Page 120

She led me to a mound of snow, which she cleared away with a broom to show three faces. One older man with close-cropped white hair wore the tattoos of an Assassin-Adept; one woman had the hard face of a warrior; the last was a dog-man, his jaw a bit too large, his canines sharp, his ears on the top of his head and pointed. He had armor on his legs, but none on his trunk, which I found odd. He still had an arrow through his mouth that went up where his brain would be.

“What a shot,” I said.

“How like you to praise yourself. But it was, jilnaedu. It was a very good shot. You lay in hiding and struck him from below before he knew exactly where you were. This one”—and here she pointed at the woman—“I think she was an Ispanthian mercenary, she had studied Calar Bajat.”

“Wait.… You beat an Assassin-Adept and a Spanth sell-sword?”

“We beat them. You loosed arrows at them so fast and well the adept had to use his arts to turn them. I killed him quickly. I used my left hand because I recognized he had the same tattoo the bull man had in Norholt.”

“True hand turns,” I said.

She nodded. “He was a hard foe, but the Spanth sell-sword was worse, and I say that not from pride in my country. She was fast and had no fear. She was at me before I even had my sword out of the adept.”

“And yet you killed her.”

“You killed her,” she said, clearing more snow to reveal an arrow buried to the fletching in her armpit. “Also from below.”

“How…?”

“You read something in the book that made you a better archer. You needed the talon of a hawk or eagle. You were gone six days finding one. But you came back with a brace of snow hares because you were already a good archer. As I well remember,” she said, slightly moving the arm I knicked when I stupidly joined stupid persons in a stupid attempt to rob her.

And yet talk of archery made the fingers of my drawing-hand tingle with want for the string’s waxy bite. If you haven’t loosed a thousand arrows, you won’t know what I mean, but bending the bow comes to feel like dancing, or swimming, or any other pleasant work of the body. You crave it when you haven’t done it for a time. I craved it then, and more, I craved an art that would make me better than long practice already had.

“I’ll have to read that book again.”

“You learned much from it, but you also became sorrowful. You learned at the expense of an innocent in bondage to it.”

“Yah,” I said. “There was a girl.”

“You told me about the girl. You said she was the niece of the first Full Shadow of Oustrim, that her body was destroyed and her soul imprisoned to feed the book. We had a … disagreement about whether the book should be destroyed. Soon after you learned the lessons of the bow, you became heavy with guilt that you were keeping a soul in chains so you might extract more secrets from the book. I was angry with you, but you convinced me, and I was ashamed of my argument. But before you could burn it, they came. And as you lay dying, your pruxilta found you … in the wasteland of your death?”

“Yah. You could just say ‘the Wasteland of Death.’”

“Not my death.”

“It’s just death.”

“Maybe for those unknown to the Bride.”

“So anyway, Norrigal came to me in the Wastelands of Death.”

“Of your death.”

“You’re infuriating.”

“It is important to be precise.”

“So what. Did Norrigal. SAY?”

“That you would, that you might, come back as you have now done. And that the book’s knowledge could not be lost.”

I closed my eyes at mention of my witchlet. How carefully she had watched over us from so very far away. I remembered seeing her through the eyes of some puppy when she gave me the cure for Galva’s sickness, gravid and beautiful and older than I had last seen her. I would get back to that tower and have my arms around her. And give that wee doggen a scratch between his ears and a bone from the soup-pot.

“And the dog-man broke my head for me.”

“Yes. And I sent him to the Bride.”

“Does she take dogs?”