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In summer, when it would burn better, they returned to the Girls’ Working School in Munz. Two women laid in the shade of the trees just at the edge of the woods that bordered the nearest field, on their bellies in the dry leaf litter, hoping desperately that no snakes would wriggle past beneath their noses. Their hair was cut short, just beginning to curl over their ears. The redhead of the pair tucked it back behind her ear, frowning.
Magda—or Tonker, as Lofty called her even now, reluctant to shed the male names that had protected them—regretted very little when it came to Tilda. To Lofty. The life they’d both led in the Grey House had carved most of the soft parts of her away, paring away everything but the anger. Sometimes she regretted the things she said under the influence of that anger, or the things she did, but with Lofty? Never. Lofty was her heart.
She regretted making that bloody promise to return to the Grey House, though. Even now, even from a distance, the sight of that drab heap of wood and stone made her stomach twist and ache with sudden nauseous anxiety. Magda gritted her teeth, wishing that sudden fright away. She was beyond all that now, wasn’t she? They couldn’t take her, nor Lofty.
Still, she felt small. She felt as weak and frightened as she’d felt the day she first set foot in the Grey House. She felt as though she would crumple at the first look, at the first raised hand, at the first kindly smile from Father Jupe, and how dare this place still affect her like this? What right did it have? What right did the sight of that miserable house, slumped and yawning, ready to swallow her up again, have to make her afraid? To make her ashamed again?
Magda realized that she was trembling—with rage or fear, she couldn’t tell. Some muddled-up mixture of both. She tasted acid at the back of her throat. Then there was pressure on her arm, as light as the brush of a feather, and the world steadied beneath her. The sour churn of her stomach eased.
“It’s alright,” Lofty whispered. Lofty’s dark eyes were solemn, as ever. Her expression was calm. “We’ll fix it. And it’ll be like it never was.”
Magda wasn’t so sure about that. She put her hand over Lofty’s anyways, savoring the warmth and the nervous, fluttering delicacy of Lofty’s hand beneath hers. “But then I wouldn’t have met you, would I?”
Lofty smiled, shyly, hesitantly, a slight flush darkening her already dark cheeks. There was none of the feral light that came into Lofty’s eyes at the sight of fire, but Magda liked her better like this. Lofty leaned forward, quick as a bird, and kissed Magda lightly on the lips. “Let’s do it tonight.”
Magda nodded.
They held hands, watching as the day drew in and the girls sent out to work in Munz returned to the School, their heads bowed and their pinafores smudged. Neither wanted to hurt the girls, who were innocent (or at the very least undeserving of their treatment), but other, less innocent people would be in bed.
Neither was a murderer. Oh, there’d been a few incidents during the war, but that was war, wasn’t it? It was them or you, and Tonker would’ve groveled at the Duchess’s cold, dead feet before she let some Zlobenian bastards hurt Ozzer or Mal or Shufti. There was something essential broken in Lofty, Tonker knew, but she’d managed to patch herself back together well enough to function, so long as she stayed at Tonker’s side. Murdering Father Jupe and the rest would have been a step too far.
So they blocked the doors to the rooms where the priest and the hard-handed sisters slept, but left the windows clear. If they woke in time—if they were desperate enough—they could find a way out. A chance, that was all, and more than they deserved.
The dormitory doors were flung open wide. The fire started at the back, farthest from the doors, and it was a slow one—one that would smolder before it sparked in earnest, leaving the girls plenty of time to scramble out. Tilda and Lofty left before the fire caught, crossing the field in long, leaping strides, almost skipping, almost stumbling, delirious with giddy relief.
“That was good, Tilda!” Magda called, her voice breathless.
“Lofty!” Lofty laughed. “Lofty, not Tilda. We’re not going back!”
“No,” Magda said. She felt something unfurl in her chest, aching as it did so, like a clenched fist. Something like wonder. “No, we’re not.”
They ran on into the woods, and before long they were lost among the trees, two more shadows slipping through the dark.
#
The bank was next. Tonker didn’t fancy a career as a bank robber, not wanting to end her and Lofty’s run in a blaze of glory, but they did need money. Their wages from the army had eventually caught up with them, but they hadn’t been much and the winter had been long. Even with food coming in from abroad, much of it cabbage, they’d still run out fairly quickly.
Neither of them intended to wait about in Borogravia, hoeing potatoes or waiting tables to earn more.
The bank was Tonker’s job, and she did it well. You couldn’t menace bankers with fire, fire not being terribly portable, but you could with a crossbow lifted from the army stocks—thank you, unobservant quartermaster. Tonker was tall, too, with muscle honed by years of work in the laundry and the rest of the repetitive, difficult jobs the Grey House had found for her. The rage in the eyes that peered over her bandanna was real, too, and the bankers cowering from her could see it.
Again they made off, this time into the afternoon. There were few peacekeepers left in Borogravia in those days, so soon after the war; most of the able-bodied soldiers who’d returned home had gone to work in the fields or repairing the country’s crumbling infrastructure. The men who chased Tonker and Lofty out of town and over the fields beyond were old, one limping along on a stiff wooden leg.
They never had a chance of catching up. And then Lofty and Tonker were gone, on their way, leaving Borogravia just as they’d left the Grey House.
“I wish we could’ve burned it all down,” Lofty whispered to Tonker, a few days later, as they walked down a narrow forest lane dappled with sun and shadow.
“The bank?”
“All of it,” Lofty repeated. She waved behind them, at the empty track and the dust that hung in the shafts of sunlight, stirred by their passage. At Borogravia.
Tonker snorted. “You don’t mean that. That’d be Pol, Alice, Mal…poof.”
Lofty giggled. The sound was hesitant at first, hardly more than a whisper, and then she laughed more whole-heartedly. She blinked up at Tonker, her eyes wide and startled, as though astonished that she’d made such a great commotion, even where there was no one but Tonker to hear. Tonker thought she’d never seen Lofty so beautiful. She leaned in, wondering if she she might steal a kiss, but then Lofty spoke. The kiss could wait. Lofty’s words were rare and precious.
“I wish we could’ve said hello to Pol in Munz,” Lofty said wistfully. “She worked at that inn, didn’t she? The Duchess.”
“Well, maybe we’ll write her,” said Tonker, privately thinking that Polly wouldn’t have understood their need to burn the Grey House—to take the money and run. Or perhaps she would’ve. Polly had understood a great many more things than she’d let on, even if Polly hadn’t understood quite as much as she thought she had.
“I’d like that,” Lofty said. “I’ll tell her when we get there.”
“When we get where?” Tonker asked.
“I’ll know it when we get there,” Lofty said.
They walked on together, hand in hand, and after a while they stopped holding hands, and that was fine. They didn’t need to, anymore. They were no longer in danger of being washed away.
When they stopped for the evening Tonker held Lofty’s hand again anyways, because she wanted to, and not because she had to. She kissed Lofty, and they laid side by side in a small clearing beneath the stars, and after a while Lofty’s whispering voice grew stronger, surer, as she sketched in all her dreams of what they might do tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, and burning was hardly mentioned at all. And for a little while, the world was a different place.