Borath hadn't planned that he would die today.
He had been doing this for eleven years.
He had taken the job in the beginning because the alternative had been worse and the alternative had been very bad, and he had continued taking jobs because by the time the alternative became less bad he had already been doing it long enough that stopping was a problem of its own.
He had a wife in the port city. She did not know specifically what he did. And he made sure it stayed that way, which he had understood as love of a particular kind and had tried to deserve.
He had two children. Girls. Eight and six. The eight-year-old was going to be clever — cleverer than him, cleverer than her mother, the kind of clever that required resources he did not currently have and was taking this job to get.
Fifteen Crowns.
It hadn't felt like enough in the room. He had said nothing because you did not say not enough in that room. But he had thought it.
He thought it now.
He had lost the girl in the trees — not entirely, she was still ahead of him, but she was moving wrong. Not away wrong. Toward wrong. Which meant she had realized he was there and had decided that was information she could use.
He thought that she was inexperienced so it was an easy income stream.
He revised. He was wrong.
Which he thought was much worse.
But he could handle it. His experience would beat hers. She was still a child.
He heard her — a branch, behind him…
How did she get there??
The sound of her foot placed on something that gave her away — and he turned, professional, already adjusting—
She was already inside his reach.
Which was a mistake.
The knife went into the space below his ribs — not elegant, not a trained strike, the strike of someone who had located a vulnerability from anatomical knowledge rather than combat experience — and she pushed it up.
He went down slowly. The pain foreign then hitting him all at once.
A grunt escaped his lips. His hands reached to grab her and bash her head on the rock. She was quicker like she read his move. Kicking his head to the ground and bashing the said rock on his head. Blood running. His ears ringing.
Fuck.
"Anastasia…"
The face of his wife smiling flashed his vision. So did his eight-year-old and the six-year-old girls. Anna and Phila. Anna's croaky laugh, the loud one, the one she produced when something was genuinely funny and she forgot to be contained about it. Phila's shy toothless grin.
I should have asked for more money.
No… I should have gone home.
The forest was very quiet. The last thing he saw was red eyes eerily staring at him.
Zolani stood over him and the shaking was worse.
Later, she had told it. Later, later, later.
And every later she told herself had accumulated and the account was overdrawn and her hands were not steady and the knife was not steady and she was standing in a forest that smelled of damp leaves and cold and the specific smell she was learning to associate with death in this world and it was not the same as in her old world but it was not different enough.
Two down.
She had been counting. Two from Fenton's people — the lean one, and the first she had — she did not finish the thought.
One unaccounted for. The silent woman.
She heard someone coming through the trees from the south.
Fast. Not trying to be quiet — moving fast and directly, the sound of someone who had a destination in mind. She pressed herself against the nearest tree. Knife up. Thread-sight doing that pulsing thing, the warmth of it—
Not danger.
Not the cold-adjacent that came with danger.
Something else.
The same something else she had felt in the carriage corridor the night before the party, the thread tugging, the frequency recognizing—
The figure broke through the trees and stopped.
They stood three feet apart.
She had her knife up.
He had the revolver.
They looked at each other.
Blue hair. Dark eyes, expressive, currently expressing several things simultaneously. Tall. A jaw that had recently been introduced to someone's hand at high velocity, judging by the bruise developing at the left side. His coat had been good this morning and was not good now. He had the specific appearance of someone who had been through a great deal in the last fifteen minutes and had metabolized it faster than was reasonable.
He was the same guy she had met in passing as she ran from the ambush. She had forgotten about him because of the adrenaline. It was funny he was still alive.
He looked at the knife.
At her eyes.
At the knife again.
He lowered the revolver.
She did not lower the knife.
He raised both hands — not surrender, the specific gesture of someone demonstrating that they had made a calculation and doing the opposite wasn't worth it.
"Revé Falke," he said. "It's not my real name. Long story. I'm also having a bad morning." He looked at the trees around them. "You?"
She held the knife.
She felt the thread — the warmth of it, the specific frequency, which was weird because she felt he was not a stranger — and held it against the part of her that was still running calculations on threat assessment.
"Zolani," she said.
______
He looked at her.
Something shifted in his expression — not recognition exactly, but the quality of a frequency registering something adjacent to it, a note that resonated without knowing why it resonated.
"Zolani," he said. Like testing the sound of it.
A branch cracked.
South-southeast. Close.
They both heard it.
Both turned.
Back to back without deciding to.
She felt him behind her — the warmth of a body, the specific rhythm of someone who was not afraid, who was alert and calibrating, who had done this before and was not performing the not-being-afraid.
"How many left?" he said. Low.
"One of mine," she said. "The silent one. She's the dangerous one."
"One of mine," he said. "Maybe two. They scattered when the gun came out."
"How many rounds?"
"Two."
She thought about that.
"Save them," she said.
"Planning to."
The forest did something — the quality of it shifting, the specific quality of spaces that had more than one thing in them and the things were close now. Thread-sight giving her locations. Two presences. East and southeast.
"East first," she said.
"I have southeast," he said.
A nod that passed between them without a nod.
They separated.
****
Ilsa had walked away from the job in the wine merchant's room with the coin in her pocket and an interesting target in her mind and she had known — she had always known, after doing this long enough to have accurate intuitions — that something was wrong. But Borath and Davan didn't seem to mind. She didn't want to be the one backing down.
After all, because she was a woman it would be perceived as a sign of weakness.
And she didn't want the years of hard work she put into making sure they saw her as equal go down the drain for a small gig.
It was just a child after all.
What is the worst thing that could happen?
Though she wondered why Borath and Davan didn't catch her yet. Probably slacking off and letting her do all the heavy lifting again.
Only to take the credit. She couldn't help but roll her eyes. Trying to simmer down the irritation she felt from the thought.
She was good. She could do it without them. And this time around she would make sure to talk to them about her payment being increased. If it didn't work. Violence would set them straight.
She had always been good — better than Davan, better than Borath, better than most of the people she had worked with in eleven years of this work. She was small and she was quiet and she had learned to use both of those as tools rather than limitations.
That was why she had found the girl in the trees so easily.
Too easy in fact.
She had been tracking her for eight minutes — the patience of it, the discipline she had learned from years of failure, that patience was the difference between finding your target and finding a problem.
She had the girl in her sights. There was no escaping.
The girl had not found her.
She moved forward.
Felt something odd.
A change in the air.
It was static then cold and the girl's attention suddenly swung towards her like a compass finding north, and she had not known how that was possible, had not known the girl had that kind of perception, and the not-knowing was the last miscalculation.
The girl was already turning. She had a knife.
Fuck.
She tried to change her direction. But the velocity of her body as she fell from the tree towards Zolani was inevitable. Her eyes looked for an alternative and saw a blue haired man moving towards her target.
An idea forming — if she killed him while using his body to reduce the force, the quick moment of surprise the Draveth girl would feel would be the opportunity to kill her.
The Thread-sight showed Zolani where the assassin was before she even saw her.
The assassin came from the northeast, between two trees that were close enough to provide concealment, from behind where Zolani had thought the second presence was. Where the man she met focused on.
She twisted the knife she aimed at the falling body at a specific angle — not the back, the side, the kidney, a location she had taken the time to study where was fatal and decided it would be her target.
But then the assassin seemed to figure out her thoughts.
And she did not aim at Zolani anymore.
What?
Her head turned to see why.
The blue haired man!! He was coming towards her grinning stupidly. He was not aware his death was fast approaching.