minutes. I’ll go out and find some blankets for you. I can get a cart. Maybe a boat. Get you out of here somehow, before the dawn. We’ve got a lot of darkness to use.”
“Jean, you’ll be watched until you leave. They’re not going to let you”—Locke coughed several times —“steal anything big. And I’m not going to let you carry me.”
“Not let me carry you? What are you going to fend me off with, sarcasm?”
“You should have had a few thousand solari to work with, Jean. Could have gone anywhere … done anything with it.”
“I did exactly what I wanted to do with it. Now, you go with me. Or I stay here to die with you.”
“There’s no reasoning with you.”
“You’re such a paragon of compromise yourself. Pig-brained gods-damned egotist.”
“This isn’t a fair contest. You have more energy for big words than I do.” Locke laughed. “Gods, look at us. Can you believe they even took our firewood?”
“Very little surprises me these days.” Jean slowly stood up, wincing all the way. “So, inventory. No money. Clothes on our backs. Mostly
“How do you plan on halting carriages?”
“I’ll throw you in the road and hope they stop.”
“Criminal genius. Will they be stopping out of heartfelt sympathy?”
“Revulsion, more likely.”
There was a knock at the front door.
Locke and Jean glanced at one another uneasily, and Jean picked up a dagger from the small pile of weapons that had been left to him.
“Maybe they’re back for the bed,” said Locke.
“Why would
Jean kept most of his body behind the door as he opened it, and he tucked the dagger just out of sight behind his back.
It wasn’t Cortessa, or a dog-leech, or even the master of the Villa Suvela, as Jean had expected. It was a woman, dressed in a richly embroidered oilcloak streaming with water. She held an alchemical globe in her hands, and by its pale light Jean could see that she was not young.
Jean scanned the curb behind her. No carriage, no litter, no escort of any sort—just misty darkness and the patter of the rain. A local? A fellow guest of the Villa Suvela?
“I, uh … can I be of assistance, madam?”
“I believe we can be of assistance to one another. If I might come in?” She had a soft and lovely voice, with something very close to a Lashani accent. Close, but not exact.
“We are … that is, I’m sorry, but we have some difficulty at the moment. My friend is ill.”
“I know they took your furniture.”
“You do?”
“And I know that you and your friend didn’t have much else to begin with.”
“Madam, you seem to have me at a disadvantage.”
“And you seem to have me out in the rain.”
“Um.” Jean shuffled the dagger and made it vanish up his tunic sleeve. “Well, my friend, as I said, is gravely ill. You should be aware—”
“I don’t mind.” She entered the instant Jean’s resolution wavered, and gracefully got out of the way as he closed the door behind her. “After all, poison is only contagious at dinner parties.”
“How the hell … are you a physiker?”
“Hardly.”
“Are you with Cortessa?”
The woman only laughed at that, and threw back the hood of her oilcloak. She was about fifty, the well- tended sort of fifty that only wealth could make possible, and her hair was the color of dry autumn wheat with currents of silver at the temples. She had a squarish face, with disconcertingly wide, dark eyes.
“Here, take this.” She tossed the alchemical globe to Jean, who caught it by reflex. “I know they took your lights, too.”
“Um, thank you, but—”
“My, my.” The woman unclasped her cloak and spun it off her shoulders as she strolled into the inner apartment. Her coat and skirts were richly brocaded with silver threads, and puffs of silver lace from beneath her cuffs half-covered her hands. She glanced at Locke. “Ill would seem to be an understatement.”
“Forgive me for not getting up,” said Locke. “And for not offering you a seat. And not being dressed. And for not … giving a damn.”
“Down to the last dregs of your charm, I see.”
“Down to the last dregs of my everything. Who are you, then?”
The woman shook out her oilcloak, then threw it over Locke like a blanket.
“Th-thank you.”
“It’s difficult to have a serious conversation with someone whose dignity is compromised, Locke.”
The next sound in the room was that of Jean slamming home the bolt on the front door. In an instant he returned to the inner apartment, knife in hand. He tossed the light-globe onto the bed, where Locke prevented it from bouncing onto the floor.
“In faith,” said Jean, “my patience for mysterious shit went out that door with the money and the furniture. So you explain how you know that name, and I won’t have to feel guilty for—”
“I doubt you’d survive what would happen if you acted on that impulse, Jean Tannen. I know your pride wouldn’t. Put your blade away.”
“Like hell!”
“Poor Gentlemen Bastards,” said the woman softly. “So far from home. But always in our sight.”
“
“Oh, gods,” said Locke. He coughed and closed his eyes. “It’s you. I suspected you’d kick our door down sooner or later.”
“You sound disappointed.” The woman frowned. “As though you’d just failed to avoid an awkward social call. Would you really find death preferable to a little conversation, Locke?”
“Little conversations with Bondsmagi never end well.”
“You’re the reason we’re here,” growled Jean. “You and your games in Tal Verrar. Your damned letters!”
“Not entirely,” said the woman.
“You didn’t scare us in the Night Market.” Jean’s grip tightened on the hilt of his blade, and the pain of his recent beating was entirely forgotten. “You don’t fucking scare us now!”
“Then you don’t know us at all.”
“I think I do. And I don’t give a damn about your gods-damned
He was already in motion, and her back was to him. She had no chance to speak or gesture with her hands; his left arm went around her neck and he slammed the dagger home as hard as he could, directly between her shoulder blades.
11
THE WOMAN’S flesh was warm and solid beneath Jean’s arm one moment, and in the next his blade bit empty air.
Jean had faced many fast opponents in his life, but never one that dissolved instantly at his touch. That wasn’t human speed; it was sorcery.
His chance was gone.
He inhaled sharply, and a cold shudder ran down his back, the old familiar sensation of a misstep made
