The rain dropped around us like a cage, drumming its furious cadence on all the surfaces of Dombang, ten million silver fingers testing the roof tiles, the deck, stippling the water, staining the silk of Ela’s dress, running in streams down her face. She licked it off her lips as though it weren’t just a summer squall, but the wine that had spilled so recently from her cup. I glanced at my fallen knife where it lay between us. Ela had moved effortlessly enough so far, but she wore high wooden clogs, while I was still in my bare feet. I’d be faster on the newly slick deck, more nimble.
I dove for the blade, caught it in my left hand, rolled to my feet, used the momentum to bring both knives down in a sweeping, overhand attack. Ela turned sideways, narrowing the target, but I felt the knives bite home hard all the same, the shock of impact shuddering up through my arms and shoulders. The priestess smiled. It took my mind a quarter moment to realize that both blades had swept past her, missing her flesh, plunging into the railing instead, the front one so close that it caught the torn flap of her ki-pan, pinning it to the wood. It was a strange almost-embrace, my fists still wrapped tight around the knives to either side of her, and Ela stepped into it, kissing me lightly on the forehead as she slammed a fist into my stomach.
I sprawled backward across the deck, blades torn from my grip.
“Of course, Thurian was a heretic,” she continued amiably.
I managed a noise somewhere between a cough and a groan, wondered if the other woman had crushed anything crucial inside of me.
“She believed that we are something other than this.…” As the priestess stepped away from the railing, a long swath of her dress tore away. She touched her bare stomach, the skin soaked with rain. “Thurian believed that a woman—or a man, for that matter—is something other than her body. Separate from it.”
I tried to stand, felt one of my ribs grind unsteadily inside me, then subsided back onto the deck. The rain had dissolved the world. I couldn’t see the buildings across the canal anymore, or any of the river craft in the canal itself. The outlines of our own inn were barely visible above me, looming through the sheeting rain. Ela and I might have come untethered from the mortal world. The wood beneath our feet might have been the deck of a ship suspended in the storm, caught between something too dark to be day, too green-gray-bright for night.
“I had to kill her, of course,” Ela went on.
I tried once more to shove myself upright, managing, this time around, to sit.
“You killed another priestess because she wasn’t obsessed with her own body?”
Ela watched me a while through the rain’s sodden veil, then let out a long, ostentatious sigh.
“I had hoped to spend more time buying dresses and less time lecturing.”
“No one’s stopping you.”
“I suppose not,” she mused. “Just my overdeveloped sense of duty.” The word should have seemed ludicrous on her lips, but she managed to say it without cracking a smile. She shrugged, then continued. “Poor little Thurian thought there was something inside her, something that was more her than all the parts she could see and feel.”
Ela crossed the deck, extended a hand to me. I took it warily. She was stronger than she looked, and hauled me to my feet easily, then set a hand on my shoulder as I steadied myself. I tried to ignore the pain lancing through my side while planning the next attack.
“She wanted to be more than her heart,” Ela said, touching my chest with a finger. “More than her face. More than all those adorable organs hidden beneath her skin.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why. She had a beautiful face—wide brown eyes, delicious lips. I took her heart out of her body to look at it; you’ve never seen such a sweet little heart.”
“Maybe…” I managed, twisting slightly in the priestess’s grip, “you should have left it inside her a while longer.”
I shifted my hips as I said the last word, seized the hand she had set on my shoulder, twisted at the waist, then hurled her across the deck. She landed on her back, and then I was on her. My side felt like someone had buried a knife in it, but for just a moment I seemed to have the advantage, and I didn’t intend to let it go. I made hammers of my fists, then went for her face. Ela caught me by the wrists.
“She was a heretic,” she said, as though we were sitting casually across from each other in some bureaucrat’s office rather than fighting in the middle of the driving rain.
“Because she believed there was more to her than bone and blood?”
“Exactly. What would you be, Pyrre, without your blood?” She lifted her head incrementally from the deck to nod toward my neck. “I can see it beating in your veins right now. What would this fight be without blood and bone? What would it mean? If you deny all this,” by which she seemed to mean everything—the blood-warm rain, the purple-gray bruise of the sky, our two bodies straining against each other, “then you deny life itself.”
“We’re not priestesses of life.”
“You are not a priestess at all,” Ela pointed out. “If, however, you manage to pass your Trial, you will come away knowing one thing: there is no death without life.”
“I thought you were supposed to be teaching me about love.”
Soaked through by the rain, Ela’s grip was loosening on my wrist. I took a deep breath, rolled to the side, twisted, felt free for half a moment, then realized my mistake: if my hand was free, that meant that Ela, too, had an extra hand, one she used to seize my hair, then, as she rolled aside, to slam my face into the wood. I managed to twist away, but eel-quick she was on top of me, legs scissored around my waist, a tiny knife she had pulled from somewhere in her shredded dress pressed against my throat. All I could see was the slick wood inches from my face.
“What I am teaching you is this,” she purred in my ear. “We are our bodies. What we do with them is what we are. This position…” she tapped the blade against my neck, “is almost killing.…”
Then, in a heartbeat, the knife was gone. She slid a hand along the side of my chin, pressed her soaking cheek against mine. “This is almost loving.…” Her hand shifted, taking my chin in a grip I knew all too well, one quick twist away from breaking my neck, “Almost killing again.…” I went slack against her grip, ready for the last, absolute blackness. She let me go, rose fluidly to her feet, crossed to the railing to stare out into the rain. I managed to prop myself halfway up to stare at her back. When she spoke again she hadn’t really shed her lazy, playful voice, but there was another voice beneath it now, or inside it, something normally hidden or drowned out, a note almost beyond all hearing, felt mostly in the bones.
“Love is like killing,” she said. “You do it with every part of you, or not at all.”
11
Night’s last mud-dark weight still sat hot and quiet on the city when someone began hammering furiously on my door. I went for my knives first, shoving aside the light sheet, snatching the blades off the bedside table, then rolling to the floor. The floor isn’t generally a coveted position from which to enter a fight, but I wasn’t in the fight yet, and I’d spent too much time studying the “Knock, Wait, Stab” approach to killing to go near the door with my head held high for the convenience of my adversary.