dozen steps down the corridor and then out a door into the open yard at the back of the house, site of the donkey stables, the vegetable garden, and the kitchen midden. He pushed her toward the stable and had almost forced her through the doorway when she threw out her arms and caught herself. She stepped to the side so the front wall and not the open door was behind her, and put her hand into her robe.
“What are you doing?” Talibo was almost screaming, his handsome, slightly childish face as exaggerated as a festival mask. Briony could see flames now on top of the house, greedily at work in the roof. On the far side of Effir dan-Mozan’s walls, torches and lanterns were being lit in the surrounding houses as the neighborhood woke up to the terror in their midst.
“You said Shaso was waiting for me. But first you said he would come to meet me. Where is he? I think you are lying.”
He looked at her with a strange, wounded fury, as though she had gone out of her way to spoil some pleasant surprise he had planned for her. “Ah? Do you think so?”
“Yes, I do. I think...” But she did not finish because Talibo put both hands on her breasts and shoved her, bouncing her off the wall and into the doorway, then pushed her again, sending her stumbling backward to fall down in the mire of the stable.
“Close your mouth, whore!” he shouted. “Do what you are told! I will be back!”
But even as he scrambled for the door, Briony was sliding across the damp ground toward him. She grabbed at his leg and pulled herself upright, and when he turned, she shoved herself against him, forcing him back against the rough wattle of the stable wall, and pressed the curved blade of the Yisti knife against his throat.
“You will never touch me again, do you hear?” she breathed into his face. “And you will tell me everything Shaso said to you, everything that has happened and that you saw. If you lie I will slash your throat and leave you to bleed to death right here in the shit and the mud.”
Tal’s long-lashed eyes widened. He had gone pale, she could see that even in the dim light of the single candle that someone had lit here in the stable—in preparation for her arrival?—and when he sagged Briony let her own muscles go a little slack. Where was Shaso? Was Effir’s nephew really lying? How could they escape with soldiers everywhere—and how had the soldiers found out...?
Talibo’s hand was open, but his sudden blow to her face was still so hard and so unexpected that Briony flew backward, her knife spinning away into the darkness. For a moment she could do nothing but gasp in helpless anger and gurgle as blood filled her mouth. She spat, and spat again, but every drop in her body seemed to be streaming from her nose and lips. She scrabbled for the lost knife as the merchant’s nephew approached but it was beyond her reach, beyond her sight—lost, just as she was...
She tried to say something, but it felt as though her jaw had been broken and she could only murmur and spit blood again. She slid her hand down her leg and reached into her boot, but the sheath was empty—the other dagger had fallen out somewhere during the scuffle. Her gut went cold. She had no weapon.
“Shaso, your mighty Shaso, he is dead,” said Talibo. “I saw the soldiers kill him—surrounded him like a wild pig, spearing, spearing. I told them where to find him, of course.”
She coughed, rubbed at her broken mouth with the back of her hand. “Y-You...?”
“And my uncle, too. Him I did myself. He will never again call me names—spoiled, lazy. Ha! He will rot in the shadows of the land of the dead and
“You betrayed...?” It hurt to speak, but the thought of Shaso murdered blazed in her like a fire, like one of the coals that had bounced across Effir dan-Mozan’s chamber floor only moments ago, lifetimes ago. It couldn’t be true—the gods could not be so cruel! “Betrayed us...all?”
“Not you, bitch, although now I wish I had. But I will keep you for my own and you will learn to treat me with respect.” Panting, he took a few steps toward her and leaned over, keeping well out of reach, even though she had lost the curved blade. Briony took a certain grim pleasure in that, anyway: he craved respect, but it was he, Talibo the traitor, who had learned to respect her. His face was ridiculously young for the emotions that played across it in the candlelight, greed and lust and exultation in his own cruelty. “And if you had been a proper woman you would have been safe here until it was all over. Now, I will have to break you like a horse. I will teach you to behave...!”
Briony hooked his ankle with her foot, sending him crashing to the ground. Instead of running away, she threw herself onto him even as he thrashed on the slippery ground, struggling to get his feet under him. She knocked him back but he curled his hands around her throat. Something hard was pressing painfully into her back, but she scarcely noticed it. The merchant’s nephew was slender but strong —stronger than she was—and within instants, as his fingers tightened, the light of the single candle began to waver, then to burst into flowers of radiance like the fireworks that had scorched the sky over Southmarch to celebrate her father’s marriage to Anissa. Her hand found the thing that was digging into her back.
Talibo’s grip was so powerful that it did not slacken immediately even after she had pulled the second, smaller Yisti dagger out from underneath her and rammed it up under his jaw with all her might. Talibo straightened, shuddering and wriggling like an eel in the bottom of a fisherman’s boat, so that for a moment it seemed his death throes might break her in half, then at last his hands fell away.
She lay where she was for a long time, fighting for breath, coughing and sputtering. When at last her throat seemed to be open again she stood up. Swaying, legs trembling, she bent over the merchant’s nephew cautiously, in case he might be shamming, but he was dead: he did not even twitch when she pulled the blade out of his throat, freeing a gush of dark blood. She spat on his handsome, youthful face—a gob that was red with her own blood—and then turned and went to look for her other knife.
When she emerged from the stable Effir dan-Mozan’s entire house was in flames. Briony stared for long empty moments, as if she had turned to stone, then she limped across the open yard into the shadows by the wall. She found a place she could mount and climbed with quivering, exhausted muscles over the top, then she let herself drop into the cool, stinking darkness of a refuse heap.
When morning came, Briony found a bucket of icy water and did her best to wash the blood from her throbbing, aching face, then pulled her robe tight around her boy’s clothes—the clothes of the boy whom she had killed, she reflected with little emotion. She dragged her hood down low and joined the crowd that had gathered outside the smoldering remains of Effir dan Mozan’s house. Some of the baron’s soldiers were still standing guard over the ruins, so she did not dare go too close, and many of the crowd spoke Xandian languages, since this was the poorest part of Landers Port, but she heard enough to learn that the women of the house, at least, had managed to escape, and were sheltering with one of the other well-known Tuani families. She thought briefly of going to Idite, but knew it was a foolish idea: they had lost everything because of her already—why put them in danger again? Nobody seemed to know for certain exactly what had happened, but many had heard that some important criminal had been captured or killed, that Dan-Mozan had been harboring him and had died trying to defend his secret.
Only one male member of the household had lived to escape. For a moment, hearing that, Briony felt a rush of hope, but then someone pointed out the survivor—a small, bowed old servant that she recognized but whose name she did not remember. He stood apart from the others, staring at the smoking, blackened timbers of what had been his home. Alone in the crowd, he looked the way Briony imagined she did beneath her hood, shocked, confused, empty.
There was nothing here for her anymore except danger and quite possibly death. The baron’s men did not seem to have tried very hard to take Shaso alive, and he had been nowhere near as dangerous to the Tollys as she was. Briony felt certain that Hendon Tolly’s hand was somewhere in all this—why else would Iomer, a man who cared little for politics, have struck in such a swift and deadly way?
She screwed up her courage and joined the crowd of people walking out the city gates for the day and stared at the ground as she walked, meeting no one’s eye. It seemed to work: she was not challenged, and within an hour she was alone on the cliff road below Landers Port. Briony walked until she reached a place where the woods were thick beside the road, then staggered off into the trees. She found a hidden spot surrounded by undergrowth and curled herself up in the wet leaves at the base of a mostly naked oak, well out of sight of the road, and then wept
