Sharp Ends

Three’s A Crowd

Talins, Autumn 587

Shev propped her elbows on the parapet, shoulders hunched around her ears and her fingers dangling, and gave a soft whistle. ‘You’ve got quite an audience for it, anyway.’

She was about as well travelled as any woman in the Circle of the World. As well travelled as only a woman who’d spent half her life running can be. But even she’d rarely seen such a crowd. Maybe in Adua, at the presentation of the firstborn son and heir of the King of the Union, though her mind had been more on her empty belly than his full streets. Maybe at the execution of Cabrian when she passed through Darmium, though she’d passed through in too much pain and far too much haste to be sure. Definitely at the Great Temple in Shaffa, when the Prophet Khalul himself had come down from the mountains to speak the prayers at the new year pilgrimage, and even Shev had felt just the tiniest bit pious, if only for a moment.

But she’d certainly seen nothing like it in Styria.

The whole of Talins was down there and plenty more besides, a multitude so vast and so tight-pressed it hardly looked as if it could be made up of individuals, but had become a single formless, mindless infestation. The steps of the ancient Senate House seethed and the great square boiled over into the adjoining streets, every window packed with faces, every roof lined with onlookers. On the Ringing Bridge, and the Bridge of Gulls, and the Bridge of Kisses, and the Bridge of Six Promises, you couldn’t have fitted one more person without squeezing another off into the water. A couple had dropped in already, only to drag themselves out downstream and force their dripping way back to a spot where they could witness the ceremony.

It wasn’t every day you witnessed a ceremony like this, after all.

‘Let’s hope it turns out better than the last time we crowned a King of Styria,’ said Shev.

Vitari ducked out onto the balcony with a glass of wine in one hand. ‘Oh, I think that turned out well enough.’

‘The five most powerful nobles in the land lying dead on the stage?’

‘Nothing could be better. If you backed the sixth.’ And Vitari grinned down at her employer, the Grand Duchess Monzcarro Murcatto. The most powerful woman in the world stood rigidly erect in the centre of the great platform below, still as the statues of her that were springing up across Styria, while her two chancellors – Scavier and Grulo – competed with each other to wail out the most overblown praise to her stewardship of the nation.

Her tailors and armourers must have been working towards this joyous moment as hard as her soldiers and spies. She wore something that neatly split the difference between queen’s gown and general’s armour, breastplate twinkling in the sunlight, long train stitched with gilded serpents snaking behind her and a bright sword at her side. She went nowhere without a sword. Shev had heard she slept with one. Used one for a lover, some said. They didn’t say it to her face, though.

Wise people took great care over what they said to the face of the Serpent of Talins.

Shev sighed. ‘It’s a dark tide that lifts no boats at all.’

‘I’ve made my living picking through the flotsam left behind by other people’s dark tides,’ said Vitari. ‘But I’m confident this crowning will go smoothly.’

‘No doubt you’ve made sure of it.’ There were soldiers down there, with burnished armour and ceremonial weapons, but few of them, and purely for show. A naïve viewer might have supposed the Grand Duchess Monzcarro and her son needed no shield beyond the love of her people. Shev was not naïve.

Not in this, anyway.

From up here she could pick out the agents in the crowd around the platform, in the windows with the best views, at choke points and on corners. There a sharp-eyed boy waving a little flag of Talins. There a woman offering pastries with less enthusiasm than you might expect. There a man whose coat did not quite fit. Something in their watchful attitude. In their ready stance.

No doubt there were others that even Shev’s eyes, filed sharp as needles by years of constant danger, could never have picked out.

Yes, Shylo Vitari left as little to chance as anyone Shev had ever met.

‘You should be down there.’ She nodded at the triple row of soldiers and sailors, bankers and bureaucrats, leading citizens and smirking aristocrats at the back of the platform, basking in the warmth of the grand duchess’s power. ‘No one’s done more than you to make this happen.’

‘She who takes the credit also takes the blame.’ Vitari glanced sideways at Shev, and hers was about as sideways a glance as you could find. ‘Those of us who work in the shadows are better off staying there. Windbags like these can strut about in the light.’

Scavier and Grulo were finally reaching the end of their address, both sweating through their cloth of gold from their oratorical efforts. A somewhat tedious double-act, in Shev’s opinion, a reshuffled deck of the usual quarter-truths about loyalty, justice, leadership and standing united. Folk stood united precisely as long as it suited them, in her experience, and not one instant longer.

The restless crowd stilled as they stepped back. The boy rose from his gilded chair, dressed all in pure and simple white, and strolled with utter confidence to the front of the platform. His mother followed him, close as a long shadow, a crown of golden leaves in her gloved right fist.

While her son smiled beneficently upon the crowd she swept them with a chilling glare, as if determined to pick out any one person among those thousands who might dare to meet her eye. Might dare to challenge her. Might dare to raise the slightest objection to what was coming.

Grand Duke Orso would no doubt have raised objections if he’d been in attendance, but Murcatto had killed him, and both his sons, and both his generals, and his bodyguard and his banker for good measure, and taken his city for herself.

The great noblemen of Etrisani and Sipani, Nicante and Affoia, Visserine and Westport had objected, and one by one she had bribed them, cowed them or crushed them beneath her armoured boot.

Several leading citizens of Ospria had aired doubts that Murcatto’s child really was the son of their dear departed King Rogont, and their flyblown heads had ended up spiked above the city gates, where now they aired the much more eloquent stink of rot.

His August Majesty the King of the Union had objected most of all, but Murcatto had outmanoeuvred him politically and militarily, stripped away his allies one by one, then beaten him three times in the field and proved herself the greatest general of the age.

So it was far from surprising that no one chose to object today.

Satisfied by the utter silence that only abject fear can produce, the grand duchess raised the crown high over her son’s head in both hands. ‘You are crowned Jappo mon Rogont Murcatto!’ she called out as she slowly lowered it, her voice ringing from the faces of the buildings around the square, picked up as an echo by announcers scattered through the crowd. ‘Grand Duke of Ospria and Visserine, Protector of Puranti, Nicante, Borletta and Affoia, and King of Styria!’ And she settled the crown among her son’s brown curls.

‘King of Styria!’ chorused the crowd with one thunderous voice, and there was a mighty rustling, a ripple through the press of bodies as every man and woman knelt, Murcatto stepping back and sinking stiffly herself. Evidently those clothes had not been cut for kneeling in.

Shev’s eyes picked out only one figure who did not kneel. An unremarkable man in unremarkable clothes, standing beside a pillar on the steps of the Senate House, arms folded. It looked as if he glanced up towards Vitari and gave a nod, and she gave the slightest nod in return.

King Jappo himself stood and smiled. Seven years old, and already as calm and controlled before that mighty audience as Juvens himself might have been.

‘Oh, do get up!’ he shouted in a piping voice.

Laughter rippled out through the throng, turning quickly to a thunderous cheer. Startled birds showered up from the roofs as every bell in the city began to toll in celebration of the joyous event. Vitari raised her glass in a silent toast and Shev knocked her ring against it with a gentle ping. Down on the platform, the grand duchess embraced her son, and she was smiling. A sight only slightly less rare than the crowning of a King of Styria. Still, one could hardly begrudge her a grin.

‘She has done what couldn’t be done!’ Shev had to lean close and shout over the noise.

‘She has united Styria!’ Vitari drained her glass in one long swallow.

‘Most of it, at least.’

‘For now.’

Shev slowly shook her head as she watched the leading citizens of Styria file past King Jappo to offer their obsequious congratulations under the hawklike glare of his mother. ‘How many people had to die to give that boy a golden hat?’

‘Exactly the necessary number. Console yourself with the thought that the war might have been a great deal bloodier without your work.’

Shev winced. ‘It was more than bloody enough for my taste. I’m glad it’s done.’

‘The swords may be sheathed but the war goes on. We will move to darker battlefields now, and subtler weapons, and the Union’s general will show far less mercy.’

‘The Cripple?’ muttered Shev.

Vitari’s jaw muscles worked as she frowned down towards the new King of Styria. ‘His hidden legions are already on the move.’

Shev cleared her throat at that. ‘Before they get here … might I ask if her Grace has prepared something for me?’

‘Oh, her Grace has quite the memory for debts, as Duke Orso and his sons would testify, if they were able.’ Vitari slid out a rolled-up paper. ‘Murcatto always pays in full.’

Now the moment was on her, Shev found herself suddenly, absurdly nervous. She plucked the scroll from Vitari’s fingers with feigned confidence, ducked out of the sunlight and into the gilded shadows of the chamber and unrolled it on the table, revealing several blocks of densely written script.

‘On this the third day of blah, blah, blah … witnessed by blah, blah … I, Horald Gasta, also known as Horald the Finger, of Westport, do hereby extend my full forgiveness to the thief Shevedieh ul Kanan mut Mayr-’ She looked up. ‘Thief?’

Vitari cocked an orange eyebrow as she stepped from the balcony. ‘Would you prefer spy?’

‘I would prefer …’ What would she prefer? ‘Acquisitions specialist, maybe?’

Vitari snorted. ‘I would prefer that my arse was as tight as it was twenty years ago. We must tackle the world as it is.’

‘Your arse looks excellent if you … ask …’ Shev cleared her throat as Vitari narrowed her eyes. ‘Thief will do, I suppose.’ She began reading again. ‘For any and all offences towards me, including but not limited to the cowardly murder of my son Crandall … Cowardly? The only bloody cowardly thing about it was him turning up with four men to kill me! I axed him in the front, which was better than he bloody deserved, I can-’

‘Wording, Shevedieh, let the man have his wording.’ Vitari waved it away, heavy-lidded. ‘It doesn’t do to get worked up over trifles.’

‘Fair point.’ Shev took a breath as she looked back to the document. ‘I hereby give up any right to vengeance or recrimination and do solemnly swear, in the absence of any further significant offence, not to cause personal harm to the aforementioned Shevedieh or any of her associates.’ She scanned down to the bottom, peered closely and gave a snort. ‘The awe-inspiring Horald the Finger makes a mark?’

‘Awe-inspiring or not, that bastard can’t write any more than I can sing.’

‘You can’t sing?’

‘I used to torture people for a living, but I’d never be heartless enough to sing to them.’

‘And this is binding?’

‘This is flimflam. But Horald gave his word to the grand duchess. That is binding, or he will become another debt to be paid. He’s no fool. He understands.’

Shev closed her eyes, and took a long breath, and felt herself smiling. ‘I’m free,’ she whispered. Could it be? After all these years? ‘I’m free,’ she said, blinking back tears, and she felt her knees weaken and had to flop down in the nearest chair. She just sat, eyes shut, thinking about how she could just sit, eyes shut, not glancing over her shoulder, not startling at every noise, not picking over the routes of escape, not planning where she’d run to next.

God, she was free.

‘So …’ She opened her eyes. ‘That’s it?’

Vitari was pouring another glass of wine. ‘Unless you don’t want that to be it? I can always find work for the best … acquisitions specialist in Styria.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Shev, rolling up the scroll and turning for the door. ‘From here on, it’s the quiet life for me.’

‘I tried the quiet life.’ Vitari held her wine up to the light, a splash of blood-red across her frown as the sun shone through it. ‘For about a week. I was bored as hell.’

‘God, to be bored!’ Shev had to shout over another world-shaking wave of applause for the young King Jappo. ‘I can’t wait!’

She took the steps two at a time, footfalls clattering in the echoing, flaking, mould-stained stairwell. She clutched the paper with Horald’s mark at the bottom as if it was a pass to a brave new life – which indeed it was – smiling so wide her face hurt as she wove pleasing fantasies of all the fine things that’d happen when she burst through the door and Carcolf looked up.

‘I’m done,’ Shev would cry, breathless and appealingly tousled.

One of those golden brows would arch, just so. ‘Done with this job?’

‘Done with all of them. Horald the Finger gave his word. I’m out. I’m free.’ She’d saunter over, their eyes never leaving each other. ‘We’re free.’

She thought of the happy lines around Carcolf’s eyes when she smiled, the creases at the corners of her mouth. The pattern of them, each one scored into her memory like a prayer learned by heart.

‘We’re free.’

Carcolf would plant her hands on her hips, her tongue in her cheek, and beckon Shev over with a flick of her head, and they’d fall into each other’s arms, Shev’s face full of that scent – loitering on the edge of too sour but somehow all the better for it. God, Shev could almost smell it now, tickling at her nose. Maybe they’d tickle their noses with some pearl dust and dance together, Shev leading even if she was half a head shorter, both laughing at the melancholy sawing of that violinist playing for coppers in the square outside.

Maybe there’d be a serious moment as they looked into each other’s eyes, and Shev would coax her out with just the right soft words like you coax a nervous cat through a gap in a fence. Carcolf would tell her stories of who she really was, and what she really felt, and she’d let that smirking mask slip and give a glimpse of the beautiful, vulnerable secret self that Shev had always been sure was in there. Maybe she’d even whisper her first name. A special name, which only Shev would get to use. Didn’t seem likely, but what’s the point of likely fantasies?

Then they’d kiss, of course, nudging to begin with, nuzzling, nipping, feeling each other out like a pair of master swordsmen fencing. Then hungrily, messily, tongues and teeth, Shev tangling her fingers in Carcolf’s hair and dragging her face down to hers. She was getting pleasantly warm in the trousers thinking about it. The kissing would lead to fumbling, and the fumbling would lead by a trail of shed clothes to the bed, and they’d stay in the bed until the room smelled of fucking, making up for all those wasted years, only getting up for a pinch more dust and maybe to make tea naked with Shev’s very fine tea set, and in the morning …

Her eager hand froze halfway to the doorknob, smile slowly fading and the warmth in her trousers with it.

In the morning, the grey, early morning, while Shev was still sprawled snoozing in the sticky sheets, Carcolf would slip out, pulling the hood down over her smile, probably with Shev’s very fine tea set in a bag over her shoulder – along with any other easily transported valuables – and vanish into the mists, never to be heard from again. Until she needed something.

Shev didn’t much like to be honest with herself. Who does? But if she accepted the pain of it for a moment, that was how things had gone between them down the years. Carcolf had jumped into her arms often enough but just as quickly slipped through her fingers. Usually leaving Shev with a hell of a mess to run away from or, on one memorable occasion, swim away from as a medium-sized merchant vessel capsized behind her.

She swallowed as she frowned down at the doorknob.

This wasn’t fantasies, it was life. And life had a habit of kicking her in the cunt.

But what were her choices? If you want to be a fine new person with a fine new life you’ve got to put the person you were behind you, like a snake sheds its skin. You’ve got to stop picking through your hoard of hurts and grievances like a miser through his coins, set ’em down and allow yourself to go free. You’ve got to forgive and you’ve got to trust, not because anyone else deserves it, but because you do.

So Shev took a deep breath, and forced a smile over her nerves, and shoved the door wide.

‘I’m-’

Her place was a ruin.

The furniture was shattered and axe-hacked, the hangings torn-down and knife-slashed. The shelves had been tipped over, scattering the lovely books that Shev hadn’t read but which made her look quite cultured. Lumps had been knocked from the marble fireplace with a hammer. Carcolf had always insisted that painting of the smirking woman with the ample bosom she’d hung over it was an original Aropella. Shev had always harboured considerable doubts. It was a moot point now, though, as someone had slashed it to flapping shreds, bosom and all.

They hadn’t just flipped the tea set over, they’d made sure every cup was individually broken, every spoon individually bent. Someone had smashed the spout and the handle off the pot and then, it appeared, pissed in it.

Shev’s skin prickled with horror as she walked across the room, splinters crunching under her boots, and pushed back the gouged bedroom door.

Carcolf lay slumped on the floor.

Shev gave a whooping gasp, dashing to her, dropping on her knees-

Just her clothes. Just her clothes dragged from her broken chest, tipped over on its side with the contents spilling out like the offal from a gutted corpse. The false bottom was smashed open, and the false bottom in the false bottom ripped out, forged documents scattered, fake jewels gleaming darkly in the shadows.

The room stank, but not of fucking. Carcolf’s scent bottle had been shattered across the wall, the smell of her almost suffocating, a haunting insult to go with the injury of her absence. The fine mattress Shev had congratulated herself on being worth every stolen copper as she stretched out on it each night was slashed, stabbed, its feathery guts in heaps, flecks of down floating about the room as the breeze stirred the ripped hangings.

Perched on the slaughtered pillows, a sheet of paper. A letter.

Shev scrambled over and snatched it up in trembling fingers. It was written in a sharply slanted hand:

Shev

Been a long time.

Carcolf’s with me, at Burroia’s Fort on Carp Island. Better come quick, before I tire of her conversation. Better come alone, cause I get shy in crowds.

Just want a chat.

To begin with.

Horald

And then that mark. That same bloody idiot’s mark she’d somehow tricked herself into thinking would protect her from all this.

She stood still for a long while. She did not speak, she did not move, she barely even breathed. The loss was like a blade through her guts. The loss of her lover, the loss of her place, the loss of the life of freedom and laughter that’d felt so close she could still almost taste it.

Her worst case had been Carcolf deciding she didn’t want her. Carcolf feeling this was a trap shutting on her rather than a trap finally springing open for both of them. Carcolf running away again. She should’ve known.

There’s always a worse case than your worst case, and more often than not, it happens.

She realised she’d clenched her fingers, crushing the worthless document she’d risked her life for in her fist. She flung it into the ash-scattered fireplace and set her jaw aching tight.

None of it was lost. It was stolen. And Horald the Finger should’ve known better than to steal from the best thief in Styria.

She stalked to the wall beside the chimney breast, picked up the broken bust of Bayaz, hefted it high, and with a shriek smashed his bald head into the plaster.

The wall folded in like cheap board – which indeed it was – leaving a ragged hole. She knocked a few splinters away with Bayaz’s nose, then reached inside, grabbed the rope and dragged it out. Her black bag was on the end, reassuringly weighty, metal clattering as she tossed it down.

Everything she really needed was in that bag. In case she had to run. But Shev had been running half her life, and she was done.

Some things are only ever going to end one way.

It was time to fight.

Oh, yes, Shevedieh had moved among the lost and the fallen.

She’d cut purses in the cheapest brothels of Sipani, anthills of vice where the marsh the city was built on endlessly oozed back into the cellars, where no word for innocence was known, let alone spoken. She’d clawed a living among the beggars in Ul-Khatif, and among the beggars who stole from the beggars, and conned the beggars, and even the ones who begged from beggars more fortunate than they. She’d burrowed out temporary homes in the thieves’ pits, gambling pits and charnel pits in Nicante, in Puranti, in Affoia, in Musselia, and always left with a heavier purse than she’d arrived with. She’d bribed corrupt scum on behalf of corrupt scum on the rotting docks of Visserine, when Nicomo Cosca had seized the grand dukedom of the city and there’d been less law than no law. She’d turned out dead men’s pockets with the bonepickers in war-torn Darmium, in plague-riddled Calcis, in famine-ravaged Daleppa, in fire-swept Dagoska. She’d felt so much at home among the low-rent Smoke Houses of Westport, where the weak came to forget their weakness, that her highest ambition had been to open one herself.

Oh, yes, Shevedieh had moved among the lost and the fallen, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever borne witness to so base a place as when she stepped through the decaying portal of the Duke’s Repose in Talins.

‘Did he repose of the pox?’ she croaked, clapping a hand over her mouth.

It was the stench of bodies unwashed for centuries, or perhaps washed daily but in shit and vinegar. As Shev’s eyes gradually adjusted to the hellish gloom, she saw cursed figures of indeterminate race or gender sprawled punch-drunk, blood-drunk, sorrow-drunk, and simply drunk. Folk tortured each other. Folk tortured themselves. Folk dragged their way towards the release of death with both hands. One lay in their own sick, blowing bubbles with every wet snore while a little dog, or perhaps a large rat, lapped hungrily at the far edge of the puddle. The sound which Shev had assumed was a long drink being poured was in fact a man with trousers around ankles, pissing, apparently endlessly, into a filthy tin bucket while he picked his crooked nose with a crooked finger. In a shadowy corner, two, or perhaps three, others grunted softly under a regularly shifting coat. Shev hoped they were doing nothing worse than fucking, but she would not have liked to bet on it.

It was a long time since she’d entertained high hopes for humanity, but had they still stood intact, they would have crumbled in that instant.

‘God has abandoned us,’ she whispered, narrowing her eyes in the vain hope she might prevent the unholy sights imprinting themselves for ever on her vision.

The prize exhibit in this museum of filth, the chief mourner at this funeral of all that was decent, the High Priestess of this final shrine on a lifelong pilgrimage of self-pity, self-neglect and self-destruction, was none other than Shev’s long-standing best friend and worst enemy: Javre, Lioness of Hoskopp.

She sat at a rickety table infested with empty jugs, half-full bottles, slimy cups and greasy glasses, with coins and counters and overflowing ash-bowls, with several chagga and at least one husk pipe, creased and filthied cards scattered like demented confetti. Opposite her sprawled three Union soldiers, one with a beard and a scar, one with a face almost as trustworthy as the vomit-supping rat’s, and one with his head tipped far, far over the back of his chair, mouth wide open, knobble on his skinny neck standing out painfully sharp and shifting gently as he snored.

Javre’s red hair was a snarled-up tangle, matted with ash, with slime, with food, with things that could not be identified. That should not be identified, lest they offend God to the extent that he felt obliged to end creation. By the look of things she had been fighting in the pit again. Her knuckles flapped with bloodstained bandages, her bare shoulder – for the indescribably stained shirt she wore had lost a sleeve somewhere – was grazed and scabbed, the side of her face smeared with bruises.

Shev hardly knew how she felt to see her. Relieved that she hadn’t left the city. Guilty at the state she’d made of herself. Ashamed to be asking for her help. Angry at she hardly knew what any more. A slow accumulation of years of hurts and frustrations, little things added up day after day to a burden she could not stand to carry. But, as always, she had no other choices. She peeled the hand from her mouth and padded over.

Javre stank. Even worse than she had the first time they met, in the door of Shev’s Smoke House. Not long before it burned down, along with her past life. Shev wouldn’t see another life burned down. She couldn’t see it.

‘You stink, Javre,’ she said.

Javre didn’t bother to look around. However carefully you crept up on her, somehow she always knew who was there. ‘Have not washed lately.’

Her words came slurred and Shev’s heart sank. It took days of drinking for Javre to show the slightest sign of being drunk. By then she was colossally, toweringly, heroically drunk. There was nothing Javre did by halves.

‘I have been entirely busy drinking, fucking and fighting.’ She cleared her throat, turned her head and spat noisily and bloodily at Shev’s feet, half of it dangling from her split lip and soaking into her shirt as she turned back to the game. ‘I have been drunk for …’ She raised a bandaged hand, squinting as she clumsily stuck the fingers up one by one. When she stuck the thumb up, her cards fluttered to the floor. Javre frowned at them. ‘I cannot even count any more.’ She started to fish them clumsily up between scabbed fingers, one by one. ‘Drinking, fucking, fighting and losing at cards. Days since I won a hand.’ She burped. Even from this distance, Shev shuddered at the smell of it. ‘Weeks. I hardly know which side up the cards go.’

‘Javre, I need to talk to you-’

‘Let me introduce you!’ Javre swept a loose arm at the Union soldiers and very nearly took the sleeping man’s head off with a backhand. ‘This little beauty is my good old friend Shevedieh! Used to be a henchman of mine.’

‘Javre.’

‘Sidekick, then. Whatever. We travelled half the Circle of the World together! All kinds of adventures.’

‘Javre.’

‘Disasters, then. Whatever. These shits are among the finest soldiers of His August Majesty the High King of the Union. The beardy bastard is Lieutenant Forest.’ He nodded to Shev with a good-natured grin. ‘This stringy one is Lance Corporal Yolk.’ The sleeping man stirred faintly, tongue moving against his cracked lips with vague squelching sounds. ‘And this lucky fucker-’

‘Skilful fucker,’ grunted the ratty man around a chagga pipe gripped in his yellowed teeth.

‘Is Sergeant Tunny.’

‘Corporal,’ he said, peering through his haze of smoke at the cards.

‘Got himself demoted again,’ said Forest. ‘Over a goose and a whore, would you believe.’

‘She was worth it,’ said Tunny. ‘And the whore wasn’t bad, either. Fire, by the way.’ And he laid his cards down with a snap.

‘Tits of the Mother!’ snarled Javre. ‘Again?’

‘There’s a certain spot …’ muttered Tunny, pipe waggling between his teeth, ‘between too drunk and not drunk enough …’ as he scooped up scattered winnings in a dozen different currencies, ‘where I’m a hell of a card player. The trick, as with so much in life, is keeping the balance just right.’

‘Luck,’ mused Javre as she watched him gather the harvest through narrowed, red-rimmed, absurdly bloodshot eyes, ‘has always been the one thing missing from my life.’

‘Javre-’

‘Let me guess!’ Bandages trailed through spilled beer as she flung up a hand. ‘You are dunked to your scrawny neck in some species of shit and have run straight back to me to fetch the shovel.’

Shevedieh opened her mouth to make an elaborate retort, thought a moment, and decided against. ‘Basically, yes. Horald’s taken Carcolf. Now he wants me out on Carp Island.’ She forced the words through clenched teeth. ‘I could really use your help-’

Javre gave a snort so explosive snot spattered down her chapped top lip. She did not appear to notice. ‘See, boys? You give them everything!’ And she beat her chest with a fist so hard it left a great pink mark. ‘You give them your heart and they spit it in your face!’

‘How can you spit a heart?’ asked Shev, but Javre was not interested in unmixing her metaphors.

‘The moment they get in trouble, oh, the fucking moment? Straight back to Mummy!’ She glared unsteadily at Shev. ‘Well, Mummy is fucking busy!’

‘Mummy is fucking embarrassing herself.’

‘That is Mummy’s fucking prerogative. Shuffle those cards, Tunny, you cunny.’ He did no more than raise a brow as he set to shuffling. ‘I thought you were all done with me and had fine new friends. What of the grand duchess, the Snake of Talins, the Butcher of Caprile? Mother to a king, I hear.’

‘Bless his eternal Majesty,’ grunted Tunny out of the corner of his mouth, flicking cards to each of the four players, conscious and otherwise.

‘I only met the woman twice,’ said Shev. ‘I doubt she knows my name.’

‘But her all-powerful Minister of Whispers, Shylo Vitari, surely does. Can she not reach from the shadows and pluck your lover from danger?’

‘She’s on her way south to Sipani.’

‘What of your grinning merchant friend, Majud? He has deep pockets.’

‘It’s getting him to reach into them that’s the problem.’

‘That Northman you were working with, then? The one with the eye. Or … without it.’ Javre accidentally poked herself while waving at her face with her cards, had to clap a hand over her running eye, but at least she accidentally wiped the snot from her lip, too. ‘Trembles?’

‘Shivers.’ Shev gave a little shiver of her own at the memory of that scarred face, the expression on it as he killed those three Sipanese who’d been chasing her. Or the terrible lack of expression. ‘Some help it’s better to do without,’ she muttered.

‘You can do without mine, then.’ Javre raised the glass towards her mouth in a wobbly hand, face fixed in concentration. Shev slapped it from her fingers and it shattered in the corner.

‘I need you sober.’

Javre gave a snort. ‘That is never going to happen, Shevedieh. If I get my way, that is never going to happen again.’

‘Here,’ said Tunny, holding out his own glass, ‘have mine-’

Shev slapped it from his hand and it shattered in almost exactly the same spot as the last one. He frowned, slowly removing the pipe from his mouth for the first time. ‘Bloody hell, girl, I wish you wouldn’t-’

Javre shoved her fist under his nose, cards crushed in it, red eyes bulging, lips curling back and spraying spit. ‘Talk to my friend like that again, you fucking cocksucker, you will be picking your teeth from my knuckles!’

Tunny peered down at that great, scarred hand, one of his eyebrows going up, ever so slowly. ‘Madam, I’m a soldier. The last thing I want is a fight.’

Forest cleared his wet throat and somewhat unsteadily rose. ‘Ladies, with great respect, I think that puts an end to the evening. We’ve an early start tomorrow. Back to Midderland after our defeat, you know.’ He jabbed Yolk with his elbow and the little man started awake.

‘I raise!’ he shouted, staring wildly about. ‘I raise!’ Then he flopped from his chair onto hands and knees and was sick on the floor.

Tunny was already sweeping his winnings into a battered hat. Forest caught Yolk by the belt and began to drag him away, still desperately trying to raise.

‘An honour,’ said Tunny as he backed towards the door through the pool of puke, almost falling over the snoring figure. ‘An absolute fucking honour.’

‘I will see you on the battlefield!’ shouted Javre.

Tunny winced and waved one finger round and round. ‘Let’s say nearby!’ And he was gone into the smoky murk.

‘You have spoiled my fun, Shevedieh, as always.’ Javre uncurled her fingers. A couple of the ruined cards dropped out. A couple of others were stuck to her palm and she had to shake them off. ‘I trust you are bloody well pleased with yourself.’

‘You’ve spoiled your own fun, as always, and I’m about as far from pleased as it’s possible to be, since you ask.’ She slid into Yolk’s chair. ‘No one else is going to help me, Javre. They don’t trust Carcolf. They don’t want Horald to kill them.’

Javre gave another snort and had to wipe more snot from under her scabbed nose with her scabbed knuckles. ‘On the Great Leveller I am ambivalent, as you know, but if you think I trust that wiggling snake any more than the plague-’

‘I don’t think we’re ever going to see eye to eye on her, do you?’

‘It is hard to see eye to eye with someone a foot shorter than you. She looks like a snake, moves like a snake, thinks like a snake. She saw you coming, Shevedieh, just like she always does, and she thought dinner. In spite of all the wrongs she has made you lick up down the years, she only had to swagger that round arse past you once and you were hooked all over again. She sank that ship with you on it, lest we forget!’

‘It’s different this time,’ muttered Shev, not sure whether the words hurt so much because they were false, or because they were true.

‘It is never different. Nothing ever is. How can a woman as clever as you not see it?’

‘I do fucking see it!’ screamed Shev, thumping the table and making the bottles rattle. ‘But I don’t care any more! I have to make the best of it. I have to have … something, before it’s too late!’ She felt tears stinging her eyes, her voice going high and warbly, but she couldn’t stop it. ‘I can’t run any more, Javre! I can’t run. I’m tired, and I need your help. Please. Help me.’

Javre stared at her for a long moment. Then she jerked up, barging the table over and sending its cargo of glasses, pots, bottles, pipes scattering, shattering, clattering across the filthy floor.

‘Cunt of the Goddess, Shevedieh, you know you only had to ask!’ She stabbed Shev painfully in the tit with one inept finger. ‘My sword is yours, always!’ Her brow knitted with puzzlement, then she stared wildly around. ‘Where is my sword?’

Shev sighed and nudged it from under Javre’s chair with the toe of her boot.

It was dark, down on this quietest part of the docks. The sea flapped and slopped at the mossy stones of the quay, and the warped supports of the wharves, and the slimy flanks of the moored boats. The reflections of the few lamps, torches and candles that still burned danced and broke in the restless water.

A gust of wind fluttered the ragged papers on the warehouse wall. Bills celebrating young King Jappo’s coronation pasted over bills celebrating the victory at Sweet Pines pasted over bills condemning Union aggression pasted over bills revelling in the ascension of Monzcarro Murcatto pasted over bills announcing the death of Monzcarro Murcatto pasted over bills trumpeting victories and defeats of enemies and rulers long forgotten. Probably it was only the ancient crust of bills that kept the warehouse standing.

Shev frowned out across the bay. In the distance she could just see a few faint points of light, flickering ghostly.

‘Carp Island,’ muttered Javre, planting a hand on her hip and nearly missing, she was that drunk.

Shev puffed out her cheeks. ‘And on Carp Island, Burroia’s Fort.’

‘And in Burroia’s Fort, Horald the Finger.’

‘And with Horald the Finger …’ Shev trailed off. God, she hoped Carcolf was still alive.

‘Once we are there,’ murmured Javre, leaning close enough that Shev almost gagged on the boozy reek of her breath, ‘what’s your plan?’

She wished she had time to get Javre sober. Or at least clean. But she did not. ‘Rescue Carcolf. Kill Horald. Don’t get killed ourselves.’

A pause, while Javre pushed the greasy hair out of her face then flicked something that had been stuck in it off her fingers. ‘I think you will agree that it is lacking detail.’

Shev took a glance up and down the quay. The thief’s glance, which looks without seeming to look. ‘You never complained about charging into the jaws of death before. Without plans, without weapons … without clothes, on more than one occasion.’

‘On clothes I am ambivalent, as you know, but I have always hated plans.’

‘Then why are you worried now?’

‘Because I always knew you would have one.’

‘Welcome to my life of constant doubt, anxiety and occasional sudden and unpredictable horror, Javre. I hope you enjoy your fucking visit.’ And she walked across the empty quay and down the steps to the nearest wharf. The thief’s walk, neither striding boldly nor scurrying crouched. The walk of someone forgettable going about their boring business. A walk that raises no eyebrows and no alarms.

A good thief goes unseen. A truly great one merely goes unnoticed.

She stopped by a boat that suited, checked the oars were in the bottom, then winced at a loud clatter, turned to see that Javre had stumbled into a set of fishing nets on a frame and was now tangled with them, desperately trying to stop them falling. She finally got them settled, shrugged at Shev, then strode down the wharf towards her, about the most conspicuous woman who ever drew breath.

‘Could you be any louder?’ hissed Shev.

‘Undoubtedly,’ said Javre, turning back towards the nets. ‘Shall I demonstrate?’

‘No, no, that’s fine!’ With some effort Shev steered her towards the boat, unshouldered her bag and tossed it in, then followed it silently across the flapping water.

‘You will simply steal it?’

‘The one upside of being a thief,’ Shev muttered through tight lips, ‘is that you can make free with things that don’t belong to you. It’s practically a requirement of the job.’

‘I understand the principle, but this is some poor bastard’s livelihood. Some family of righteous, honourable, hardworking bastards, maybe. There might be a dozen little weeping children depending on it.’

‘Better to rob the righteous,’ muttered Shev as she slipped the oars silently through the rowlocks. ‘Evil people tend to be suspicious and vengeful.’

Javre made her voice go piping high. ‘Oh, Daddy, whatever shall the twelve of us eat now that the boat is gone?’

‘For God’s sake, Javre, do I tell you how to start fights, suck cocks, destroy my property or ruin my life? No! I trust to your unchallengeable fucking expertise! Now let me steal the boat I judge appropriate! We can bring it back when we’re done!’

‘When do we ever do that? At the very least we bring it back smashed.’

‘You bring it back smashed!’

Javre snorted. ‘You remember that cart we borrowed in-’

‘Might I remind you we have something of a demanding schedule?’ Shev pressed her fingers to her temples and gave a growl of frustration. ‘All the bloody arguing over every little bloody thing, it’s exhausting!’ She stabbed at the rower’s seat with a finger. ‘Just get in the fucking boat!’

‘Could you be any louder?’ Javre grumbled as she tossed the mooring rope in, followed it with the ragged bundle that contained her sword and clambered unsteadily after, the whole thing rocking alarmingly under her considerable weight. ‘You are the one always telling me I should give more thought to consequences,’

‘The consequence that’s preying on my mind is the love of my life with her fucking throat cut!’

Javre blinked as she dropped heavily between the oars. ‘Love of your life?’

‘Well, I mean …’ Shev hadn’t meant to say that. Hadn’t meant to admit it, even to herself. ‘You know what I mean! Exaggerating, for effect.’

‘I have heard you exaggerate a hundred million times, Shevedieh. I know how it sounds. That was the much rarer sound of you letting slip the truth.’

‘Shut up and row,’ grumbled Shev as she shoved the boat away from the slimy wharf.

Javre leaned to the oars, great muscles in her bare arms twitching and bulging with each stroke, the boat sliding smoothly out onto the calm, dark waters of the harbour. Shev undid the buckles on her bag and unrolled it, metal rattling.

Javre whistled softly as she peered down at all those gleaming tools. ‘Going to war?’

‘If need be.’ Shev buckled the sword-eater onto her thigh. ‘A wise man once told me you can never have too many knives.’

‘Sure you’ll be able to climb with all that weight of steel?’

‘We’re not all built like bulls.’ Shev slid the throwing blades one by one into the strapping inside her coat. ‘Some of us need an edge.’

‘Be careful the edge does not cut your head off, Shevedieh.’ She watched as, ever so gently, Shev slid a little vial of green liquid from her bag and into the fleece-lined loop on her belt. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

‘Depends what you think it is.’

‘I think it is as likely to blow she who throws it to hell as to blow those it’s thrown at to heaven.’

‘Fancy that, you’re not the only one who can go down in a fireball.’

‘You are more or less the only friend I have not been obliged to kill. I am concerned for your welfare.’

‘If you’re such a good friend you could try being happy for me.’

‘Happy to see you strung along by that golden-haired siren?’

‘Happy that I’ve found some little respite from the endless tide of shit my life has been!’ Shev winced, trying to find some position where her blowpipe wasn’t jabbing her in the armpit. ‘Did I complain when you were noisily enjoying your frequent dalliances?’

‘Did you complain?’ Javre snorted. ‘You, the baroness of bitching? The countess of carping? The princess of prating? The … er … the grand duchess of … of …’

‘I get the idea,’ snapped Shev, checking the trigger of her crossbow before she slid it into the holster under her coat.

‘Good, because apparently your memory is almost as short as you are. Complain, Shevedieh? You made my life a misery day in and day out for the past …’ Javre frowned up at the starry sky, moonlit lips moving as she counted. ‘Thirteen … no fourteen!’ She gave a long pause before her bleary eyes settled on Shev, then added in a weary drawl, ‘Fourteen fucking years.’

‘Fourteen years,’ muttered Shev. ‘Half my life, near as damn it.’ And she felt the back of her nose aching with the need to cry. For all those years wasted. For the ruin of their friendship, which for so long had been all she had. For the fact that it had still been there when she needed it. For the fact that it was still all she had.

Javre puffed out her scarred cheeks. ‘Small wonder we are … somewhat wearied.’

The blades of the oars feathered the water, trails of sparkling drops falling from their ends, then cut silently into the surface. The rowlocks creaked. The wind picked up and stirred Javre’s dirty hair.

‘I am happy for you,’ she said, softly. ‘I try to be, anyway.’

‘Well, I’m happy you’re happy.’

‘Good.’

‘Good.’

Another slow silence. ‘I am just sad for myself.’

Shev looked up, caught Javre’s eye. A wet gleam in the darkness. ‘I’m sorry you’re sad,’ she said.

‘Good.’

‘Good.’

‘Shit,’ mouthed Shev as she scrabbled about in the dark for a reliable toehold on that crumbling wall. Burroia’s damn fort was falling apart. But then it was a ruin. Bit like Shev’s hopes in that regard. ‘Bloody, bloody shit.’

Javre might’ve had a point about all the hardware. It was a hell of a weight for someone who’d built their reputation on a light tread. There were a couple of buckles she’d dragged too tight now threatening to cut off the blood to her legs, and a couple she hadn’t dragged tight enough, loose metal clinking and the garrotte knocking distractingly against her arse crack every time she pulled herself up.

What was she doing with a damn garrotte anyway? She’d never used a garrotte in her life, except once to cut a cheese and that was for a joke and hadn’t even ended up that funny. You can make an argument for a knife. Sometimes people just need a knifing. Like Crandall had. She shed no tears for him. But once you start garrotting people you can’t claim to stand with the righteous.

Garrottes simply are not part of God’s chosen path and although, through a combination of personal weakness, evil acquaintance and plain bad luck, Shev had to admit her feet had often left the chosen path behind, she liked to imagine she could at least still see it, in the distance, if she squinted.

She froze at a noise above, the latest of a volley of curses stopped cold on her lips.

Footsteps scraping. The tuneless humming of a person deeply bored and with no musical aptitude. Shev’s eyes went wide. A guard, on patrol. She wondered what the chances were of his not noticing the grapple wedged against the parapet. Not good, was her guess. She clung tight to the rope with one hand, jerked a dart out with the other and shoved it between her teeth.

It would’ve been the perfect end to her career of misadventures if she’d pricked herself in the cheek, lost consciousness and dropped off the rope into the sea. But Shev was blessed with a nimble tongue. Probably that was what Carcolf saw in her. God knows, there had to be something.

The humming stopped. Footsteps scuffed closer. She snatched out her blowpipe, raising it to her lips. Sadly, at that moment, her fingers were less nimble than her mouth. The blowpipe caught on a jutting stone, she fumbled it, juggled it desperately, almost let go of the rope in her confusion, then gave a despairing gasp of, ‘Thuck!’ around the dart in her teeth as she watched it tumble away.

Javre caught it, then peered up, puzzled. ‘What is this?’ she hissed.

Shev looked back to the parapet, helpless panic settling on her like snow on a sleeping tramp. A face suddenly appeared. The face of a big man with curly hair. His thick brows went sharply up when he saw her clinging to the rope with her feet against the wall, close enough to reach out and touch.

Her first bizarre instinct was to give him a hopeful smile, but with the dart between her teeth it was impossible.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, and leaned out, lifting a spear.

Lucky that Shev had always been a quick thinker in a tight spot. Years of practice, maybe. She jerked herself up as if overpowered by a desire to kiss him and stuck him in the neck with the dart.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said again, but less angry this time, and more surprised. He tried to stab her but she was too close, his elbow caught on the battlements and the spear slid from his slack grip, dropping over Shev’s shoulder.

Fast-acting, that toxin. He flopped limp over the parapet with a sigh and Shev grabbed his belt and dragged herself up by it, rolling silently across his back and onto the walkway.

With rare good fortune, she found it empty. A stretch of stone maybe two strides wide, crumbling battlements to either side, a door leading into an ivy-throttled turret at the far end, faint torchlight showing around its edge. More lights twinkled further off in the windows of the old fortress. The place might be a ruin, but it was evidently far from abandoned.

She leaned over the slumbering guard to hiss at Javre. ‘Planning to fucking join me?’

The Lioness of Hoskopp was still fumbling drunkenly with the rope, her boots scuffing the wall no more than a stride above the boat. ‘Yes I am fucking planning on it!’ she hissed back.

Shev shook her head and padded on towards the door, allowing herself the slightest smile. Considering the mess with the blowpipe, that really couldn’t have gone much-

She frowned as she heard faint laughter, then the door flew open and a man walked out, holding a lamp high and chuckling over his shoulder to another. There were more behind them. At least two more. ‘We’ll finish that hand when Big Lom gets back and I’ll-’ His head turned and he saw her frozen with her mouth an apologetic O of surprise. He had a bent nose and absurd hair cut in a straight line across his forehead.

‘Horald told us to expect you.’ And he grinned as he drew his sword.

Shev had always hated fighting. She’d hidden from it, talked her way free of it, bought her way out of it. She’d dodged it, she’d ducked it and, with shameful frequency, she’d watched Javre do it for her.

But Horald the Finger had pushed her over the line, and she would be pushed no further.

She whipped out the little crossbow and levelled it. The eyes of Horald’s bent-nosed man went wide.

‘He tell you to expect this?’ she asked, and squeezed the trigger.

The string snapped with a ping and the bolt went twittering end-over-end sideways and was lost in the darkness above the water, leaving them staring at one another, all somewhat surprised.

‘Huh.’ Bent Nose cleared his throat. ‘I’m thinking-’

If she’d learned one thing from Javre, it was that when it came to fighting, the less thinking the better. She flung the crossbow at his head and it hit him just above the eye. He gasped, stumbling back into the man behind him, his lamp dropping to the stones and spraying burning oil across the walkway.

‘Shit!’ another shouted, slapping at the flames that had suddenly sprung up his trouser leg.

Shev charged, popping the thong from the hilt of her sword-eater as Bent Nose righted himself, whipping it from the sheath as his hard eyes focused on her, jerking it up just as he flailed his sword down. Steel squealed as blade slid into serrated jaws and she snarled, twisting her wrist. Bent Nose’s outraged bellow turned to a squawk of shock as his sword snapped just above the hilt and left him staggering forwards. He did not have to stagger far, however, before Shev’s fist thudded into his gut and doubled him up, wheezing. She clubbed him on the back of the head with the pommel of the sword-eater so hard it went flying out of her hand and skittered down the walkway.

She saw a heavy mace swinging at her, ducked it on an instinct, the wind of it tearing at her hair, spun away as it whipped past and crashed into the parapet, kept spinning, giving a scream, lifting her leg in a raking kick. Her heel could not have connected more sweetly with the fat man’s head if they’d rehearsed the whole thing. It snatched him off his feet, blood and teeth spraying spectacularly from his face, turned him over in the air and sent him tumbling from the walkway, a satisfying series of crashes below strongly suggesting that he had fallen onto, then through, the fragile roof of a lean-to in the yard.

A flash of metal and Shev jerked back. A skinny man with a birthmark around one eye stabbed at her and she dodged again. He was wearing a ridiculous swashbuckler’s three-cornered hat, no doubt reckoning himself quite the master swordsman now he’d slapped out the flames on his leg. Shev thought it always wise to play to the pretensions of an opponent, so as he brought his sword whistling over she shrank into a crouch, the helpless victim, thrusting her fist into a pouch at her belt, lifting her other arm despairingly as if to block the blow. She saw his rotten teeth as he smiled, sure the blade would strike her hand straight off. It was most satisfying to see him grimace as it clanged instead against the steel rods under her sleeve and scraped clear. She stepped past him as he lurched off balance, ripped her fist free, opened her palm and blew the dust in his face.

He squealed, reeling about, swatting blindly with sword and knife, trampling through the still-burning oil and setting his trousers on fire again. She ducked under his whistling blades, slipped silently behind him, grabbed the back of his coat as he spun around and gently but firmly assisted him over the parapet. A moment later, Shev heard the sweet sound of him hitting water.

Not much time to celebrate, though, as Shev was already wrestling with the last of the four. A little fellow, he was, but slippery as a fish and she was tired now, slow. An elbow in the gut brought vomit to the back of her throat, then a fist above the eye only half-blocked snapped her head back and made her ears ring. He forced her against the parapet. She fumbled for a gas bomb but her straining fingers couldn’t quite get there. Tried to reach her poisoned needle but he caught her wrist first. She growled through gritted teeth as he bent her back, crumbling stones grinding into her shoulders.

‘Quiet, now,’ he hissed, forcing her wrist around. His thumb must have caught the mechanism by accident. The spring twanged, the knife shot out of her sleeve and jabbed him in the throat. He retched, she butted him in the face, then as his head snapped back twisted her hips and kneed him full in the fruits.

He gave a breathy gasp, tried to clutch at her, but she slid around him, caught his hair and mashed his face into the battlements, loosing a shower of crumbled mortar and leaving him floppy as new washing. She jerked out the first thing her free hand closed around.

The garrotte.

God, but no one had ever been in a better position for a garrotting. Easiest thing in the world to jerk the wire across his throat, screw her knee into his back and garrotte the merry hell out of him. Probably he deserved it. Wasn’t as if he’d been taking much pity on her until the knife went off in his face.

But you do right for your own sake. Shev just wasn’t a garrotting sort of girl.

‘God damn it,’ she grunted, clubbing him across the back of the head with the handles and knocking him senseless, then tossing the garrotte over the wall into the sea.

‘What the-’

A great, slow, grinding voice, and Shev turned. A man had ducked out onto the walkway from a door at the other end. He had been obliged to duck because he stood considerably taller than the lintel. The Big Lom mentioned earlier, she guessed, and the name had evidently been bestowed without irony. They hadn’t struck her as a particularly ironic crowd, in truth. His head was immense, with a tiny prim little mouth, hard little eyes, a pimple of a nose all lost in the trackless, doughy expanse of his face. A shield the size of a tabletop was strapped to one trunk of an arm, and as his diminutive features crept together first in puzzlement, then anger, he jerked an enormous hammer from his belt as if it were a child’s toy.

‘Ha!’ Shev whipped her coat open, throwing knives jingling in a gleaming line. Fast as a woodpecker strikes she sent them spinning down the walkway, her hand a blur.

Her accuracy, it had to be admitted, was less impressive than her speed. Several missed entirely, clattering from the walls or twittering off into the night. Three others thudded into Big Lom’s shield and a fourth hit his shoulder handle-first and dropped off.

‘Huh,’ he grunted, peering over the rim with angry little eyes. ‘That your best?’

‘No,’ said Shev. ‘That is.’ And she pointed towards the one knife that had found its mark, lodged in his thigh just below the hem of his studded jacket.

He snorted as he plucked it out and tossed it away, a few specks of blood along with it. ‘If you think that’ll stop me you’re even sillier’n Horald said.’

‘The knife? No.’

Lom roared as he charged, shield up ahead of him like the end of a battering ram. Shev merely planted her hands on her hips and raised her brows. Halfway down the walkway, his great steps went a little unsteady. Above his shield, his hard eyes went a little crossed, then a little wide, and his furious roar turned to a hurt bellow and finally a brainless gurgle.

He was tottering towards her like a drunkard now, carried forward only by his considerable momentum, shield wobbling sideways, the great hammer dropping from his nerveless hand and bouncing into the yard below.

Shev nudged the door to the guardroom open and politely stood aside, pausing only to stick one delicately upturned foot into Lom’s path.

He blundered past, eyes already rolling back in his huge head. She hooked one of his great boots with hers and he tripped, slobbered, drool dangling from his clumsy lips. He bounced from the doorframe, spun wildly, knees drunkenly knocking, arms flung wide, then one foot caught the other and he crashed straight through the midst of a set of chairs and tables sending plates, pots and half-eaten dinner flying. He lay in the wreckage, face in a puddle of spilled stew, breath slurping, about as unconscious as it was possible to be.

‘But the poison’s another matter,’ said Shev, feeling intensely pleased with herself. Hannakar had told her that toxin could knock out an elephant, and for once he hadn’t exaggerated, apparently.

‘Ha!’ came a shout from behind and Shev spun about, rolled neatly, grabbing the sword-eater as she came up in a ready crouch.

It was Javre, dragging herself over the still-slumbering guard on the parapet, catching her foot on his head, tripping, stumbling up bleary-eyed and breathing hard, rag-wrapped sword clutched in one hand.

‘Huh.’ She stared at the crumpled bodies and slowly straightened. ‘What did you need me for?’

‘Someone had to row me out here.’ Shev slid her sword-eater back into the sheath, stepping over Big Lom’s slumbering form and towards the steps. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Here!’ hissed Shev, leaning close to the door and beckoning Javre up behind her.

Voices burbled on the far side, suddenly clear as she pressed her ear to the lock.

‘She won’t come for me. You’re wasting your time!’

‘Oh, I’ve got time.’

The voice might’ve been soft, cheerful, even, but it sent the chills prickling down Shev’s sweaty back regardless. The voice of a man who’d order a family murdered as easily as wiping his arse. A man ruthless as the plague and with a conscience no bigger than a speck of salt. The voice of Horald the Finger.

‘Don’t underestimate your charms, Carcolf. Shev will be along, I’m sure of it, and her friend, too. In the meantime, here, have some more!’

‘No!’

Harsh, ugly laughter, and a clinking that sounded like chains. ‘You’ll take some more if I say you’ll take some more!’

‘No!’ Carcolf’s voice, gone shrill now, agonised. ‘No more, you evil bastard! No more, please!’

Shev raised her boot and kicked the door open with a scream. It flew back, almost as if it wasn’t locked at all, bounced from the wall beyond and gave her a jarring blow in the shoulder as she dived through, spinning her around and almost knocking the sword-eater from her hand. She struggled to keep her balance while giving a war cry that ended up more than half a howl of pain and-

She tottered to an uncertain stop in the middle of a ruined courtyard, its crumbling walls coated with dead creeper.

Carcolf sat in a chair. Horald the Finger leaned over her.

But the terrifying scourge of Styria’s underworld held no hideous instrument of torture. Only a bottle of wine, tipped as if to pour. His smile, far from being a twisted murderer’s leer, was good-natured and fatherly. Carcolf, meanwhile, sat apparently unmolested and unrestrained, her usual sleek and beautiful self, legs calmly crossed with one pointed boot swinging comfortably back and forth, holding her hand over a glass.

As if to say no more.

‘See?’ Horald positively beamed as he threw up his free hand in delight. ‘She did come!’

Carcolf sprang up. She walked to Shev, their eyes never leaving each other. That walk she had, that Shev couldn’t look away from, even now. Shock, anger, fear, all swept aside by a heady wave of relief so strong her knees almost buckled from it.

‘You’re hurt.’ Carcolf winced as she pressed Shev’s cut eyebrow with her thumb. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Ow! About as good as you could hope for, considering I just fought five thugs!’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Horald shrugged as he sat, charging his own glass. He was a good deal older than when Shev last saw him, of course, but a good deal more prosperous-looking, too. You could have taken him for a well-heeled merchant if it wasn’t for the tattoos on his neck, the scars on his knuckles and a certain flinty hardness about the eyes. ‘If I’ve discovered one thing during my career, it’s that there are always more thugs.’

‘You came for me.’ If Shev hadn’t known better she might’ve fancied there was a little torchlit shimmer at the corners of Carcolf’s eyes.

Shev snapped out the letter and flung it at Horald, and it fluttered to the worn flagstones between them. ‘I was rather under the impression you were about to be murdered if I didn’t.’

‘I must admit,’ and Javre nudged the door open and stepped through, ‘that was my understanding, too.’

Carcolf nervously cleared her throat, edging slightly closer to Shev. ‘Javre.’

Javre narrowed her eyes. ‘Carcolf. Horald.’

‘Javre!’ He grinned as he raised his glass. ‘The Lioness of Hoskopp, who walks where she pleases! Now we’ve got a party.’

‘Party?’ snapped Shev, shaking her sword-eater at him. ‘I should bloody kill you!’ It was hard to maintain her fury with Carcolf standing uninjured beside her, still smelling as wonderfully sharp and sweet as ever, but she took her best stab at it. ‘You gave your word, Horald!’

‘Imagine that,’ said Javre as she took a cautious circuit of the yard, kicking loose stones out of her way. ‘Styria’s most infamous criminal mastermind being untrustworthy.’

‘Now hold on just a moment,’ said Horald, all offended innocence. ‘I haven’t broken my word in thirty years and I’m not about to start. I said neither you nor your associates would be harmed and neither you nor your associates have been. As you can see, Carcolf is in fine, if not to say superb, fettle. I’d never hurt her. Not after she saved my life that time in Affoia.’

‘Saved your …’ Shev stared at Carcolf. ‘You never told me about that.’

‘What kind of a mysterious beauty would I be without any mysteries?’ Carcolf tipped Shev’s head back and started dabbing the blood from her cut head with a handkerchief. ‘It was nothing heroic. Just the right word in the right ear.’

‘Right words in right ears change the world! They’re the only things that can.’ Horald held up the bottle. ‘You’re sure you won’t have some more?’

Carcolf sighed. ‘Oh, go on then, you evil bastard!’

‘You killed my place!’ snapped Shev.

‘Your place?’ Horald shook his head as he poured. ‘Come now, Shevedieh, it’s just things. You can always get new ones. Had to make it look good, didn’t I? I mean, you’d hardly have come if I just asked. And there was nothing in that paper about tea sets.’ He twisted the bottle to let the drips fall just the way an Osprian cellar-master might’ve. ‘I made sure of it. Checked the wording.’

‘You and your bloody wording,’ muttered Shev.

‘It pains me to say it,’ said Horald, ‘but my son Crandall was a nasty fucking idiot. Had my doubts over his parentage, if I’m honest. Want a glass of wine, Shev? It’s the good stuff. Osprian. Older than you are.’

Shev felt like she was drunk already. Waved it away.

‘I will take one,’ said Javre, plucking the bottle from Horald’s hand and peering down at him as she upended it in her bandaged fist, thick throat shifting as she swallowed, a little running down her neck and into her filthy collar.

‘By all means,’ he said, holding up his palms in a peaceable gesture. ‘Look, I’ve no doubt it all happened the way Carcolf always said. You defending yourself against some undeserved meanness on Crandall’s part.’

‘The way you always said?’ muttered Shev, peering sideways at Carcolf.

‘I’ve been pleading your case for years.’ And, evidently satisfied with her doctoring, she tucked the handkerchief into Shev’s pocket and gave it a pat.

‘I’m no fool,’ said Horald. ‘I always knew Crandall would make things difficult for me, sooner or later. More than likely you spared me the trouble of killing him myself.’

Shev stared. ‘Eh?’

‘I’ve got eleven other children, after all. You ever meet my eldest daughter, Leanda?’

‘Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.’

‘Oh, you’d like her. Got her running things in Westport now and she’s ten times the man Crandall ever was. When you’re in my position, you have to maintain an implacable image.’ His stare went so hard for a moment that Shev took a little shuffling step back. Then he broke out in a smile again. ‘But between you and me, I forgave you for killing him years ago.’

‘You might have fucking said so!’

‘Had to get something out of it, didn’t I? And, more importantly, had to be seen to get something out of it. Reputation’s everything in our game, Shev. Who’d know that better than the best bloody thief in Styria?’

‘Then …’ She stared from Horald, to Carcolf, and back, sluggish mind only now starting to grope past the present moment. ‘What the hell is this about?’

‘Oh. Yes. Sorry. This isn’t about you at all, Shev. Nor Carcolf, neither, much though it’s been a pleasure to see you again, my dear.’ And he and Carcolf gave each other a respectful little nod, as of two champion squares players just fought a testing game to a draw. ‘The two of you are incidental in all this. As am I, really.’ Horald grinned up at Javre, who was looking back at him with a sad little smile on her bruised face.

She tossed the empty wine bottle away and it clattered across the courtyard and into a corner. ‘It is about me.’

Horald spread his palms. ‘A man simply can’t prosper in business without owing debts to someone.’

Shev felt her relief being overcome by an uneasy queasiness. ‘Who do you owe?’

‘Among other people …’ Horald licked his teeth as though he was far from happy about it. ‘The High Priestess of the Great Temple of Thond.’

Shev’s eyes went wide. ‘Javre, get-’ She spun towards the door they had come through, but there was a woman standing there. A tall, lean woman with a hard face and a shaved head and a long sword in her tattooed fist. Another woman, huge as a house, was already ducking under the lintel to join her. Shev caught Carcolf’s sleeve and took a step towards a door at the far side of the yard. It swung gently open and a heavy-muscled woman stepped through, her thumbs tucked in a great belt from which two curved swords hung. Another with her white hair gathered into a hundred tiny braids followed grinning after, arms folded across her chest.

A shrill whistle came from above and a figure flashed down from the top of the wall, turning over, landing with hardly a sound in a ready crouch and standing tall, taller even than Javre, fine blonde hair shifting in the breeze across her face, so all Shev could see was the gleam of one eye and the glisten of her perfect teeth as she smiled. She plucked a spear from the air as it was tossed down to her without even looking, its long blade shining, blinding, mirror-bright.

Shev swallowed as she glanced about, trying to make it the thief’s glance that hardly seems to look at all but probably failing. She usually did fail, when it came down to it, for all her boasting. Some best bloody thief in Styria, while she was playing at the hero she’d blundered straight into a trap and dragged the one real friend she had into it with her.

There were two more women on the walls above, a pair of twins with great bows draped across their shoulders like milkmaids’ yokes, wrists hooked over them as they smiled blandly down. Seven in all, and each, Shev had no doubt, a Templar of the Golden Order, and far beyond her fighting skills even if she hadn’t used half her tricks on those fools upstairs.

‘Fuck,’ she said, simply. Sometimes no other word will cover it.

Horald shifted somewhat nervously as he glanced at the scarred, sinewy, tattooed, heavily armed women now surrounding him on every side. They looked deadly, and Shev knew they were a lot deadlier than they looked. ‘Have to say I feel a little outnumbered,’ he muttered.

Javre gave a weary nod, ran her tongue around her mouth and spat. ‘I, too.’

‘Javre,’ came a deep voice.

As if it was a spoken command, the Templars all bowed their heads as one. Another woman stepped through the door. A big, broad-shouldered woman in a sleeveless white robe, moving with such wonderful poise she appeared to glide more than walk. ‘It has been too long.’

A great string of beads was looped around and around her thick neck until it covered half her chest. Grey showed in the orange stubble on her shaved scalp, her sharp-boned face with deep lines in the cheeks and about the eyes. And what eyes they were. Calm and blue as deep water. Bright as stars. Hard as hammered iron. And ruthless as a backstreet knifing.

Javre watched her sit at the table opposite Horald. ‘Never would have been too soon for me, Mother.’

Shev cleared her throat. ‘I’m guessing “mother” in this case is a term of respect due to the High Priestess of-’

‘Javre is my daughter.’ The woman raised one brow. ‘And she has never been all that interested in terms of respect.’

Shev stared. She found herself doing that a lot, lately. There was indeed a strong resemblance, if only in the muscle that squirmed in the woman’s arms as she crossed them over those rattling beads. ‘So we’ve been chased across the breadth of the Circle of the World for fourteen years by … your mother?’

‘She can be extremely stubborn,’ said Javre.

‘So that’s where you get it from,’ murmured Shev. ‘I finally see the upside of being an orphan.’

There was a tense, quiet moment, then. A couple of dry leaves chased each other across the cracked flagstones as the wind swirled around the yard. The High Priestess pursed her lips as she looked her wayward daughter up and down. Fourteen years, Shev and Javre had been running, and now they stood before the two people who had done the chasing. After that long, it was bound to be something of an anticlimax.

‘You look …’

‘Like shit?’ ventured Javre.

‘I would have tried to be more diplomatic.’

‘I fear the time for diplomacy between us is long past, Mother.’

‘Like shit, then. Never was a woman more blessed by the Goddess than you. It grieves me to see you treat her gifts with such scant respect. Did you really run away from me … for this?’

‘I left so I could choose my own path.’

Javre’s mother slowly shook her head. ‘And you chose to wallow in your own filth?’

‘Having murderers chasing you every hour of your life does rather limit your options,’ snapped Shev.

She felt Carcolf’s hand on her shoulder, gently drawing her back into the shadows. She shook her off, moved instead to stand beside Javre. If she was about to die, that was where she chose to do it.

The blue, blue eyes of the High Priestess slid over to her. ‘Who is this … person?’

Javre drew herself up to her full height then, puffing up her chest, and put her hand on Shev’s shoulder. ‘She is Shevedieh, the greatest thief in Styria.’

Shev might have had a foot less height and about a quarter of the chest that Javre did, but she drew up and puffed out what she had. ‘And I am proud to be Javre’s sidekick.’

‘Partner,’ said Javre, and gently guided her back. ‘But leave her out of it.’

The eyes of the High Priestess drifted towards her daughter. ‘Believe it or not, and in spite of all the pointless bloodshed between us, I have never wished to harm anyone.’

Javre stretched her neck out one way and the other, then put her bandaged hand on the rag-wrapped grip of her sword. ‘I will tell you what I told Hanama, and Birke, and Weylen, and Golyin, and all your other lapdogs. I will be no one’s slave. Not even yours.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Especially not yours. I would sooner die than go back with you.’

‘I know.’ Javre’s mother wearily puffed out her cheeks in just the way Javre did when she and Shev had their endless theological debates. ‘If the last fourteen years have taught me anything, it is that. Even as a girl you were stubborn beyond belief. All my efforts to make you bend, with smiles, with entreaties, with threats, with blows, and finally with blades, have done nothing but temper you. There are some wearying patterns to life that, try as we might, we never can seem to escape.’

Shev could hardly deny that. Here she was, outnumbered and facing death once again. How many bloody times now? She made a show of holding up one hand, as if to check her fingernails, and slipped the other towards that vial at her belt. One lucky throw might blow two of those Templars to the hereafter they were so fond of and maybe bring one of the towers down to boot. A spectacular note to end on, if nothing else …

‘The Goddess teaches us to embrace them.’ The High Priestess glanced towards Shev. ‘You can leave that vial alone, my child. I have another choice for your partner. There is something that I need.’

Javre snorted. ‘You have never been one to bridle at taking what you want.’

‘This thing is not easily taken. It is in the possession of …’ And Javre’s mother worked her mouth as though there was a sour taste there. ‘A wizard. A Magus of the Old Time.’

Shev leaned close to Javre. ‘I don’t much like the sound of-’

‘Shush,’ she said.

‘Deliver this thing to me, Javre, and you are free. I, and the guards of my temple, will pursue you no longer.’

‘That is all?’ asked Javre.

‘That is all.’

Shev caught her by her big bare arm. ‘Javre! We don’t know what this thing is, or where it’s kept, and I really don’t like the sound of this whole Magus of the Old Time business-’

‘Shevedieh.’ Javre patted her hand and gently peeled her fingers away. ‘When you have only one choice, there is no purpose waiting to make it. I accept.’

‘Well, then.’ Shev glanced over at Carcolf and gave a long, shuddering, painful sigh, her puffed chest rapidly collapsing. ‘Guess I’ll be stealing a thing off a wizard.’

Javre had a little smile at the corner of her mouth as she glanced down at her. ‘You and I, side by side?’

‘That’s where a sidekick belongs, no? You can do the fighting, I can do the complaining.’

‘Just the way it has always been.’

‘How else would it be?’

Javre’s smile curled up a little further. ‘I appreciate the offer, Shevedieh. It means … more than you can know. But you have earned the chance at something better. Some things one has to do alone.’

‘Javre-’

‘If I die, drowned in some bog, or spitted by some guard, or roasted by some wizard’s Art, well, it will be some consolation to know that my partner lived to be old and shrivelled, still telling tall tales of our high adventures together.’

Shev blinked. Strange, how a day before all she could think of were the bad times. The thousand hurts, the million arguments, the nights spent on the stony ground. Now all the good came up at once and choked her. The laughter, the songs, the knowing there was always, always someone at her back. She tried to smile but her sight was swimming. ‘It’s been something, though, hasn’t it?’

‘It has,’ said Javre, glancing over to Carcolf. ‘Look after her.’

Carcolf swallowed. ‘I’ll try.’

‘Fail, and there will be no place in the Circle of the World where you will be safe from me.’ She laid that great, heavy, comforting hand on Shev’s shoulder one more time. ‘Fare you well, my friend.’ And she turned away, towards her mother.

‘Fare you well,’ whispered Shev, wiping her eyes.

Carcolf took her gently by the shoulders from behind and drew her close. ‘Let’s go home.’

‘You should come talk to me!’ called Horald after her. ‘I can always find work for the best thief in-’

‘Go fuck yourself, Horald,’ said Shev.

When they got back there, her place was still killed.

‘Nothing broken that can’t be fixed.’ Carcolf righted Shev’s ruined table and brushed some broken plaster off it with the back of her hand. ‘We’ll get it all put right in no time. I know people.’

‘Seems you know everyone,’ muttered Shev, numbly, tossing down her bag.

‘We’ll take a trip. Just you and me. Change of scene.’ Carcolf had hardly stopped talking since they rowed away from Carp Island. As if she was worried by what might be said if she left a gap. ‘Jacra, maybe. Or the Thousand Isles? I’ve never been. You always said the Isles are beautiful.’

‘Javre thought so,’ muttered Shev.

Carcolf paused, then pressed on as if the name hadn’t been mentioned at all. ‘When we get back it’ll all be so much better. You’ll see. Let me change. Then we’ll go out. We’ll do something fun.’

‘Fun.’ Shev flopped onto the one intact chair. She was the one who really needed to change but she couldn’t be bothered. She hardly had the strength to stand.

‘You remember what it is?’

Shev forced out a weak grin. ‘Maybe you can remind me.’

‘Of course I can.’ Carcolf smiled. ‘Fun’s my middle name.’

‘Oh? So it’s just your first name I’m missing.’

‘What kind of a mysterious beauty would I be without any mysteries?’ And Carcolf consummately acted the part of a mysterious beauty over her shoulder as the bedroom door swung shut.

Shev winced, bruised side aching as she squirmed out of her coat, tools clattering as it dropped to the floor, a loose smoke bomb rolling free through the mess. She slumped down, elbows on her knees, chin on her hands.

Javre was out of her life. Carcolf was in it. She was square with Horald the Finger. Everything she’d wanted, wasn’t it?

So why did she feel so bloody miserable?

There was a soft knock at the door and Shev frowned as she looked up. Another knock. She slid out her sword-eater, held it down by her right side as she stood, and with her left hand nudged the door open a crack.

There was a twitchy youth out in the stairwell with big ears and a rash of spots around his mouth.

‘You Carcolf?’ He squinted through the gap. ‘You’re shorter than I thought you’d be.’

‘I’m shorter than I hoped I’d be,’ snapped Shev. ‘Reckon my height’s a disappointment to us both.’

The lad shrugged. ‘Disappointment’s part of life.’ And he held out a folded paper between two fingers.

‘Everyone’s a fucking philosopher.’ Shev opened the door wide enough to pluck it free, then shouldered it shut and turned the key. A letter, with Carcolf written on the front in a slanted hand. Something familiar about the writing. Something that picked at her.

She tossed it down on the scarred tabletop and frowned at it while Carcolf started singing in the bedroom. Bloody hell, she even sang well.

If you want to be a fine new person with a fine new life you’ve got to put the person you were behind you, like a snake sheds its skin. You’ve got to stop picking through your hoard of hurts and grievances like a miser with his coins, set ’em down and allow yourself to go free. You’ve got to forgive and you’ve got to trust, not because anyone else deserves it, but because you do.

Shev took a hard breath and turned away from the letter.

Then she turned back, snatched it up and slashed it wide open with the sword-eater.

No one changes that much. Not all at once.

She knew the hand, now she saw more of it. The same one that had written the note Horald the Finger had put his mark to. The note that had been left here in her ruined place. The note that had drawn her and Javre out to Burroia’s Fort.

Carcolf, my old friend

Just wanted to thank you again for your help. No one spins a story like you. Pleasure to watch you work, as always. If you come through Westport again I’ll have more for you, and well paid. I’ve always got things that need taking from here to there.

Hope it all went well with my father in Talins. I swear, you’re the one woman he holds in higher regard than me.

Stay careful,

Leanda

Shev’s eyes went wider and wider as she read, the cogs upstairs spinning at triple speed.

Leanda. Horald’s oh-so-competent daughter running things in Westport.

My old friend. Carcolf might know everyone, but these were tighter ties than she’d ever given a hint of.

Hope it all went well with my father in Talins. Shev looked up and saw Carcolf standing in the doorway in her underwear. A sight she would’ve swum oceans for once. It gave her scant happiness now.

Carcolf blinked from Shev’s stricken face to the letter, and back, and slowly held up a calming palm, as if Shev was a skittish pony that a sudden move might startle. ‘Now, listen to me. This isn’t what it looks like.’

‘No?’ Shev slowly turned the letter around. ‘Because it looks like you’re about as tight as can be with Horald and his family, and this whole fucking business was your idea!’

Carcolf gave a guilty little grin. A toddler caught with stolen jam all around her face. ‘Then, maybe … it is what it looks like.’

Shev just stood and stared. Again. The old violinist chose that moment to strike up in the square outside, overplaying the hell out of a plaintive little piece, but Shev didn’t feel like dancing to it, and like laughing at it even less. Seemed a fitting accompaniment to the collapse of her pathetic little self-deceptions. God, why did she insist on demanding from people what she knew they could never give her? Why did she insist on making the same mistakes over and over? Why was she fooled so easily, every time?

Because she wanted to be fooled.

You’ve got to be realistic, that old Northman on the farm near Squaredeal used to tell her. Got to be realistic. And she’d leaned on the fence with a stalk of grass in her teeth and nodded sagely along. And yet, in spite of all she’d seen and all she’d suffered, she was still the least realistic fool in the Circle of the World.

‘Look, Shevedieh …’ Carcolf’s voice was smooth and calm and reasonable, a politician explaining their great plans for the nation. ‘I can see how you might feel … a little bit deceived.’

‘A little bit?’ squeaked Shev, her voice going high with disbelief.

‘I just wanted …’ Carcolf looked down, prodding at a bent teaspoon with one pointed toe, and glanced up shyly under her lashes, trying on the innocent new bride for size, ‘… to know that you cared.’

Shev’s eyes went even wider. She positively goggled. ‘So … it was all a fucking test?’

‘No! Well, yes. I wanted to know we’ve got something … that can last, is all. That didn’t come out right!’

‘How could that come out right?’

‘Because you passed! You passed and then some!’ Carcolf padded towards her. That walk she had. God, that walk. ‘You came for me. I never thought you would. My hero, eh? Heroine. Whichever.’

‘You could’ve just asked me!’

Carcolf crushed her face up as she came closer. ‘But … you know … people say all kinds of things in bed that it’s probably not best to put to too hard a test later on-’

‘So I’m beginning to fucking see!’

Carcolf’s brows drew in a touch. An impatient mother, frustrated that her daughter’s tantrum won’t subside. ‘Look. I know it’s been a hard night for everyone but it all turned out for the best. Now you’re square with Horald, and I’m square with Horald, and we can-’

Shev felt a sudden cold twinge in her stomach. ‘What do you mean, you’re square with Horald?’

‘Well …’ A flicker of annoyance across Carcolf’s face that she’d let something slip, then she started flapping her hands around like a circus magician disguising a trick. ‘I had a little debt of my own, as it happens, and he had the debt to the High Priestess, so, you know, favours for favours, we could help each other out. It’s the Styrian way, Shev, isn’t it? But that’s not the point-’

‘So you sold my friend to settle your debt?’

If Shev had been hoping Carcolf would sag like a punctured wineskin with the weight of her shame, she was disappointed. ‘Javre’s a fucking menace!’ Carcolf stepped closer with a stabbing finger. ‘As long as she was here you’d just have got sucked back into her madness like you always do! You had to get free of her. We had to get free of her. You told me so, in this room!’

Shev winced. ‘But I didn’t mean it! I mean, I did mean it but … not this way-’

‘What way, then?’ asked Carcolf. ‘You were never going to do it. You know it now. You knew it then. That’s why you said it. I had to do it for you.’

‘So … you’ve done me a favour?’

‘I think so.’ Carcolf stepped closer. Fair now, humble, a merchant offering the deal of a lifetime. ‘And I think … when you’ve had time to think about it … you’ll think so, too.’

She smiled down, taller than Shev even without her shoes. A winning smile. Point proved. Argument won.

She took horrified silence for agreement, reached out and cupped Shev’s face in her hands. The sensitive lover, whose only joy was her partner’s happiness.

‘Just us,’ she whispered, leaning close. ‘Better than ever.’

Carcolf sucked at Shev’s top lip. Then she nipped the bottom one with her teeth, pulled it back, almost painful, and let it go with the faintest flapping sound. Shev’s head was full of that scent, but there was no sweetness in it any more. It was just sour. Gaudy. Sickening.

‘Now let me get dressed, and we’ll go have fun.’

‘Fun’s your middle name,’ whispered Shev, wanting to shove her off. To shove her off and punch her in the face besides.

Shev didn’t much like to be honest with herself. Who does? But if she accepted the pain of it for just a moment, it wasn’t Carcolf’s treachery that truly hurt. You can’t bed a snake then complain when you get bit. It was that Shev had suddenly realised there was no secret self hidden under Carcolf’s smirking mask. There was just another mask, and another. Whatever role it suited her to play. Whatever got her what she wanted. If Carcolf had anything underneath, it was hard and shiny as a flint.

She had no first name to learn.

A few hours ago Shev had been willing to kill for this woman. Willing to die for her. Now she didn’t feel love, or lust, or even much anger. She just felt sad. Sad and bruised and so, so disappointed.

She made herself smile. ‘All right.’ She made herself put her hand on Carcolf’s cheek, brush a strand of golden hair back behind her ear. ‘You get dressed. But I promise you it won’t be for long.’

‘Oh, promises make me nervous.’ Carcolf brushed the tip of Shev’s nose with her fingertip as she let her go. ‘I never know whether to trust them.’

‘You’re the one who lies for a living. I just steal for one.’

Carcolf grinned back at her from the bedroom doorway, calm and beautiful as ever. ‘True enough.’

The moment she was gone, Shev snatched up her bag and walked out.

She didn’t even shut the door.