Cast In Shadow

She turned the words over, thinking them through. After a moment, she glanced at Severn. He nodded. “I’m thinking,” she said slowly, “that I really don’t like this.”

Severn smiled. “I’m thinking that it’s time for a bet.”

“You haven’t changed either,” she said. The smile that crept over her face was a treacherous smile. She couldn’t—quite—douse it. Think, she told herself grimly. But thought led to the past, and the past—it led to darker places than she could afford to go today.

She pulled back. “What bet?”

“Well,” he said, nodding to the east, “there are four armed men coming this way.”

She nodded.

“And we’re not ducking.”

Nodded again.

“They’ll probably take it as a challenge.”

Three times, lucky. “And so?”

“So we’ll probably have to fight.”

Tiamaris said, in his crisp, bored Barrani, “I think that unlikely.”

“Don’t interfere, and we will.”

“And what will that prove?” Kaylin asked, ignoring Tia-maris.

“Nothing.”

“And the bet?”

“We fight.”

“Some bet.”

“And whoever pulls a real weapon first—you or me—loses.”

“What’s the debt?”

“I win, you let me explain.”

“No.”

“Then don’t lose, Kaylin. Here they come.” His smile was a thin stretch of lip over teeth. It made her feel every one of the five years that had always separated them.

“Fine.”

Tiamaris rolled his eyes. “You are children,” he said, just shy of open contempt. The words were Barrani—she wondered if the Dragon condescended to speak any other language when dealing with mere mortals—but the tone wasn’t. Quite. He folded arms across his broad chest and leaned back against the faded wood and brick of an old building.

The men closed in. They were armed; they carried naked blades. One sword, she thought, a short one, and three knives that were as long as Severn’s weapon.

“Hey, hey,” one said. He was a tall man, and his face was knife-thin, his eyes dark. “You’re visitors, I see. You’ve probably forgotten to pay the toll.”

Severn said nothing.

“You pay us, we’ll let you pass.”

Kaylin added more nothing.

The man smiled. “You don’t pay, and we’ll double the tolls, and extract them from your purses. Oh, wait, you don’t seem to have them.” He shrugged. Without turning, he said something in mangled Barrani. Kaylin understood it and tensed.

But her hand didn’t fall to her daggers, her throwing knives or her small club. Instead, she widened her stance and waited, watching them carefully. They wore some armor; it was piecework, and it wasn’t very good. But they weren’t slugs; they moved.

Two to one odds gave them some confidence; it was clear that Tiamaris had no intention of interfering, and he became just another part of the landscape. In the fiefs, this was not uncommon. In fact, given it was the fiefs, there were probably people up windowside, in the relative safety of their tiny homes, crouching and making bets with their roommates. Betting was the pastime of choice in the fiefs, especially when it involved someone else’s messy death.

“How well did they train you, in the Wolves?” Kaylin asked.

“Watch and see.”

“Like hell.”

He laughed.

She might have added something, but there was no more time for words.

She should have let Severn take the leader, because they were both the same height, and the advantage of height was not her friend. There was an advantage in lack of height, but it usually involved doing one’s best to look harmless and pathetic, and she’d given up that route when she’d left the fiefs to find the Hawklord.

Being a woman? Meant nothing, to the fieflord’s thugs. Hell, she’d seen women in their ranks who were far more vicious than the men when they wanted to be.

The city ladies made femininity a triumph of style, and honed their tongues instead of their daggers. Kaylin knew that seven years in the city had failed to make a mark when she swung in before Severn could.

The leader wasn’t stupid, but he was overconfident; she wasn’t armed, and she wasn’t dressed like a flashy guard. He swung the dagger wide, choosing its edge as a threat, and not its point.

Damage, not death; not yet.

His loss. She let him swing, raising the bracer that caged her; the knife’s edge sheared through linen threads, and bounced up at an angle, leaving his ribs exposed. She was inches from his side before he could bring the long knife down, and she raised her leg to deflect his awkward kick.

She swung in, one-two, breath coming out like short, sharp punctuation as she applied the whole of her considerable training to a single point. She felt bone snap; heard him grunt. He was good; she gave him that. He did no more than grunt.

But he didn’t have much opportunity; her fist rose, opening at the last minute into flat palm as it clipped the underside of his chin, snapping his head up. She hit him in the Adam’s apple, and he stumbled backward.

Severn’s snap-kick sent him into the two men who were coming up behind him. He didn’t hit them dead on; they’d already started to separate. But he did hit their right and left arms, putting them off balance.

Rules in the fiefs were pretty simple. Honorable fights were for stories, idiots or dead people.

Kaylin was already on the move, going for the man with the long knife on the left; Severn had the man with the short sword in his sights. She had the impression of height, width, dark hair; she could see a flash of red as the man with the sword swore, again in mangled Barrani. No doubt at all who these men served.

The man she now faced, off balance, was heavier than his leader. He wasn’t any better armored, and he was cautious—but overbalanced and cautious were a poor combination. She let gravity take its toll on her opponent. He was fighting it, but that meant he was fighting on two fronts. She launched into a roundhouse kick, grounded her foot, spun on it, and finished with a back kick. Nothing broke this time, but the man staggered, dropping his weapon as he clutched his stomach.