A lamplighter half a block back was unloading a ladder from a mule-drawn cart.
Leesil snorted. “Well, that one doesn’t look like a local.”
Magiere stepped around him. “I’ll go. You still don’t speak Numanese worth a wit.”
Chap rushed in two steps, but Leesil grabbed Magiere’s arm first—too sudden and firm. He quickly loosened his grip and faked a smile.
“I can manage,” he said. And at Magiere’s suspicious glare, he added, “When else am I going to get the practice?”
“This isn’t the time,” she argued.
“Wait with Chap. We don’t need you terrorizing the locals. Save that for any ruffians invading our tavern, my dragon.”
Magiere scowled over the pet name that only he called her. It was the right kind of scowl—or so he hoped—as in the old days, when he purposefully goaded her.
He passed her the travel chest and took off down the street. Keeping his hands in plain sight and feigning his lost-traveler demeanor, he approached the elderly man in a floppy canvas hat who was about to climb up and replace a lantern wick.
Again, Leesil flashed a smile. He slowly pulled out the nearly empty coin pouch, shook it gently, and then pointed to the two lavish inns within sight.
“Room?” he asked in Numanese. “Little coin?”
The old man squinted a bit at Leesil’s thick accent, but his eyes brightened with a smile as he pointed northeast. Leesil nodded deeply as he touched a hand to his heart and then extended it toward the old man. The lamplighter tipped his floppy hat in return.
Leesil returned to Magiere and Chap, and they were off again. But as they headed northeast down street after street, he noticed fewer and fewer lit lampposts along the way. The streets began to change bit by bit.
Buildings became smaller, more worn, and then outright shabby. Shake and shale roofs were replaced by ones of irregular planks and sometimes even thatch. The mixture of structures grew until he couldn’t be sure if any one of them was a shop, domicile, both, or something else. The only life in the street came from taverns or public houses, which weren’t always marked with a sign.
A sailor stumbled out of a broad, run-down building. The noise of loud voices spilled out around him before the door swung shut.
Magiere grumbled under her breath when the man wobbled to a street side and threw up on the cobble. Chap gave the drunkard a wide berth, and if Leesil hadn’t looked over, he would’ve been spared Magiere’s sidelong glare.
“Well,” he said. “I did ask the man for something cheap. He must have taken me at my word.”
“Yes,” she answered dryly, “he must have ... if he understood you.”
Leesil hadn’t seen a single dwelling that resembled an inn. In too many places, the cobblestones were cracked, broken apart, or sunken. The remaining holes were filled with grime and rain like scattered pots of muck, all the way up the street.
This area was below even Magiere’s “thrifty” standards, and Leesil didn’t care for it himself. Even Chap grumbled, his head low, and he usually wanted all of them well off the mainways. Leesil had almost given up hope when he glanced into an empty side street.
Two blocks down, light leaked from the open-shutter windows of a two-story building. Two stories weren’t common here, and lit lanterns actually hung under a roofed front landing. By a trail of smoke caught in the light, Leesil spotted a bear-sized man in a full cloak puffing on a long-stemmed pipe. Two people came out the front door. Though Leesil couldn’t make them out as they turned away up the road, neither one was stumbling. No interior ruckus had followed them before the door swung closed, just after the pipe puffer strolled inside.
“Over there,” Leesil said. He turned down that side street, but halfway along the first block, he froze and spun to his left.
“What now?” Magiere mumbled.
Leesil peered into a cutway between the buildings, but it was too dark to see where the back end might meet an alley behind the buildings. He could swear something had moved in the corner of his sight. It was only an instant’s glimpse when ...
“Leesil!” Magiere hissed. She dropped the chest, and it thudded onto the street.
Leesil spun back as Chap snarled.
A tall figure stood midstreet, short of the next crossing road. He’d barely made it out when a memory raised by Chap filled his head. That image echoed what he saw.
The light of the far porch lanterns didn’t help much, but the figure wore a cloak with the corners tied up around its waist. The fabric of its leggings and sleeves was dark, but tinted to green. And in that memory he saw what his eyes couldn’t make out within the shadow of its cowl.
Above a wrap of forest gray across its mouth and nose were large amber, almond-shaped eyes below high, feathery blond eyebrows in a face darkly tanned.
The figure in the street was an anmaglâhk, a member of a caste of spies and assassins among the an’Cróan, the elven people of the eastern continent. Something narrow, the length of a forearm, glinted silvery in both of the figure’s hands.
Leesil heard someone land too softly down the street behind him, and he jerked free the bindings on the sheaths lashed to his thighs. As Magiere ripped her falchion from its sheath, he pulled both winged punching blades, whirling to face whoever was behind them.
Another anmaglâhk stood silent up the street.
How could they be here—now—from the other side of the world?
Chap’s sudden snarl cut off in a clack of his teeth. Leesil barely looked back as Chap bolted forward, straight at the one blocking the way. Before Leesil could shout at the dog to stop, a barrage of memories flooded his head.
He saw himself and Magiere running through the elven forest in the Farlands. Then came an earlier time when they’d fled from being outnumbered by Lord Darmouth’s men in Leesil’s own homeland. Images came faster and faster, all of them memories of flight.
They weren’t outnumbered here, but Leesil couldn’t mistake Chap’s intention—if they quickly overwhelmed the one ahead of them, they might be able to make a break.
“Run!” Leesil shouted to Magiere, as he dashed after Chap.
Another forest gray figure dropped from the rooftops. It landed a dozen paces ahead, between Chap and the first anmaglâhk. Smaller and slighter, it instantly charged, and Chap swerved into its path. Leesil kept his focus on the first one until ... the second smaller one leaped.
Chap’s teeth clacked on empty air as the small anmaglâhk hurdled over him.
The option to run was gone, and Leesil swerved into the small one’s path. He blocked its first slash with his left blade. In that instant, he saw its—her—eyes. Everything around him seemed to grow still and quiet.
Leesil had faced these assassins more than once, blade for blade. He knew their cold, dispassionate, deadly calm. His mother had been one of them and trained him in their way, but this small anmaglâhk’s amber eyes glistened, as if they might well with tears. They weren’t filled with the calm of an assassin fixed on its target. They were overwhelmed with anguish that had built to fury.
Leesil almost faltered. He’d seen eyes like those before ... when they recognized him.
They had looked upon him in youth and long after. They peered at him within his dreams, out of faces ravaged by grief. They watched him in his sleep for every life he’d taken at the order of Darmouth, who had held him and his parents as slave servants.
Those were the eyes that starved for vengeance.
But of all he’d killed in his youth, not one had been a member of this elven people, the an’Cróan—“Those of the Blood.” His only an’Cróan victim had come much later, and it had been one of the anmaglâhk.