“Killing is not something you do privately, in the space of your own head. It happens here.” She opened her arms, as though to embrace the whole world. “In the relationship between bodies.”
I pushed myself slowly to my feet, turned to face the priestess once more. I’d managed to hack away a neat section of her ki-pan, but the smooth skin beneath seemed untouched. I flipped the knife, catching it in the old Antheran grip, then drew its companion from its sheath. I might have been holding a pair of potatoes for all Ela seemed to notice.
“It’s the same with love,” she went on. “You’re going at the whole thing as though it’s a problem with you, inside of you, sealed off from the rest of the world. It’s not. Love isn’t a part of you or your lover. It’s not something you can have, like a pile of gold or a pet pig. Love is this,” she said, gesturing to the emptiness between us. “The space between.”
I took half a step forward, testing that space, searching for the right distance, close enough to kill without being killed.
“There’s space everywhere,” I growled, “between everyone.”
“Don’t be obtuse, Pyrre. It’s the nature of the space that matters.”
Then, abruptly, she turned her back on me. This time, I didn’t hesitate. I went high with one blade, low with the other, raking the air in opposite directions even as I closed. Ela, without turning, caught both of my wrists in the moment before the steel drove home. It was impossible; even a priestess of Ananshael couldn’t block an attack without seeing it. Then I saw her brown eyes reflected in the glass of the window, her amused smile.
“This configuration, for instance”—there was no strain in her voice, despite the fact that I was putting my full weight behind those blades—“is wrong. There is a shape to a kill without which it is not a kill, just as there is a shape to love, without which it is just flirting, or fawning, or fucking.” She shrugged, twisted, shifted my blades, and was free.
My breath chafed in my throat, hot and ragged. Barely a pace away, Ela glanced down at the fabric of her ki-pan, ran a finger along the rent, then shook her head regretfully. “You know, Pyrre,” she said, looking back up at me, “there are other ways to get a woman out of a dress.” She picked up her cup of ta from the railing where she’d left it, then took a long sip.
“That’s all it is to you, isn’t it?” I demanded. Back in Rassambur, I would never have spoken to a priestess that way, but then, back in Rassambur no one had ever taunted me. I’d been defeated certainly, hundreds of times over in training and sparring matches, beaten or bloodied with just about every conceivable weapon. Priestesses and priests had mercilessly revealed the flaws in my technique, and yet it had all felt like a part of our greater devotion. There was no shame in straining to better serve our god.
What Ela was doing now, however, didn’t feel like devotion; it felt like a game she was playing. She wasn’t trying to make me a better killer or a better priest. We were fighting—sort of—but she wasn’t teaching me anything new about my knife work. Instead, she just kept smiling and taunting me about my own failure. I found, standing there panting, that I really did want to put a knife inside her. Not a sentiment worthy of a servant of Ananshael, but I didn’t feel like Ananshael’s servant. I felt like a stupid little girl, a girl so broken she couldn’t even fall in love, not with anyone, not even once. I ached to drive a knife into Ela’s eye, but failing that, I lashed out with my words, pouring as much scorn as I could into my voice.
“That’s your great lesson? That love is just a matter of bodies? Of the way they line up next to each other? Stick a knife in a neck or a chest or a gut, and it’s killing; get a tongue in your cunt or a cock in your ear, and it’s love, is that it?”
“Sometimes,” Ela agreed mildly. “I’d try, personally, to discourage the ear scenario, but we all have our peccadilloes.” My words seemed to have found no more blood than my knives. “There’s a reason,” she went on, “that lovers tend to speak with their bodies. It can be easier to see the space between two people when you’re dealing with flesh, to apprehend the shape of it, to believe.” She tapped a finger against her lips, as though caught by a momentary thought or a memory. “A warm tongue tracing the right circles has a way of … confirming one’s faith.”
“Meaning you can’t be in love unless you’re fucking.”
Ela laughed, a long, breathy sound. “You would have liked Thurian,” she said, then narrowed her eyes. “I hope you haven’t quit trying to kill me. I didn’t take you for a quitter.”
I took a long breath, shifted right, trying to box her into a corner of the small deck. She moved with me, smooth as a dancer, sliding around until she stood just at the railing, back to the canal, the whole city to the east spread out behind her. A hot, thick wind was blowing in off the ocean, scraping green-black clouds over the delta, blotting the sun.
“Who was Thurian?” I asked, only half listening for the answer.
“A priestess,” Ela replied. “Very serious.” She waggled a finger. “Like you.”
This time I threw the knife, a quick, underhand flick that sent the steel spinning toward her gut. Ela barely moved. She’d been holding her clay cup in front of her, two fingers slipped through the handle. As I threw, she let the vessel slip, pivot around her fingers, so that where the blade should have plunged into her stomach, it met the inside of the cup instead, steel grinding against the hardened clay, then clattering to the deck in a splash of spilled ta. It had been so slight, that movement that saved her life, an afterthought, an accident.
She righted the cup, peered inside, then shook her head. “I was enjoying that.”