“Not here,” he said again.
“When?” Laith asked.
“What about Rianne?” Gent rumbled, his voice hard.
“Almost two weeks ago,” Valyn replied. “But her sister just found the body tonight, tied up and cut up in a garret down by the harbor. Rianne’s fine. Or as fine as you’d expect, after finding her sister’s body. We just got finished burying Amie.”
“Shit and ’Shael,” Laith muttered, sheathing his belt knife and shaking his head. “Where is she?”
Valyn nodded through the back door.
Laith took a step toward it, then stopped to clumsily gather up the flowers Gent had dropped on the floor, rearranging them into a lopsided bouquet once more.
Rianne started crying once again when she saw the two cadets. Gent’s eyes flitted to the grave; then he turned to her with an awkward formality.
“Valyn told us what happened. You find the bastard, and we’ll kill him.” He concluded with a brusque nod, as though that settled everything.
Laith gathered Rianne in his arms. She started to resist, then sagged against him, snuffling. Another man might have felt awkward, comforting the whore he’d crossed the sound to bed, but Laith didn’t feel awkward about much. He kissed her hair as if she were his own sister and rocked her back and forth without saying a word.
Lin watched the two with hooded eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“Does it matter?” Laith responded quietly.
They locked gazes over Rianne’s head. Then Lin shook her head. “I suppose not.”
Over the next hour, the five of them drank the wine Laith had brought. As it turned out, the two cadets had been bedding the sisters off and on since they were old enough to fumble their pricks out of their pants. Valyn was surprised at the range of stories they remembered about the murdered girl, each one bawdier than the last. At first he thought the coarse tales would insult Rianne or set her on edge, but the truth was, she seemed strangely touched to find that someone else remembered something about her sister, and she laughed along with their jokes, her words more slurred as the night dragged on. The jugs went round and round and finally the poor girl lapsed into a drunken sleep, her head resting on Laith’s thigh.
The cadet ran a finger down her cheek, said her name once, then again louder. When it was clear she wasn’t waking up, he turned to Valyn.
“What in ’Kent’s name happened?”
It didn’t take long to recount the story, and no one seemed to feel like speaking when it was finished. Somewhere down the lane a dog was barking over and over, a trapped, desperate sound.
“Kettral, eh?” Laith asked finally, his voice uncharacteristically subdued.
“Not necessarily,” Lin replied, an edge to her voice. “Rianne said that Amie was looking forward to meeting a soldier that morning, but that doesn’t mean it was a soldier responsible for her death. Whores get slapped around all the time. When a man pays for a girl like cattle, you shouldn’t be surprised when he treats her like cattle.”
Valyn grimaced. “Getting her up all those stairs, tying her up the way we found her, keeping her quiet the whole time—”
“It’s not like Hook is a ’Kent-kissing monastery,” Lin said, cutting him off. “The place is a madhouse. Between sailors brawling down by the docks and the rest of the town getting drunk, you could slaughter an ox in the street at high noon and most people wouldn’t notice.”
“I’m just saying,” Valyn replied, “it doesn’t scream ‘amateur’—”
“It screams fucked up,” Gent rumbled.
“Of course it’s fucked up,” Lin snapped, her voice filled with venom. “The whole thing is fucked up. You’ve been … patronizing Amie for years? Since she was thirteen?”
“Leave it alone, Lin,” Laith replied. “We didn’t kill her. Besides, how old were you the first time you had a tumble? Twelve? Whores and soldiers both grow up fast.”
“She’s not grown up,” Lin snarled. “She’s dead.”
“And we’re trying to figure out who killed her,” Valyn said, trying to calm the two before Rianne woke to a full-blown brawl.
“Some sick bastard who likes to cut up his whores before he has his way with them,” Gent suggested.
Lin darted her eyes at the sleeping girl.
“She’s out,” Laith said, not ungently. “I’ve thought I had some good reasons to drink myself dark, but this…” He shook his head.
“So who?” Valyn persisted. “Lin and I were here on Hook the day she died. It was the day Manker’s collapsed. Sami Yurl was here, too.”
“Sounds like Yurl,” Gent said. “Force a girl. Hurt her.”
Lin looked like she was going to say something sharp, but she bit her lip. “No,” she said almost reluctantly. “He’d force a girl. Maybe even kill her. He’d certainly enjoy it. But the scene we found … the candles … the rope … the wounds—it was too…”
“Too private,” Valyn agreed after a moment’s thought. “Yurl likes to hurt people, to embarrass them, but he likes an audience.”
“Well,” Laith said, frowning, “it’s not like he’s the only one of our esteemed brothers in arms who enjoys causing pain.”
It was a casual remark, but it brought back Valyn’s conversation from the evening before. It seemed a week rather than a single night since he’d threatened Juren for information over at the Black Boat.
“Annick was on Hook the day Amie was killed,” he said abruptly. “The guy who looks after Manker’s saw her there in the morning.”
“She’s certainly a murderous bitch,” Laith replied speculatively.
“Manker’s,” Lin cut in, nodding. “Amie was going to Manker’s that same morning. That’s what Rianne said.”
“For what?” Laith asked.
“To meet a soldier.”
They exchanged a look.
“Well,” Gent said, “I don’t understand much about Annick, but she ain’t a man.”
Valyn waved the objection aside. “We don’t know that it was a man who killed Amie—we know it was a soldier.”
A light breeze had picked up off the harbor, heavy with salt and low tide. Somewhere close by, a man and woman were screaming at each other, either in the street or in one of the sad hovels like the one where Amie and Rianne lived. It went on for a few moments before the woman let out a sharp cry of pain, then fell silent.
“A woman wouldn’t do that to another woman,” Lin said finally.
“Kettral aren’t like other people,” Valyn said. “And Kettral women certainly aren’t like other women.” He tried to lighten the tone of the final comment, but there wasn’t much levity to be had.
“But why?” Gent asked, his blunt features screwed tight in concentration. “Why would Annick want to kill her? To do … that?”
“Why does that bitch do anything?” Laith replied. “She’s crazy as a blind fox in a locked henhouse.”
Though Annick was only fifteen years old, the hardened Kettral trainers joked that she had a rock for a heart and steel for a stomach. She ate by herself in the mess hall, trained by herself on the archery range, and if the rumor was true, slept with her bow lying beside her in her bunk. The idea that she might visit Manker’s for a cup of ale and some idle chatter seemed about as likely as a shark strolling out of the sea on its fins to ask for a bowl of soup.
“Annick might be crazy,” Valyn said quietly, “but she’s deliberate. She could do something like this.”
“We still don’t have any idea why,” Lin pointed out. “Annick went to a tavern and so now she’s a murderer?”
“Just because she’s a woman, she can’t be?” Laith demanded.
Lin opened her mouth, but before she could retort, Valyn interposed a hand.
“‘Assume nothing,’” he said. The first chapter of the Tactics. “If we figure everyone might be a murderer, we’re less likely to be disappointed.”