confused. “That doesn’t matter. It’s a secret among the men. We tell each other—”

  “So do the women,” Pirria cut him off. “It’s not a warning for us, though. Of course. A tale of hope, maybe. Or just a way to acknowledge her for her service, to spread the word of her. We owe a lot to the Mantis.”

  “Merciless killing is not a service to be grateful for,” Leroh pointed out distastefully.

  “You’re a man—a boy, really, not yet past adolescence. It’s no surprise that you would think that. But I can tell you the truth of it, if you’ll hear it.”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Yes.” To Leroh’s shock, it was Yilenn who said it, her Okedam accent clashing contrastingly with Pirria’s intonation. “I’d like to hear more. Please.”

  “You don’t know the stories? You’re a grown woman,” Pirria said, disdain sharp on her every word.

  “The stories never spread to Okedam, perhaps. I’d never heard of her until I met her,” the siren excused herself a little shyly.

  “Ah. I should have known. A Sea servant,” Pirria dismissed her with the face of someone who’d eaten something off. “Among the free folk, though, few have not heard of the Mantis; the only God-sworn person in Yriaa that uses her abilities to aid, not hinder. She and her master are the exception to the rule. They are good.”

  “She murders people. Children, innocents—” Teela started arguing, but the woman interrupted her with a raised hand.

  “You’re too young to know what you’re saying, little girl. So let me paint a picture for you, a picture my late mother made clear for me and my sister when we were around your age to help us understand what we narrowly missed.” Pirria stood and paced a few steps toward the middle of the room to be closer to them as she spoke, dragging the little stool behind her with a drawn-out scraping noise of wood against wood. “When I was a child and my mother a young woman, things were very different among the male and female genders. We lived differently, for, as you may not even know (thanks to the Mantis), men used to rape women a lot. Husbands forced themselves on their wives freely. Men took their enemies’ women as a form of attack, or revenge, or to display dominance over the leader of a family. The impulses of men ran rampant, as the years after the Parting were a time of chaos. With the reordering of society’s rules we saw a wave of crime, a lawlessness that freed and fed many deep, dark wants. Slaves and servants and any in a position of disadvantage or vulnerability were especially at risk, and one could hardly have expected for there to be punishment for those transgressions. After all, it was the people in charge of the punishing who had evil desires often enough.”

  Teela cut in again. “But rape is illegal, like murder. Fair justice—”

  “Fair justice was even further from reality than it is today. But when the Mantis came, that changed for us, for women, for children, for any group who regularly suffered at the hands of men with more power than them. She changed the way of the world, and put in evidence the fact that those who’ve got it in them to commit such crimes would do it less if consequence was certain. That is simply the truth of it. Think, child, if theft were always met with the penalty of death, don’t you think potential criminals would think twice before swiping an apple from a merchant’s cart?” Teela was silent, her brow creased. “Theft is illegal, but the fear of a severe repercussion would surely put off most swiftfingers from it. Don’t you agree? And that is what happened. Ask this young lad here if he’s not terrified of puttin’ his manhood where it doesn’t belong.”

  “I would never!” Leroh exclaimed.

  “Of course you would never. And neither would your da or your uncle or your little friends, I’m sure. But thirty years ago, we could not have said that so confidently. My mother once told me that every woman she’d known before the Mantis came around had either been molested herself, or knew at least one person intimately who had, that it was so common that everyone at the time had some sort of personal experience in the matter. Try telling me that’s still true today, boy. Try telling me you don't know the reason why it’s not.”

  For a long moment, no one said anything. Leroh had his hands fisted around the fabric of his leggings. He was tense with outrage. Then, Pirria finished with, “I understand it might be hard to believe, seeing as you were born in a world influenced by the Mantis—a kingdom changed. You don’t know these concerns, much as you don’t know a life free of the Gods. You can only sympathize with and understand that which you see for yourselves, and that’s only natural. But understand me when I tell you that the Mantis came to make things better. We’d have a lot more to complain about today than we already do if it weren’t for her.”

  And with that she finally fell silent. In the wake of Pirria’s speech, they all remained quiet. For a time, the only sounds in the room were those of the nearby carts. The clop of hooves and the creak of wooden parts invaded the house, bringing with them a sense of normalcy after the storm of her words.

  Yilenn’s eyes showed concern; she was deep in thought with her gaze absently on the floor. Teela was frowning and shaking her head, as if processing her denial internally first.

  It was after a long lapse in the conversation that Leroh’s sister released the unsaid words in a long and breathless rush. “I still don’t think it’s right, what she does. There has to be some sort of…intermediate measure, a penalty that is just. A consequence that fits the crime. I understand what you’re telling me, ma’am, but I don’t think I can agree. I’ve seen her kill a man for making a suggestive joke. I’ve witnessed her ruthlessness, and her Goddess’s too. There has to be a better solution than this.”

  “But there isn’t,” Pirria gave Teela a sad smile. “That is why she had to take things into her own hands the way she did. And it worked, girl. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  It took Mantis a while to return, and when she did come back, Leroh’s sister had the nerve to ask her if she’d gone to kill someone as well as to stable the horses. She said it with a straight face, too, not seeing at all how inappropriate her question was. Leroh was tired of sighing.

  Mantis had only looked her in the eye, perhaps not even surprised anymore at this point, and said, “Yes. I also brought food.”

  They ate, and Pirria shocked them all when she suggested moving down to the cellar.

  It turned out, the woman’s uninhabitable hovel was just a sort of decoy to deter those with ill intentions from trying to take what was hers. Underneath the crumbling one-story building of decaying timber was a large cellar fully equipped with furniture, a big bed, and even a walled area in the back with a smaller bedchamber.

  “You live here alone?” Mantis asked, looking around.

  “I used to have a son. Lost him,” Pirria replied with emotionless eyes. “I’m afraid I don’t have pallets for all of you, only the two beds.”

  “We can sleep on the ground. Thank you for your hospitality,” Mantis’s voice was kind and respectful. Foreign. Leroh kept finding himself glancing her way with confusion.

  “No need.” Pirria dug through a drawer. After a moment she pulled out some winter blankets of aged wool in dirty gray. “So, you’re here for the prince, then?”

  Mantis immediately caught her meaning and turned to her with ice in her eyes. It took Leroh a few moments longer to understand what she was implying.

  “The prince?” asked Mantis in a frightening, low voice.

  “There’s been rumors about him for an age. I thought maybe you’d finally said enough’s enough, even if he’s one of the Sun’s people. So you’re not here for him?”

  “What rumors?” Mantis had gone very still, her pupils were dilated and she was looking at Pirria in a way that Leroh didn’t like.

  “You don’t know about Prince Siebos?” the woman furrowed her eyebrows. “They keep finding dead slaves and castle servants in his chambers. Say he’s perverted. Last thing I heard, there was some commotion among the royalty because he took a boy, some nobleman’s son, and never returned him. Everyone knows he killed and disappeared him, but with his God’s backing, who’s gonna accuse a prince? Still, I’m sure. I know he oughta’ be the one who did it. Where else could the child have gone?”

  “Why is it my business if the man’s a killer? I target rapists.”

  Pirria was visibly taken aback by Mantis’s words. She couldn’t find a response at first, stuttering unintelligibly under her breath. Then she met Mantis’s gaze with confusion. “Well, that’s what I’m saying. He’s been hurting people openly for years now. Doesn’t even try to hide it. Everybody knows. If you want a rapist, you won’t find a worse one. He’s a member of the Sun court, of course, I know, so he must be out of reach for you. I understand that. I just thought…” Her voice slowly died down, as if Pirria had suddenly run out of words. Her eyes were full of conflict and locked warily with Mantis’s.

  It became so quiet in the underground chamber then that Leroh could hear Mantis’s loud breathing from where he stood across the room from her.

  “You are sure of this? That they’re crimes of sexual nature?” her voice was low and dark.

  “Well, I wasn’t there. I can’t confirm it, but that’s what the rumor says.” Pirria nodded grimly. “A sadist, they say. Little boys and girls is his preference, but the help’s good enough for him, too, they say. Keeps the Sun well fed.”

  Mantis’s head snapped to the side, in the direction of the looming castle overlooking the city smack in the center of it. She looked as if she could see through walls, through earth and more walls, and into the castle itself.

  Teela’s voice rang like a bell in the tense air of the room. “Are you going to kill this prince—this Siebos?”

  Without peeling her eyes from the empty wall of the chamber, Mantis replied very quietly, “I cannot see the prince.”