This was the tricky part. Ruc had come to the baths because of the note he found on the Neck, a note indicating a rendezvous with an unknown contact. It was my note, obviously. I wrote it; I was the contact. According to the rules of my own fiction, however, I was supposed to be expecting the Neck. Which meant I ought to look confused. Confused, but not baffled. I needed to exude an air of competent improvisation, to let him see that I was improvising without letting him see that I was letting him see it. And it wouldn’t hurt if I looked a little bit glamorous into the bargain.
I pulled my shoulders back a fraction, brushed my wet hair from my eyes, tried to look lush and languorous. Rassambur hadn’t afforded much practice when it came to looking lush and languorous.
“Someone break your nose again?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“You ought to quit letting people hit you. Your face is nice, but it gets a little uglier each time someone breaks it.”
That last wasn’t exactly true. I liked that slightly crooked nose, those faint smooth scars marring his skin.
“If I remember right,” he replied, “you’re responsible for some of the breaking.”
I shook my head, took a couple strokes toward him, paused when I was an arm’s span away, then raised a hand to his face, touched the scars on his chin, his right cheekbone. My stupid heart was thudding away in my chest, far faster and more violently than it had been in the moments before I killed the Neck. I supposed that seemed promising, in a very uncomfortable way. Thudding hearts and stupidity seemed to be hallmarks of love. On the other hand, the incessant hammering made it difficult to concentrate. I’d forgotten what it was like to be close to him. The hot steam folded around us, blotting out the rest of the pool, the rest of the world.
Ruc made no move to block my hand. He stood chest deep in the water, still but ready—he always looked ready, even when he slept—watching me the way a boxer watches an opponent’s first moves in the opening moments of a match. I dropped my hand, took a step back.
“If you’d been faster,” I said, “I might have hit you less.”
He snorted. “How are your ribs?”
My hand searched out the spot under the surface of the water. I could still feel the ridge where they’d mended.
“Better than Bedisa made them.”
“How long did that take?”
“A couple months. Well worth the lesson.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Which was?”
“Keep the elbow tucked until the hook’s already in motion.”
“Kid’s mistake.”
“I was a kid.”
“You were pretty fucking vicious for a kid.”
“Emphasis on pretty, fucking, or vicious?”
“High marks on all three.”
I winked at him. “I love getting high marks.”
My breathing was hot and fast, the way it always was before a fight, and my heart kept hammering away, as though it were a bell hung above some outpost town, and a sentry were pounding the alarm. He ran his eyes over my shoulders, down the front of my body.
“Some new scars.”
I nodded toward a patch of puckered skin on his shoulder, the remnant of a nasty puncture wound, one he hadn’t had in Sia. “I’m not the only one.”
He shrugged. “I keep telling myself I’m going to stop fighting. Take up pottery or something. Somehow I never get around to it.”
“We’re made how we’re made.”
“Not a philosophy,” he observed, “that leaves a lot of room for personal growth.”
“Pythons don’t mature into lily roses.”
Ruc studied me for a while, then shook his head. Coming from someone else, the motion might have indicated some sort of capitulation. Ruc, however, was not one to capitulate. “What are you doing here, Pyrre?”
I glanced over my shoulder, as though looking for the Neck, then turned back to him. If anything, he was more muscular than I remembered, not just stronger, but harder, like a statue dropped in the middle of the baths and abandoned.
“The same thing as you, would be my guess.”
“Then your guess is wrong, unless you pulled a note out of a dead man’s vest.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I try to stay out of the clothing of dead men.”
“An admirable trait, but not always practical in my line of work.”
“So it’s true. Annur gave you command of the Greenshirts.”
He nodded. “I should have kept boxing in Sia. More honest.”
I glanced around the bathhouse again. “City seems to be thriving under your watch.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Long enough to see that it’s not on fire.”
“Don’t read too much into that. It’s tough to burn down a city built in the middle of a fucking river.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Far overhead, lost in the gloom and steam, the bathhouse gong began tolling the evening hour, the hour indicated on the note I’d left inside the Neck’s vest. The deep bass trembled inside my chest. Ruc waited until it was over, then shook his head.
“He’s not coming.”
I cocked my head to the side. “Who’s not?”
“The man you’re hoping to meet.”
“How do you know it’s a man?” I asked, pursing my lips. “Have you been keeping tabs on my bathhouse assignations?”
“I know it’s a man,” Ruc replied, “because he was found in the privy of The Bronze Croc with his throat slit, bleeding through the shitter into the canal. He had a letter,” Ruc tapped his bare chest, just where I’d tucked the note, “details for a meeting. That meeting is here.” He patted the water in front of him gently. “Now.”
“Ah.” I gave the syllable time to breathe. “And you think it has something to do with me.”
“Here you are.”
I cast an eye around the huge open space.
“Lots of people here.”
“Not with your history.”
“You don’t know my history.”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I tried to find you, six years ago. I’m good at finding people. It’s what I did in the legions, when I wasn’t killing people. It’s the reason the Annurian kenarang put me in charge of the Greenshirts. When you disappeared, I looked for you, and do you know what I found?”
I tapped a finger against my lips. “Nothing?”
“A truly remarkable amount of nothing. A woman who fights as well as I do, probably better than I do, if you give her a knife, appears out of nowhere, dominates, alongside me of course, the bare-knuckle boxing scene in one of Annur’s largest cities for months, then disappears. No one knows her. No one trained her or trained with her. No one saw her before she appeared, evidently out of thin air, and no one saw her after.” He moved closer to me as he spoke, slowly but inevitably as the rising tide, until he stood just inches away. “And now, after six years in occultation, she appears here, at the precise point where a murdered Annurian legionary—not just a legionary, but the commander of an entire legion—was supposed to arrive for a secret meeting, and at the precise time.”
I wet my lips. “Imagine your surprise.”
He shook his head. “Quite the contrary: I feel an old wound finally beginning to mend, the rent of a long-standing mystery starting to stitch itself whole.”
“Well, you don’t need me if the mystery is stitching itself.”
I took a step back, silently praying that he would follow.
He raised his brows. “Retreating? Not like the Pyrre I remember.”
“Just giving you some space.”
“You gave me six years’ worth.”
“So another few days won’t hurt.”