She hadn’t heard Nick move, but suddenly he was pushing past her, blade in hand, running toward the sound of the gun. Sin hesitated and then ran after him, through the pathways around the wagons to the other side of the hill. She was pulled up short by the dead body at her feet.
Nick was already kneeling by the body, his hand against its chest. He looked from that dead thing up at Sin, and he smiled a wild smile that made him look handsomer than she’d ever seen him.
“You can’t be sure it was Alan.”
“A shot in the dark, through the heart?” Nick asked. “I’m sure.”
With some people it was a voice they would recognize, with some people a step in the hall. Sin guessed it was fitting that Nick could look at a corpse and see his brother’s skill.
If Alan had got out, surely Toby and Lydie were safe. But she had put Lydie under the bed herself. She had told her,
Nick rose. “Where—”
He was looking at the night beyond them, not the wagons behind them, and Sin knew failing to look both ways wasn’t safe. She glanced around and saw two magicians walking toward them with their hands full of light, ready to hurl.
She launched herself at Nick, tumbling him down into the night-cool grass with hot fire scything through her hair. Nick was breathing hard underneath her, muscles coiled, ready to attack. He didn’t thank her for saving him, just gripped her arm in one hand and his sword in the other.
“If Alan hadn’t asked me to cut my power in half,” he ground out, “in less than half, I could have killed them all.”
And Toby and Lydie would have been safe, Alan would have been safe.
“Why did you give it up?”
“I’m not very bright,” Nick said, and tipped her over into the grass, his body covering hers, pinning her down for a minute. He lifted his free arm, and a bright bolt of magic flew through the air, as if he’d had a knife in his hand when he hadn’t. He grinned down at her in the magic light. “Lucky I’m so pretty.”
Sin shoved Nick off her with a knee against his chest. She rose to her feet, missing her second knife, left in the back of that first magician.
There were two magicians, both men: Nick went for the older-looking one, so Sin went at the younger. He retreated as she rushed at him, and as she drew closer to him and he drew closer to the wagons she saw he was even younger than she’d thought, about her own age. He had dark hair and green eyes with dilated pupils. He looked terrified.
“Listen,” he whispered, low and urgent. “Listen, I don’t want to hurt you.”
Sin smiled her most gorgeous smile at him. “That’s wonderful news! Can you tip your head back just so and expose your jugular?”
The boy magician’s mouth opened. “No! Look, we’ve met.”
“I don’t recall,” Sin snapped. “Maybe it’s the shock of seeing my home set on fire. Perhaps that induced temporary amnesia.”
She slid the tip of her knife up along the boy’s stomach. She felt a twinge of panic at the thought that she might have to kill someone who wasn’t fighting back.
“Sin,” he said. “Where’s Mae? Is she all right?”
A woman’s voice sliced through the air. “What are you doing, Seb?”
“She has a knife,” Seb said quickly, stepping away. He didn’t stay to help either of them, backing into the shadows instead, and Sin made sure to keep watching him out of the corner of her eye even as she turned to face the real threat.
The woman was tall and lean, muscled in a way Sin would like to be one day, when she had more time to work on her routines. She came toward Sin in a series of spare, efficient movements, a sword burning magic in each hand.
“Got a knife, have you?” she asked. “I’m armed myself.”
The reach of those swords was going to be a real problem. Sin looked at her knife, measured her chances, and feinted. When the woman checked herself and looked for a knife that wasn’t coming, Sin threw the knife from a different angle.
The swordswoman was just a hair too fast. She got a sword up to deflect the knife. Sin had thrown hard, and the sword flew from the woman’s hand, but that left her with one weapon and Sin with none.
None that this magician knew about. Sin wasn’t about to tip the woman off about the knife at her ankle.
She waited for a chance to duck and make it look natural, which meant standing there empty-handed as the woman advanced on her.
“Cynthia Davies, I think? My name is Helen,” the woman said. “The Market’s in your hands, in the absence”— her lip curled—“of your leader. Care to surrender it to me?”
“Come and take it,” Sin told her.
Helen ran at her and Sin waited, waited, and threw herself to the ground, curled up in a ball with her hand finally at her ankle as the sword came hurtling down toward her head and—
Stopped.
Sin grasped her knife, and only then looked up.
There was an orange line over her head, drawn on the night sky like a line beneath a sentence. The sword had
