“They’re after me,” he said. “I have to get home.” “Who?” Ysira demanded.
He had to pause for breath. “Guard. Not far.”
An understanding passed between them. Ysira seized him by the arm, practically dragging him along her path. Keeping low to the ground, they stole behind a towering one-armed cactus. They slid down a pebbled slope into a burrow half-concealed by shrubs and agave plants?—
—to find someone already there.
The man, slumped against the back of the burrow, took a moment to notice them. A rainbow glaze shimmered over his eyes as he turned his head languidly sideways.
“You’re shiny,” he said.
A thorn eater. Of course. Ysira gritted her teeth and urged the scavenger along, bracing herself to wait. Hopefully, the thorn eater would keep still, hallucinate in silence long enough for the Guard patrol to retreat.
No sooner had she shuffled past the shrubs, though, than he let out a piercing yell. She lunged, prepared to choke him into shutting up. He dodged with irritating dexterity, making her fumble to hold on to her satchel.
“Stay away!” He brandished a short flint knife.
The scavenger stumbled back. He was a liability, already injured and unwilling to let go of that blasted sack. It occurred to Ysira that she could run and leave him there. She nearly did. But then he would have been killed or sentenced to some ludicrousamount of prison time once the Guard got hold of him. Andgods,but she’d been looking for an excuse to hit someone since the eclipse began.
“I’ll deal with this,” she said to the scavenger. “Run.”
It was the last thing he’d expected her to say. He stared at her until she enunciated, “Go.”
The thorn eater pounced. Ysira punched him in the jaw. If she was getting arrested tonight, she might as well deserve it.
The scavenger darted off into the night. The thorn eater doubled over, cursing. Ysira imagined he was a specific someone else and hit him again. Again.Again.Somewhere in that haze of red, his knife caught her in the stomach.
As she cried out, he pulled back, holding his bloodied nose. Staring at his blade—completely clean. Ysira winced, massaging the fading sore spot on her abdomen, and straightened.
“Demon,” he hissed.
Whether he’d used the word as a simple pejorative or the hallucinogen actually allowed him to see the creature coiled around Ysira’s brainstem, she didn’t know. She spread her arms in satiric apology. “I suggest?—”
He spat a mouthful of blood at her and tackled her by the waist. His shoulder rammed into her diaphragm. She lost her satchel, gasping for air as they both went down. The jar slipped out and shattered on a boulder. Ysira clawed through the dirt for something to use as a weapon and cringed when her fingers brushed the slimy pancreas.
She smashed it against his skull. He howled and sank his teeth into her shoulder. A strangled shriek escaped her.
“Get—fuck—off me!”
He did, because the Guard patrol chose that moment to arrive. The thorn eater socked Ysira in the gut and ran cackling into the desert. She scrambled to her feet, wheezing, with all thegrace of a drunk with a concussion. She still held the pancreas, now certainly ruined. Ogden would be unhappy about this.
She braced to throw it—might buy her a few seconds’ advantage—but faltered. The two men before her wore white cloaks. Knights, not ordinary Guardsmen.
Little as Ysira liked to admit it, she would not win this fight. Even when she’d been in training for knighthood herself, she had never been above average in skill, and she’d fallen out of practice in the decade since. More importantly, if they inflicted any serious harm on her with that steel they carried, she’d have a far more complicated problem on her hands. She resigned herself to a shit couple of nights. She’d spent time in jail before, and she always found a way out. She could make it a shit time for them, too.
“Caught ourselves a corpse-robber,” said the taller, bald knight, who was entirely too smug for someone who’d done nothing but stumble across Ysira. He glanced at his peer, a pale man with a long, braided beard. “An awfully bold one, to be stealing from the dead during Harvest season.”
The bearded knight clicked his tongue. “She looks scared. Must be remembering that thieves make good sacrifices.” He demanded, “You alone out here?”
Ysira was not, in fact, scared, and resented the insinuation. She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder in the direction the thorn eater had run. “Besides him? Yes.”
“Have you seen another thief? Male, Zal, carrying dangerous contraband?” The knight spoke like a man accustomed to getting whatever he wanted.
There had been a time when Ysira, too, could have spoken in such a way. Through the bitterness that rose like bile in her throat, she flashed him her most radiant smile. “Go fuck a cactus.”
The bearded knight had, by now, had enough of Ysira. He drew his blade and leveled it at her. “Hand over whatever it is you stole.”
If only she’d come for something as simple as coins or trinkets. With little choice left in the matter, Ysira tossed the pancreas onto the sand at the knights’ feet.
