This, at last, was language I understood. My years in Rassambur had been short on discussions of love, but I knew my striking range—with each of half a hundred weapons—down to a finger’s breadth. Ela watched me, then shrugged. “You may as well get out a knife, while you’re at it—anything to make you feel a little more at ease.” I hesitated, then slid a knife from the sheath at my thigh. The weight of the weapon in my hand made the whole world seem more stable.
Ela made a little flourish with one hand, as though she were introducing me to a crowd. “So, posture matters, obviously.”
“When you’re trying to kill someone.”
“Love is like killing, but without all the blood.” She frowned, as though reconsidering. “Usually. The point is, you know more than you think you know.”
“What I know,” I growled, “is how to put this knife in your eye, or your chest, or your throat, or any of a dozen other places—”
“Actually,” Ela said, raising an elegant finger in objection, “you know how to put that knife in the eye, or the chest, or the throat, or any of a dozen places belonging to someone a good deal slower than me, but never mind that. The point is, love is like this. It matters how you hold your body.”
She was smiling, but it seemed to be her normal smile, warm with the joy of a woman at one with herself and at home in the world. I studied that smile for a hint of mockery. “If this is some joke about sex…”
She waved away the objection lazily. “Any fool can fuck—perhaps not well, but that’s beside the point. We’re discussing love, here, Pyrre.” Sunlight sparkled in her eyes, tiny stars bright enough to survive the daylight. “Please try to elevate your mind above such carnal pursuits.”
I realized I was glaring at the priestess. “This is what I look like when I’m elevated.”
Something about the fighting pose had righted me, returned my equilibrium. Things felt familiar again. Somewhere out of sight, the gong began to sound in Intarra’s temple, massive, sun-bright bronze trembling out the noon hour beneath the priest’s hammer. I spared a glance for that sun—furious, hot, lodged for just a moment at the day’s apex. Sweat slicked my back, matted my hair to my scalp, but poised as I was in one of Ananshael’s oldest forms, none of that mattered. Instead of an idiot who didn’t know what to do with her body, I was a vessel for the god, the never-ending possibility of death made flesh.
Ela stretched her arms languorously above her head, graceful as an unfolding flower. Her eyes were closed, face uplifted to the sun. “Now,” she murmured. “Kill me.”
I stared. “Excuse me?”
A tiny frown creased her expression, but she didn’t open her eyes. “Do you say that every time you kill a woman?”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s why we’re doing this.” She took a deep breath, chest filling against the silk of her ki-pan, as though she were savoring the warm air in her lungs. “It’s time to kill me, Pyrre. And please, try your hardest.”
I hesitated only half a heartbeat. Someone is always fighting in Rassambur, sparring with broad blades on the sun-baked clay, going knuckle-to-knuckle in the blocked-out squares inside the training barns, hammering through spear forms on top of one of the neighboring mesas. You learn early on how to pull punches, how to twist a blade at the last moment to avoid a killing stroke. It’s not that killing is forbidden—we would make strange servants of Ananshael if it were—so much that each killing should be deliberate, an act of true devotion, not just a mistake made in training. I debated, in my half heartbeat of hesitation, whether to go at Ela with a curtal Manjari thrust, an attack that would draw blood without killing. Back in Rassambur, it would have been a reasonable assumption, but we had left Rassambur behind months earlier. She’d told me to kill her. If I succeeded, Kossal would still be alive to Witness the end of my Trial.
The smooth skin of her throat was exposed. I went after it.
Ela didn’t parry. She didn’t even really dodge. As my knife came at her, she took a step back, quick and smooth as a dancer caught up in the music, dropped her arms to her side, and bent away from me. My motion ended with hers. I was at the full extent of my lunge, the tip of my knife bright against her neck, touching, but not quite close enough to cut. Ela winked at me.
“You see?”
The question seemed to suggest an end to the fight—if it could even be called a fight—but the priestess hadn’t told me to stop trying to kill her, so I didn’t. My next attack was awkward, a clumsy stumble forward out of the full lunge, but my knife was already against her neck. I had to close with her only a finger’s breadth to nick the smooth artery beneath her skin. Ela anticipated the attack, moved with the knife, keeping the blade against her skin without allowing it to cut.
It was the most ostentatious display of competence I’d ever seen. Priestesses and priests of Ananshael are encouraged to be discreet. It is easier to give people to the god if those people believe you to be a wheelwright or a gardener or a haberdasher—anything but a member of the dreaded Skullsworn. As a result, the training at Rassambur emphasizes speed and efficiency. If you can kill a woman in one heartbeat, it’s sloppy to use two. There’s almost no place for the kind of dangerous, showy game Ela was playing with my knife and her neck, but then, Ela had never quite fit with the rest of the priests in the first place. There weren’t a lot of silk ki-pans in Rassambur.
She smiled at me over the length of gleaming steel. “You’re thinking about love all wrong.”
I almost hurled myself forward into yet another lunge, but my lunges hadn’t done much good. I wasn’t sure just how I was giving myself away, but Ela obviously knew the signal. I took a step back, letting my arm drop into a low guard, ready to feint left with the knife, then level the true attack with a stiffened fist. Instead of taking the offered space, however, Ela matched her advance to my retreat, moving forward with the knife, so close the blade sliced down the front of her ki-pan as I shifted to the low guard. She was close enough that I could smell the jasmine on her, close enough that I could have leaned forward to kiss her. She smiled, and for a moment I was too shocked to move.
“You think love is something that happens in here,” she tapped me once between the eyes, “or here,” in the center of my chest. Then she frowned, her brow wrinkling. “Don’t stop killing, Pyrre, just because I’m talking.”
I slammed the blade into her stomach, ripping upward through her diaphragm into the lung. I would have, anyway, if she hadn’t pivoted with the attack, letting it slide by her. My knife parted the silk along her waist, then sailed off into empty space. Hauled forward by the violence of the attack, I tripped over Ela’s outstretched foot, falling clumsily to the wooden deck.
“See?” she said again.
That word was starting to wear on my nerves.