Sworn in Steel

by Douglas Hulick

  “Good.” Wolf drew back his blade and wiped it clean with a napkin. “If it helps, you and I are almost done with our business.”

  “Not soon enough for me.” Rambles picked up his own napkin and pressed it to his neck, then drew it away and frowned at the stain. “You could have learned a lot from your late sword brother about dealing with people. He used his words almost as well as his sword.”

  Wolf smiled as he finished polishing his blade. “Perhaps, but as much as I may have loved Iron, I can’t help noticing that I’m alive while he’s in the ground.” He tossed the napkin on the table. “Now, all of you leave us. I need to speak to the Gray Prince alone.”

  Rambles, napkin back at his neck, glared at Wolf one last time and stormed out of the room. He didn’t even look at me. The doxy paused long enough to take a last sweet biscuit from the table and followed him out.

  For her part, Nijjan stepped partway through the doorway, then paused. She looked over and met my eye.

  “It wasn’t just because you’re in trouble,” she said. “I wouldn’t cross you just for that.”

  “Then why?”

  She looked over her shoulder at Wolf. “Ask him.” Then she was out of the room and closing the door behind her.

  I looked back at Wolf and cocked an eyebrow. “Well?”

  He gestured at the table, inviting me to sit. I remained where I was, up against the wall.

  “A clever woman, Nijjan,” he said, smiling at my caution. “And one who knows how to drive a bargain.”

  “She wouldn’t have survived very long as an Upright Woman if she didn’t.”

  “Likely not.” He picked up a fluted brass goblet and took a deliberate sip. “So. You want to know what I offered her, yes?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Then you’ll first tell me what happened to Iron Degan.”

  I crossed my arms. “Seems like I’ve been asked to retell that tale a lot lately.”

  “Then it should come easily to your tongue.”

  “Like I told the Order, Shadow already had Iron’s blade at his side when—”

  The brass goblet crashed into the wall beside me with a hollow clang, taking a gouge out of the plaster and sending a spray of wine against the side of my face in the process. I flinched, and hated myself for doing so.

  “I’m not interested in the tale you told the Order,” he said, reaching across the table to pick up Rambles’s goblet, along with the half-full decanter of wine. “The council has closed the matter. What I am interested in is what truly happened to Iron Degan, and how the sudden disappearance of our mutual friend . . .” Here Wolf paused to glance at the sword on my back. “. . . plays into that.”

  I didn’t bat an eye at the reference. Wolf had heard me speak to Fowler about Degan’s blade back in Barrab, had seen the bundle when we escaped the town—it didn’t surprise me that he knew about it. What did impress me was they he’d been able to feign disinterest so well up to this point.

  “What’s Degan’s disappearance to you?” I said.

  Wolf rolled the goblet in his hand, took a sip. “I’m a degan,” he said. “Bronze is my sword brother. We are, in many ways, of the same tribe. It’s only natural I be worried about him.”

  “Bullshit. You don’t kill one Gray Prince and set another up just because you haven’t gotten a letter in a couple months. You want something: something I have or something I know—and it must be pretty damn important if you’re willing to hold Crook Eye’s death over me to get it.”

  “I didn’t kill Crook Eye to hold him over you.”

  So Wolf had done it. I wasn’t exactly surprised, but it was good to know nonetheless.

  “Then why’d you dust him?” I said.

  Wolf looked me in the eye for the first time since I’d entered the room. “To let you know that I could, of course. To assure you that even a Gray Prince isn’t beyond my reach.”

  My blood seemed to cool and thicken in my veins. As threats went, that was a pretty damn good one.

  “And all the rumors you had Rambles spread around?” I said. “Why do that if you just wanted to show me you can dust a Prince?”

  Wolf shrugged. “A death can be easy to explain away, but a death laid at your door? Much harder. Not fatal,” he added, “but harder. Plus, you needed to know I had resources among your tribe.”

  I looked at Wolf for a long moment—at his easy pose, his mocking smile, the confident gleam in his eye. I looked at him and realized he’d played me since before I’d met him. That he’d been playing me for weeks, if not more. That he thought he had me.

  To hell with this.

  I bent down and retrieved my weapons. “If you want answers,” I said, resheathing my steel, “you can come and bend the knee or make an offer like any other thug on the street.” I turned and reached for the door, noticing the handle was normal on this side. “I stopped giving answers in exchange for threats a long time ago.”

  “You speak like someone with options. Like someone who has a choice. The only choices here belong to me.”

  “You mean choosing whether to dust me or let me walk out the door?” The handle turned under my hand. The door latch clicked.

  “No. I mean making your life much easier, or much harder. You think I’ll stop at placing one dead Prince at your feet? At two? Three? What if I toss a trio of White Sashes in as well? Maybe attach Kells’s name to their deaths while I’m at it. Or maybe Fowler’s. How long, do you think, before the empire comes sniffing after you then? Before the Kin decide it’s smarter to kill you than let you live?”

  I laughed, though not as convincingly as I might have liked. “Multiple Gray Princes? A trio of Sashes?” I looked back over my shoulder. “Degan or no, no one’s that good. Not even you.”

  A feral smile spread across Wolf’s lips, almost lazy in its danger. “You’ve spent too much time around my more civilized sword brethren. Not all of us spend our nights wandering the gutters of Ildrecca.” He sat up. “I am Silver Degan, and I am of the Azaar. I’ve left smoldering villages and salted fields in my wake, trampling entire tribes in the dust of my passing. Soldiers curse and widows weep at the sound of my name. What are the threats of back-alley princes and their dagger-wielding thugs to me?”

  I bit the inside of my lip. It was a good speech; it was also, quite possibly, true. And even if Wolf didn’t pile up bodies the way he claimed, the man could still make things a hell of a lot worse for me. Between what he knew and what he was, Wolf would have me at war with half the Kin in less than a month. All he’d have to do is set his mind to it.

  The question wasn’t whether or not I’d make it out the door: Wolf had invested too much time and effort into the setup to simply cut me down now. No, the real issue was whether I’d walk out with my old organization intact or a new target on my back.

  I closed the door.

  “I need to know one thing,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why the setup? Why ask me about Iron Degan? Why the sudden interest in Bronze?”

  “Why?” said Wolf, looking genuinely surprised. “I thought that would be obvious: I need to find Bronze Degan, of course. And I need you to help me do it.”

  Chapter Seven

  The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them.

  “Like hell!”

  I turned and yanked the door open and stormed down the hall.

  “Wait!”

  A chair turned over behind me, was followed by the sound of footsteps coming quickly.

  I reached the head of the stairs and drew my rapier, spinning back as I did so. Wolf stopped short, my point less than a foot away from him, aiming center-left on his chest. I was pleased to see that my tip didn’t waver in the slightest.

  “You don’t want to do this,” he said. He could have been talking about my walking out or my drawing steel on him. I expected it was a little bit of both.

  “Maybe not, but
I’d rather end up ruined or dead than help you hunt down Degan.”

  Wolf raised an eyebrow. “You love him that much?”

  “I owe him that much.”

  “Then I was right to choose you.”

  “To hell with your choices.”

  Wolf shrugged. “Perhaps.” He gestured toward the stairs. “What about Rambles’s and Nijjan’s men? How will you get past them?”

  “They’re not what concern me right now.” And besides, there was always the roof.

  “Ah.” Wolf looked at my sword’s point, then back at me. The bastard didn’t even seem worried. “In that case, I’d best earn my reputation, yes?”

  Before I could shift my rapier’s tip, his left hand was past it, sliding up and over and around the blade, his arm slithering up my sword like a snake. In an instant my weapon was enveloped, the fabric of his robes serving to both protect his arm from the edge and further entangle my steel. At the same time, he stepped forward and slammed the open palm of his right hand into my sternum.

  I fell back, my hands empty, my breath lost, my sword in his grasp.

  Fucking degans.

  I was still gasping for air when Wolf put a hand under my armpit and helped me to my feet. He slid my rapier back into its scabbard.

  “I think we may do better under an open sky,” he said. “Come.”

  I didn’t argue. For that matter, I didn’t really walk until we were past the second landing and getting near the main floor. I was able to shake off Wolf’s arm and move under my own power by the time we made it to the door.

  As he’d said, there were a good number of Cutters loitering in the courtyard, although all of them seemed more worried about glaring at one another than watching us. Nijjan and Rambles were there, too, standing with their respective crews. Rambles growled to his men when he saw us and led them back inside; Nijjan simply nodded and turned away.

  “So, what was her price?” I said, watching Nijjan go. I’d be lying if I said my voice wasn’t bitter.

  “Don’t hold on to your judgment of her too tightly,” said Wolf, following my gaze. “She gave you to me, yes, but only after she was certain I wouldn’t kill you. She was very exacting on that point.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “It’s supposed to tell you that she was only willing to go so far in her betrayal. Yes, Nijjan broke her agreement with you, but that’s all she did. How many of your Kin would have taken Rambles’s offer, or handed you over to me, no questions asked? You’re not a man lightly crossed, and she showed courage in doing it to your face. You need to respect the respect she has shown you. Jackals eat whatever meat they find; Nijjan Red Nails is no jackal.”

  “That still doesn’t tell me what she charged to cross me.”

  “Yes,” said Wolf, turning away. “It does.”

  I started and looked down the street to where Nijjan and her men were slipping into an alley. At the last moment, I caught a glimpse of what might have been a woman’s face, skin thick with hennaed patterns, turning back my way. Then she was gone.

  Had that been the entirety of her price? Nijjan keeping her turf and me not dying?

  Of a sudden, I wanted to go after her—to ask just how far she would have gone for me if I hadn’t been set up for Crook Eye’s death; to ask whether another month or ten between us would have made a difference. Part of me liked to think that it would have.

  Wolf led me toward the center of the square. The cobbles beneath us were black with coal dust and mud from the smithies that populated Rustwater. Iron and water and soot hung thick in the air. Combined with the heat—both from the weather and the banked but never dead forges—it felt as if we were walking through a mine. I glanced upward to be sure and made out blotchy, moving pockets of stars overhead. Clouds rolling in from the steppes to the northwest, bringing heat but no rain.

  Summer in Ildrecca. Bad time to be in the city. The walls of the basement taverns would be sweating, while the Kin would be sitting in the dank, drinking, honing their blades, and polishing their grudges. Men and women would die for words that wouldn’t have garnered a hard look two weeks before, and the thinnest rumors would take on the heft of fact. More bodies to be found in the alleys, more reasons for the Rags to take their clubs to the Kin.

  Bad time to be saving an organization; worse time to be losing one.

  Wolf stopped beside a row of low wooden boxes that had been set up in the middle of the square, each filled with earth. Flowers and leeks and Angels knew what else pushed up against the heat, trying to justify the communal garden. Wolf rested a foot on the corner of a plot.

  “I would see his sword,” he said.

  I reached back, put my hand on the canvas. “No.”

  “As Bronze’s sword brother, it’s only proper that I—”

  “As the person who’s been framed, it’s only proper that I tell you to fuck off. I faced down another Gray Prince for this—there’s no way I’m handing it over to you.”

  “I only wish to see it.”

  “You haven’t earned the privilege.”

  “The—?” Wolf’s foot hit the ground with a thump. “I’m a degan! If anyone has the right to see Bronze’s blade, let alone carry it, it’s me.”

  I put my finger to Wolf’s chest, my face in his. “You want to see it? You want to hold it? Tell me why you went through all of this—the charade, the setup, the blackmail—instead of just asking, and I’ll think about it. Because unless it’s a damn good reason, you have about as much chance of getting my help, and your hands on this sword, as I have of becoming emperor.”

  Without taking his eyes off mine, Wolf reached up and wrapped his hand around my finger. I half expected to hear a crack, followed by agonizing pain. Instead, he merely pushed it, and me, back.

  “I didn’t ask to see it,” he said, “because I couldn’t be certain of the answer. And because I suspected I already knew what your reply would be.” He let go of my hand. I got the feeling that, under different circumstances, he’d have snapped it—and other parts of me—off without hesitation. “You hunted Degan after the fire in Ten Ways,” he said. “Then you ceased. This tells me you lost his trail, or decided not to follow it. Either way, given your history with Bronze, I knew asking for your help wouldn’t be enough: I needed to get your attention.”

  “So you dusted Crook Eye?”

  “It worked, didn’t it? I doubt we’d be standing here talking if I hadn’t.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  I stepped over to the nearest raised bed and sat down on its corner. “So why do you want to find Degan?”

  Wolf shook his head. “I answered your question about why I killed Crook Eye; now show me the sword. I’ll answer your other questions after that.”

  I hesitated for a moment, then unslung the bundle and laid it across my legs. By the time I’d undone the rope and begun working at the canvas, Wolf was all but looming over me. When I folded back the last bit of cloth, he caught his breath.

  “By the stars,” he murmured. “What happened to it?”

  I ran my fingers over the wreckage that had been Degan’s sword. Soot blackened and charred, it looked worse than it was, but that was still bad enough. What had once been an elegant piece of moon-kissed steel now looked like something that had been abandoned in a back alley after a losing fight. Oh, the sword still ran straight, and the edge seemed to be true under all the grit—this was Black Isle steel, after all; it would take more than a simple fire to damage this blade—but no one would have taken this for a degan’s weapon at first glance, or even a second. It hadn’t been until I’d noticed the traces of bronze chasing left on the misshapen guard that I’d suspected it for what it was, wasn’t until I’d rubbed away the grime at the base of the blade and saw the single tear etched into the sword that I’d known it for what it was. And even then, I’d doubted—that is, until Crook Eye had told me how he got his hands on it.

  “It was in that fire you mentioned down i
n Ten Ways,” I said. “I’d thought it had been lost or, I don’t know, found and returned to the Order. Either way, I hadn’t gone looking for it.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I figured that’s how he wanted it.”

  “Yet Crook Eye ended up with Degan’s sword,” said Wolf. “How?”

  “By being smart and lucky and in the right place at the right time.”

  “And he wanted it why?”

  “He didn’t. He wanted this.” I patted the rapier at my side. Shadow’s rapier. The tapering length of Black Isle steel that Fowler had fished from of the embers, gotten remounted, and gifted to me. A prince’s sword for the newest prince, she’d said at the time, knowing damn well what my having that blade would mean. I hadn’t known whether to curse her or kiss her at the time; still didn’t, to be honest. “For the Kin,” I said, “this blade holds far more meaning and symbolism than Degan’s sword ever could. Crook Eye wanted the rapier, but someone beat him to it. But in looking, he came across Degan’s blade instead.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, being the smart Gray Prince that he was, he thought and schemed and bided his time until he could use it against me.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “More or less.”

  “I’m surprised I found him alive to kill.”

  I rewrapped the canvas around Degan’s blade and hung it from the baldric. “Why? I would have done the same thing in his place. Leverage is leverage. Besides, he was under my Peace—there was no way I was going to dust him.”

  Wolf cocked an eyebrow. “Not even over the sword?”

  “I don’t break my word.”

  The words felt like stones in my mouth. Of course I broke my word—but only when it truly mattered. The proof was lying right there in my lap. But I had to say it, had to see if I got a reaction from Wolf—especially with Degan’s name hanging in the air between us. If he knew about my Oath to Degan and what had happened, he couldn’t not react, couldn’t not call me out. All other things aside, he was still a degan.

  I watched him as I slung Degan’s sword over my shoulder: studied the amber-limned lines around his eyes to see if they tightened, took in the red-gold line of his jaw to see if it clenched beneath his beard, listened for an intake of furious breath.