Excerpt: Unbinding

“What’s wrong?” Rhys asked

Ciara pointed to the floor. Dim in the shadows, he saw something metal.

“What is it?”

“It is,” she said, in a voice so precise and cool that each word came out wrapped in its own coat of ice, so very, very careful that he knew she had to be about to break, “a knife. It was flung just past my head earlier this afternoon.”

His bitten hand and bruising cheek suddenly seemed much less important. “A knife?”

“You may look at it if you wish. Or pick it up. I left it there.”

“Is it cursed?” he asked, not sure he wanted to touch it if she’d been so unwilling.

“I don’t think so.” Some of the cold perfection was gone from her voice, and she bent to look at it moving almost normally. The hand she reached out over it shook a bit, but it wasn’t that bad—he doubted he would have noticed if he hadn’t been watching, seen the quiver like some—he wasn’t sure. The flutter of a new bird’s wings? Not a leaf, the motion was too small for that, unless it was the littlest of breezes, gentle as a breath.

“No,” she said finally, looking up at him. It was dark, and firelight, but still when her hair swung away from her face she turned away to let it fall again. “No, it’s not cursed. I just—I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to go near it. Someone threw it at me, Rhys, it wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t my imagination. I was sitting in plain sight, in full daylight, and this knife went right past my head, so close I heard it pass, and through the window.”

“What did you do?”

She stood, clumsily, and had to catch herself on the table. He reached out a hand to her, but by the time she saw it she was already balanced. “What did I do? I didn’t know what it was at first, but I knew something was wrong. And I saw someone in the crowds, and she saw me.”

“She?” Rhys said before he could stop himself. Knives from the shadows wasn’t something women did, for the most part—poison, as the saying went, or a fair blade to one’s face, but not this odd blend of honor and dishonor, and perfect throwing (his sister would have hit him for thinking that, if she’d heard him, but it was true, from what he’d seen of her friends, that they liked throwing things less than his friends did).

“She. Red-blonde hair,” Ciara said, frowning a bit, “cut to her shoulders. Thin. Wearing black, that’s how I noticed her. It was... flashy, I suppose. Something that caught the eye because it wasn’t supposed to. There was a mark on her neck going down to her shoulder, and up to her cheek.”

Mark. A mark on her shoulder— “Ciara,” he said, “what did—”

“And suddenly I didn’t like it—I mean, liked it less than I had, I knew something was wrong—so I went into the house, quickly, and, Light-Holder divine, I hated the feeling I had when I turned my back on everyone long enough to open the door and go through it. Then I got into the house and saw it was a knife. Shiny,” she said, slowly, “and all sharp and pointy and silver. Not silver like the coin, just silver.”

“Yes,” Rhys said, carefully, because she shouldn’t have sounded this... young? Was that—yes, it was, and that was what was bothering him, that she sounded so very young and helpless. “Knives often are. People don’t make them out of silver itself, because it’s soft and doesn’t” cut “work.”

She nodded, all small and fragile-looking, and he reached out again because she was so frightened that she was making the room cold. “It’s going to be all right, if you’ll believe me,” he said.

“How?” She looked up at him. “How is it going to be all right?”

“Because if you don’t believe me you’ll give up,” he said. “Remember? If you don’t try, Tierney wins. If you try and fail, Tierney wins.”

“Is it midwinter already, then?”

For a heart-stopping instant he thought she meant it, that she truly had no idea that it wasn’t still not yet midsummer, and then he realized she was trying to tell him, without using that many words, that if Tierney had said midwinter and sent this black-clad woman with her markings and her throwing knives anyway then he was a liar and couldn’t be trusted, since Ciara still had more than half a year.

“No,” Rhys said, “which is why it’s all the more important you not let him do this to you. He’s cheating, Ciara. He’s like a small child who realizes he’s losing at Blind-Man’s Bluff and rips off the blindfold.”

“I’ve played with people like that,” Ciara said, sounding a bit more like herself. “You always wanted to take away their stick and clobber them with it.”