Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [21]
At the last, and shivering slightly from the chill, she drew her rapier in one smooth, silent motion. His wings and sting would give him all the advantages when at range, yet she could not bear to simply kill him from behind. This was not squeamishness: she wanted him to know the agent of justice before he died.
Even as she took her first step towards him, his voice called out, ‘About time. Now come out where I can see you.’ He was standing up, one hand out with palm open, but not quite looking at her – knowing that he was observed but unable to make her out in the darkness beyond his fire. She edged closer, in inches and steps, and he cast about, frowning and tense, but unwilling to flee from mere shadows. In her slow progress there was a fierce battle being fought, his eyes and the moon against her stealth, until she was almost within rapier’s reach. Then the firelight caught her, and he saw at last who she was.
His expression was almost all she could have wanted: utter shock at first, but swiftly replaced by an intense loathing that mirrored her own thoughts exactly. She had to kill him, because he was a reminder of all the things she was trying to forget. He, in that instant of recognition, had made a similar resolution – and quite possibly for similar reasons.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve got the whole of the cursed Lowlands! Why can’t you keep there?’ The immediate hostility was gratifying: no wheedling, no excuses, no feigned friendships, nothing to tempt any uncertainty; just a man who very plainly did not want to see her.
‘Perhaps I’m the new Collegiate ambassador,’ she said. ‘Why are you fouling the Commonweal, Wasp?’ And it was a release to be able to speak so frankly – and viciously – to someone, for a change. She was already calculating angles, distances. If he took wing, there would be a moment sufficient for her to rush forward and impale him. If he lashed out at her with his sting she would trust to her reflexes to read the motion, to be casting herself aside and in again even as he formed his intention to shoot. Poised on a knife-edge of reflex, his death within her gift, she could afford to talk, to make him understand, relishing his hatred and casting it right back at him.
‘No fool would make you ambassador,’ he told her. ‘Wait – this is where the airship visits. Did Maker send you here?’
When she neither confirmed nor denied it, he bared his teeth. ‘Just do what you came for and go back to the Lowlands,’ he told her. ‘I don’t want trouble. Just go.’
That was too much for her. ‘And how do you imagine I can just go back after what happened?’ she hissed, bunching herself to spring. His hand was slightly lower now, the talk taking him off his guard. In a moment, she would have him.
‘Oh,’ he said, almost to himself, ‘the Moth boy died, then.’
It froze her even as she was about lunge for him. The Moth boy died, then. For, of course he had. Not when she herself had run him through; nor even later in the Collegium infirmary. While Tynisa had been off chasing her father, the Moth had levered himself up from his sickbed to try and save his own people from the Empire and there, in the remote mountain fastnesses of Tharn, he had died. The delay had been just enough, after her terrible deed, to fool Tynisa into believing that she might not, after all, be the woman who had killed her half-sister’s lover.
‘Is that what this is about?’ Gaved asked Tynisa, seeing the struggle inside her. ‘You’re running away?’
Every instinct howled for him then, but her own guilt was like a grey anchor that held her back, so