*
Arin’s mind had gone dark, which was perhaps why he didn’t notice that the hallway had, too. All the lamps but one had burned down. The last sputtered in its oil.
He hadn’t been paying attention to where he was going. He’d intended to return to his rooms, but this hall was nowhere near that wing. He found himself in a disused part of the palace hung with frayed tapestries that—as far as he could tell in the dim light—glorified Valorian conquests from a century before, when Herran was at its height and Valoria was a speck of a country with unwashed warriors who liked the sight of blood so much they’d cut their own flesh to get it.
The tapestries were crude. It might have amused him, if he were in the mood to be amused, how bad Valorians were at beauty. They stole it. They forced it. They had never been able to bring beauty to life.
Yet this made him think of Kestrel’s hands springing from piano keys, and coming down again, and running wild, and this made him think of the ruined dress, and this made him stride farther into the shadowed hall as if he could escape his own thoughts, and that brought him smack against a blank wall.
He swore. He looked up at the scrolled woodwork of the ceiling and tried to be very careful not to insult the god of the lost. Instead, he focused on the woodwork carvings of his dead end, and noticed an odd, rigid line cutting through the swirling pattern. Narrowing his eyes in the light of the dying lamp, he caught a gleam in the ceiling. Metal. There was a metal strip running horizontally across the ceiling—no, not across, not exactly. It was set into the ceiling.
Arin was so distracted by wondering what that thing was that he didn’t see a shadow slip toward him and then behind.
He heard a metallic cranking sound. That line burst into full being—an iron gate hurtling down from its slit in the ceiling.
It hit the stone floor. It trapped Arin into the dead end. And even though he was already turning, adrenaline punching through his veins and singing high in his brain, he didn’t quite see the shadow behind him become a man. He didn’t see a face.
There was a rush of air. Arin was shoved back against the grate, and then he didn’t see anything at all.
14
Arin lay on stone. His neck crooked painfully against something hard and cold. It took several blurry seconds before he thought gate, and then ambush.
He didn’t move. He didn’t open his eyes. He couldn’t have been knocked out for long, because hands were patting him down for weapons. Arin wore no dagger at his hip. That was too Valorian. But his knife was pulled from one boot. His attacker came down on him, kneeling on his chest. Heavy. The air squeezed out of him.
Arin’s head throbbed. It took everything he had not to be sick.
The weight on his chest shifted. “Let’s make you pretty,” the man said, and set the tip of a blade against Arin’s lips.
Arin’s fist cocked up and slammed into bone. He shoved the man off him. He was awake now, he was on his feet. He wouldn’t go down again.
His attacker shook away the stun of Arin’s blow, his hair catching the lamplight. The man was blond. Valorian. Dressed in military black.
And well armed. A knife in each hand, a short sword at his waist. One of those knives was Arin’s.
He’d have to get it back.
Arin was still trapped between the man and the gate. A bad position. The man swung the hand that held Arin’s blade, and Arin ducked. The knife raked the gate behind him, shot sparks. Hitting metal instead of flesh seemed to throw Arin’s opponent off balance, and Arin drove into the opening made when the man’s swing had gone wide and wrong. Arin thrust a knee up, sank it into the man’s gut, seized a wrist, and wrested back his knife.
But not before the man sliced through the air with his own.
That dagger was beautiful. Arin saw its flash. It arrested him somehow, it started him thinking when he had absolutely no business thinking. Arin didn’t flinch away fast enough. The blade cut into his face.
Pain seared from forehead to cheek. Red flooded Arin’s left eye. He was blinking, he was half-blind, he was desperate to know if someone can still blink if an eye has been gouged out. He wept blood. His face had split. He could feel air inside the parted flesh, and his hand instinctively went to it.
That saved him. Without meaning to, Arin had blocked a second blow, which caught him in the forearm. It tipped him sideways, and in his shock Arin didn’t fight the momentum, which knocked him against the long wall of the hallway.
He had dropped his knife. But his hand was scrabbling the wall even as his mind screamed at it not to be stupid, there was no weapon there.
Arin’s hand wrapped around a dead lamp set into the wall and ripped it free. He smashed it against the man’s head. He heard a cry. He ground the shards in.
And now the fight was his. Now Arin was remembering every nasty trick he’d ever learned with his fists, elbows, and feet, and he was forgetting that he’d never really been trained to hold a weapon, except as a boy, and that boy’s arm had trembled under the weight of a child-size sword, and little Arin had begged not to be made to do it, and so what did his grown self know about the sword, which he yanked from the attacker’s scabbard? What did Arin know about the Valorian dagger that appeared in his hand as if a god had set it there? What could he do even as both of his blades were hurtling through the darkness, and the Valorian cried, “Please,” and Arin stabbed into him as if this was an art, this was his art?
With all the grace in the world, Arin’s body said mine, and cut the man’s soul right out of him.
Where was Arin’s breath?
He gasped. With one good eye, Arin looked down at the bloody mess of the Valorian at his feet. He dropped the sword. He tried to wipe away the red-black blindness from the left side of his face. Blood streamed. No matter how Arin pawed at the flowing wet curtain, he couldn’t see through it.
He gave up.
He was still holding the Valorian dagger. He was holding it strangely, as if it belonged to him, which was impossible. Yet his fingers clutched it and refused to let go.
His breath still shuddering through him, the pain still hot, Arin lifted the dagger into the weak light.
He knew this blade.
How could he know it?
The dagger was light, well balanced. It hadn’t been made for a strong hand. Arin had been a blacksmith; he knew quality when he felt it. The tang was simple yet strong. The hilt had been chased in gold, but not overly so—nothing gave the dagger too much weight or interfered with its clean efficiency.
And it was loved. Someone had taken very good care of the blade that had carved Arin’s face open.
None of this explained why Arin’s hand held the weapon so tightly. He frowned, then rubbed at the blood on the hilt. There was something red beneath the red. A ruby.
It was a seal.
The dagger’s seal showed the hooked talons of a kestrel.