“Seth,” Annalise cried, and he heard her clattering behind him, her sharp, determined breath, and oh no she was fast as fuck.
He zig-zagged around a tree, trying to break her vision, and then there was a squelch and something cold and viscous was glued to his leg, clinging leaves to him, and when he put his hand on it to see what it was his hand was stuck too, now.
She’d hexed him. The Weaver on her arm was hunkered now behind its web.
“Fucking chancer.” She laughed harshly and yanked him across the forest floor on his stomach, through the thickening muck. “Get your skinny arse—do not struggle with me, il Gutierre.”
A cuff locked around his wrist.
“I’m just finding a place to hide,” he protested. “Just getting out of the—”
She slapped the other end of the cuff onto a sturdy young tree’s skyward limb. “That would have been nice to have in the actual fight. You know how these work?” She peeled her sleeve up the massive ivory pillar of her forearm and pointed a finger at an illustration in the intricate weave of them. A web, behind which an illustrated spider hid as if in waiting for a dermatic fly. “You better hope none of those bleeding gougers on our tail manage to disarm me, ‘cause I just blew an active on you and now my sticky fingers are gone for an hour. Dumbshite.”
“Please,” he said, voice thin and desperate. “It wasn’t my—Please, Madam Verdugo. Just let me go and I’ll stay out of trouble. I’ll find a roadhouse with a kitchen. I can cook on a line.”
“Shut up.”
“I’ll stay the hell away from men like Rohan. Seraphs take me, I will.”
“Shut up. For a bleeding second.” She leaned forward so their eyes were level. “Listen to me, Seth il Gutierre, and listen good, cause there’s no time to repeat myself. I thought this was obvious, but maybe it isn’t. I’m not gonna execute you, goofy little fuckup that you are.”
His next round of pleas faltered. “You’re not?”
“You stole my stuff,” she said. “Hence the unkind name. But you were set up and chumped out. I believe that. I’d be a raging bitch to all-the-way blame you for that. They don’t go and blame the sword when I take a head off with it. Well—they do, sort of, but in poetical terms. I sentence you to helping me find what you stole and stealing it back, plus one whack on the ear.”
She gave him a light smack upside the head.
“Ow,” he said.
“You’re a wee shaggy wild animal right now, shrinking from every hand that comes near you and pissing in the dirt, and now it’s time to go bipedal and put big boy pants on. So cop the fuck on. No more running, right? No more ducking and dodging. From now on, you stand in one spot, stick at one thing, and fucking well apply yourself to something better than this, something that doesn’t get people fucking chasing you out of every billet you bed in.”
“I’m just a thief. I’m—”
“You’re not just a thief.” She shoved a black-clad finger in his face. “You’re a thief who stole from a Verdugo and lived.”
“So far.”
“I know there is something worth something in you, Seth il Gutierre. And I’m sure you’ve had many posh and prancey people tell you that, and you’ve said, oh aye ma’am, I’ll turn my newest new leaf over tomorrow morning, you’ll see. But those people couldn’t whack your fucking head the fuck off.” Her biting burr turned the fuck into a fook. “And I can. And when I say it, you listen.”
He listened.
A hex-engine in the distance, its mite traps clattering, its dynamo echoing like an enraged beast. Annalise’s dark brows lowered. She removed her sunglasses from a hip pocket and flicked their arms open. “Righty-o. Hope you’re not queasy about blood. You’re like as not to see some.”
“Can you uncuff me?” he asked.
“It’s like I said.” She slipped her sunglasses on. “I’ll handle it.”
Louder came the engine, and louder, and then its roar died to a rumble, and then it stopped. Annalise removed her coat, folded it, and placed it in Demetrius’ saddlebag. She murmured soft encouragement to the horse, rubbed his nose, and stepped away.
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It was as she limbered herself, raising her elbow and rolling her shoulder, that Seth finally forced himself to admit that striking was damning the Verdugo with faint praise.
Every woman Seth had ever met—had ever been with—had grown up on the Plainland. A Plainland life thinned you out, made you willowy and slight and sunkissed. None of them had ever had the diet, the training, the tattoos, and the sheer genetic good fortune to look like the Verdugo. She wasn’t thin, certainly—her waist was solid as a tree trunk. But her shoulders and hips were wide and strapping and in proportion to shape a plentiful, feminine hourglass out of her curves, and the combination of strength and softness was—
Sharp voices echoed in through the trees. Snapping twigs. Seth’s vision was pried away from Annalise al Ydris’s big butt.
She hopped lightly on tiptoes a handful of times until her heavy stance had gone loose and slinky. She stepped in front of Seth (that orange peel and leather again) and squared her broad shoulders.
Saints, she looked strong. Like smiling death.
The half-dozen men who picked their way through the trees surely thought so, too, because their chest-voiced bravado and their purposeful gaits slowed as they came into view, their bristling weaponry held a little closer to their own vitals.
Annalise glanced backward over her illustrated trapezius at the hapless pickpocket she’d handcuffed to a tree. “Wink,” she whispered. Then she turned to the approaching murderers, and nodded. “Alright, gents.”
Polecat was in the lead, of course. Rohan’s homicidal handpick. He nodded back. “Madam Verdugo.”
“So glad to see this little weasel hasn’t given you the slip.” This from a unibrowed man with a matched set of quillon daggers in his belt and a mite-rifle slung on his back. Prichard the prick.
“That’s right,” Annalise said, cool and professional. “He’s in my custody.”
“He’s the one who stole from you, y’know,” Prichard said.
“I’m aware, thanks.”
“Were you aware that Rohan il Agante was already hunting him in your name?” Polecat asked. “Hoping to squeeze out whatever confederates he may have had?”
“Sure look.” Annalise’s grin cracked back through her solemnity. “If Rohan il Agante wanted to squeeze out a confederate, it’d be behind closed doors with his pants round his ankles.”
Prichard nailed Seth with a look. “He lied to you, then.”
“We barely know each other, Prichard,” Seth said. “We’ve said three words to each other. What’s your problem with me?”
“Fuck you, il Gutierre.”
“Weasel, man? Come on.”
“He didn’t lie to me,” Annalise said. Deadly calm again.
Polecat’s filed teeth clicked into his version of a friendly smile. “I assure you—”
“I’m plenty assured already, sir. Thank you.”
“You’re not from these parts,” Polecat said. “I can tell. You don’t know the kind of man Patre Rohan il Agante is. A wealthy man. His friendship is valuable. Much more valuable than whatever that fellow could give you.”
“You can even take his head and his hexis yourself, ma’am,” A skinny fellow with a spear and one of those unfortunate-type beards said. Nikolas? It certainly started with an N. “We don’t mind.”
“I inherited Erheis’ books and notes. I know the kind of man Rohan is. I know the kind of man Erheis was.” Annalise cocked a hip and rested her hand on the hilt of her side sword. “I am not that kind of man.”
“Guys.” An urgent murmur from the man in the rear, a bare-pated guy with an axe. “Let’s just go back to the patre.”
Polecat held up a nixing hand. “Rohan wants to talk to you. Just talk.”
Annalise removed her hat and tossed it lightly to the mud. “I don’t want to talk to him.”
Polecat took a slow step forward. “That’s a shame.”
“I’m warning you to come no closer.”
Another step forward from Polecat. “That’s a shame, too.”
Rivulets of sweat dripped down the axe man’s shiny head. “Guys. Let’s just—we should just—let’s all be—we’re all reasonable people here.”
“That’s right,” Polecat said, and raised his leg.
“Ah—before you move.” Annalise held up a finger. “Hampering a verdugo of the legion on her duties—that’s punishable by death, at my discretion. And merciful as I’ve tried to be today, the legion is counting on the hexis I take, and I’m behind. You five would catch me right up.”
“Madam Verdugo,” Nikolas said. “Surely you wouldn’t kill us just for talking.”
“Talking? No. But I will kill you for taking another step toward me. Yes.” Annalise sighed. “Deary me. I suspected this might happen. I spared a goat thief or two and gave you the wrong idea about me, I’m afraid. This ain’t a threat to me, boys.”
She splayed her hands out in front of her and cracked their heavy knuckles.
“This is an excuse,” she said.
Silence in the woods but for the drumming of the rain. The men looked at one another, seeking courage in their numbers.
“Clear as I can make it, gents,” Annalise said. “Take any step that isn’t back where you came from, and by the apposite wrath and merciful name of the Sorcerer General, you will die by the sword.”
Polecat’s thumb tucked into his belt, a finger’s width from the cutlass that sat there. He matched Annalise’s grin; his vertical-slit pupils dilated. “I don’t believe that, Madam Verdugo.”
He lifted his soft leather shoe back up, and placed it, with slow deliberate malice, in front of the other.
Annalise’s face shifted. Polecat’s face shifted, too. The smiles stayed on. But they were different smiles, now. The paradoxical sweetness of Annalise’s punctured and drained away. The cold professionalism of Polecat’s turned into a rictus leer. Just teeth, now, and hunger. His men crowded in close and uncertain—all except the axe man, who was standing and sweating and shaking where he’d halted the first time.
“Well, now,” Annalise said, and looked between the other five. “That’s settled, aye?”
“Always been a notch I’ve hoped to carve.” Polecat’s finger slid back the terminal inch to his cutlass’s grip. “Killing a Verdugo. I’ve never killed a Verdugo before.”
“No?” Annalise’s right hand found the pommel of her executioner sword where it rose past her shoulder. Her left closed around the basket hilt of her side sword and clicked a strip of steel out from its ebony scabbard. “I have.”
And they stared at one another across the mud. And they were quite still, the Verdugo and the killer.
And then, quite suddenly, they weren’t.