He shot three.
In succession. Without pause. The sound of it enormous in the fog, each report bouncing off the trees, the fog carrying it further than it should have carried. The three had not expected the rate of fire — they had expected the pause between shots that older weapons required and had started to move before the first shot and had not finished moving before the second.
They did not get up.
The girl had moved during the shots.
Not at him. Past him — she had used the confusion of the gunfire as cover and was already into the tree line, the remaining four between them now, her blade handling two of them with the efficient terrible fluency of someone who had been trained rather than taught.
"He has a gun!" she called to the four. In a language he almost recognized — not quite this country's common tongue, a regional dialect or a code, the specific flavor of something learned rather than native. "Don't hold back!"
"Please don't," he squealed in response. Two rounds left. Two of the four had guns of their own — older, single-shot, the reloading time a factor he was calculating. "As much as this is exciting I'd rather not get my clothes—"
A shot.
He dropped from the carriage door to the road surface, felt the wind of it, came up moving. The two remaining rounds were for specific problems and he was identifying the specific problems. The shooter — reloading, hands occupied — was the first. He shot him. The second round he held.
Two left. Four people still standing. One of them is her and she appears to be on neither side.
He looked at the girl.
She had dealt with two of the four. She was looking at him.
Crimson eyes.
Across the bodies between them.
In the fog with the shots echoing off the trees.
Something passed between them — not warmth, not alliance. The specific communication of two people who had been fighting towards a similar goal rather than against each other and had arrived at a moment of mutual acknowledgment.
"Tie them up," she instructed. Low. "The ones that are still breathing."
"And then?" his gaze observing those wild blond curls swirling in the wind.
"And then." She did not finish the sentence. She looked at the road and the fog and the trees and the road that rejoined the main highway half a mile south.
He had the feeling she was thinking about something on that highway.
Something more interesting than this. His blood ran hot. She was gone.
He tied the remaining two with the carriage's harness leather — competently, not perfectly, the knot of someone who knew what it needed to do and did not exceed the requirement. He checked the assassin's knots. Pulled the last one tighter. He was surprised he caught her without a hitch. It was almost too easy. Except if he included the loads of money he lost from firing those expensive bullets.
The woman watched him.
"Who sent you?" he asked.
"Someone with resources," she joked, a bit awkward trying to release tension. Something he caught on a bit too quickly.
"Helpful." He stood. Looked at her without the mask. Her messy bangs and dark circles. "You're not going to tell me."
"No."
He looked at the fog. At the road south.
"The main highway," he said. "Something's happening there?"
"Yes," she said.
"That's also your business?"
"It intersects with my business," she said.
He looked at her.
"I'm going south," he said.
"I know," she said. She looked at the tied men behind her. Back at him. "You're very confident for someone who was nearly killed in his own carriage."
"I'm confident for someone who had a three-to-one engagement and won it." He started walking. "With a woman trying to kill him. Those are decent odds."
_______
Zolani was in the trees when she heard the gunshots.
Six of them — not all together, in quick succession, the specific pattern of something with a rate of fire she had not heard before. She registered them with the part of her brain that catalogued sounds and filed them under not Fenton's people, different weapon, north of her position.
She filed it and kept running.
The second assassin had been — harder.
Not physically. Harder in the specific way of someone who had been asked to do a thing and was doing it and was good at it and the goodness of it was not something she had been prepared for. Fenton's people were not incompetent. They were professionals who had taken a contract and were executing the contract with efficiency of people whose reputation depended on execution.
She thought about this while running through the trees with one slipper gone to the mud and the knife in her hand that had the first man's blood on it and the shaking — she had told the shaking later and the shaking was arguing with her about the definition of later.
She changed direction.
The second assassin — the broad-built one with the careful hands — was behind her and to the left, and she knew this because thread-sight had that quality when it was working well, the sense of presences and their relative locations, the map of a situation she couldn't see.
He's good, she thought. He's quieter than he should be for his size.
Too quiet.
She broke left. Hard. The direction she had been tracking him from — toward rather than away, because away was what he expected and toward was the only thing she had that he wasn't planning for.
_____
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 eeriely 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 the calculation had produced this gesture.
"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, this is not a stranger — and held it against the part of her that was still running calculations on threat assessment.
"Zolani," she said.